2. WP Super Cache (free) to improve site performance and speed

Another basic performance tool that improves your website and helps you deliver a better user experience for your blog audience. The plugin improves your site by increasing server performance, reducing download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. This is basically done by generating static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a HTML file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Check out the WP Super Cache plugin for your blog.

3. Antispam Bee (free) to keeping your blog spam free

Once you have launched your blog, you can be sure to get spam comments and this will become pretty annoying. And, you will also get in touch with trackback spam. A trackback is also a kind of comment to notify that someone has linked your post on their site. Trackbacks are great for networking with other bloggers, but unfortunately, they are also very attractive for spammers. One solution to defend spammers is to deactivate the comment and trackback functions on your blog. But this will deprive you of the opportunity to engage with your readers and connect with other bloggers. The plugin Antispam Bee blocks spammy comments and trackbacks effectively, without using captchas. The plugin detects spam based on checking incoming comments and trackbacks against public databases and typical spam comment structures as well as a local database for comments previously marked as spam. Thus, it eliminates spam comments by automatically reviewing and filtering your comments but lets you keep control of which comments are displayed and which comments are caught and cleared under your blog’s “Comments” tab. Cleaning out spam regularly speeds up your site and saves space in your blog’s database. Thus, Antispam Bee is a very useful plugin, doing all the dirty work for you and saves your time for getting rid of annoying spammers. Check out the Antispam Bee plugin for your blog.

4. Updraft Plus WordPress Backup Plugin (free & premium from $70/ year) to backup and restore your data

Regular backups of your site and data save you in case your site gets hacked or you accidentally lock yourself out.

The Updraft Plus WordPress Backup Plugin enables backups and restoration of your files and database. You can backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), Rackspace Cloud, DreamObjects, FTP, Openstack Swift, Updraft Vault and email.

The paid version also backs up to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.

Check out the Updraft Plus WordPress Backup Plugin for your blog here.

5. Yoast SEO (free & premium from $69/year) to optimize your blog and content for the search engines

First of all, you need to make sure your blog content is SEO friendly to get a good ranking in the search engines.

Even if you don’t know much about SEO, Yoast SEO can help you to take care of some very basic aspects, such as focus keyword, permalinks, meta title and description, images, meta tags, text structure, and readability.

The plugin will analyze your pages and posts and displays a traffic light which shows you how to optimize your posts before publishing. So you can make sure, each page and post applies to basic SEO rules.

The plugin will also add XML sitemaps and breadcrumbs.

6. PB SEO friendly images (free) to optimize your images for a better indexing in the search engines

The search engines need specific attributes (»alt« and also »title«) to index your images. And images can have a huge impact on the ranking of your blog. These attributes are also required to get a W3C valid website.

The PB SEO Friendly Images automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. It helps you to automatically optimize all »alt« and »title« attributes of images in your posts. This makes the posts W3C/xHTML valid as well.

The plugin works for all your images in posts and your post’s thumbnails as well.

You can sync existing »alt« to »title« and vice versa or override them with a custom scheme.

7. EWWW image optimizer (free & premium) to compress your images for more page load and a better ranking

Large images can reduce your page speed and this is extremely harmful to your ranking and conversion and it will cost storage and bandwidth.

The EWWW plugin will automatically optimize new images that you upload, it can also optimize all the images that you have already uploaded, and optionally convert your images to the best file format.

You can choose pixel perfect compression or high compression options that have no impact on the beauty of your images.

8. Broken Link Checker (free) to monitor and fix broken links in posts, pages, and images

Broken links lead to a poor user experience for your readers and can impact your ranking. The search engines dislike bad user experience caused by broken links.

The Broken Link Checker plugin will constantly monitor your blog looking for broken links and notifies you by email or via the dashboard when it detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects. Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post.

9. Redirection (free) to fix 404 errors by 301 redirection

The Redirection plugin helps you to fix 404 errors caused by broken links, by building 301 redirects automatically.

It monitors your blog for 404 errors as soon as they are generated and flags them accordingly. It automatically redirects a post when its URL changes. You can also manually add 301 redirects for whatever you want.

The plugin logs all URL redirects

10. Related Posts Thumbnails Plugins for WordPress (free) to keep your website visitors reading on

When visitors land on your site, you want to make them stay as long as possible and browse your content and keep on reading. Related links with thumbnail images of related posts improve CTR.

This Related Posts Thumbnails Plugin allows customizing thumbnail sizes, display settings, and type of relation. Thumbnails are arranged in columns under the post with related posts title/excerpt under each post thumbnail. You can customize background color, border, text, text sizes, background on mouseover, title and excerpt length.

By default, the plugin uses the first image appeared in the post. You can select between ‘thumbnail’ and ‘medium’ size options or custom size. The plugin also lets you specify post custom field name to be used as thumbnails source.

You can specify the number of related posts to display, start date, categories to show on and to include, top text, style settings, default image URL.

And, you can select types of relation – categories, tags, categories and tags, random or custom taxonomies and many other settings.

Related Posts thumbnails sidebar widget and shortcode are also available.

11. Contact Form 7 (free) to let your website visitors contact you A contact form is an essential and basic feature of your blog to stay in touch with your website visitors. With Contact Form 7 you can easily create contact forms to enable your website visitors to comment on your posts or to get in touch with email. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The forms support Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering. You can customize notification messages and embed forms to specific posts or pages via shortcode. Contact Form 7 also provides file uploads and quizzes. Check out the Contact Form 7 plugin for your blog.

12. Email Subscribers and Newsletters (free & premium from $97/year) to build email list from your website visitors Once you managed to get visitors to your blog, you will want to make them come back. An email list is an essential element of any marketing strategy and a good way to build leads, loyalty, and conversion. The easiest way to grab your visitor’s email address is by offering them to subscribe to your blog. A blog subscription or newsletter will hook your visitors to your blog and encourage them to return, whenever you publish a new update or news on your blog. This Email Subscribers and Newsletters plugin lets you easily collect subscribers. It automatically sends updates to your subscriber list, whenever you publish a new post. Email Subscribers and Newsletters is a fully featured subscription plugin that helps you achieve all the things you need to build a subscriber list from your website visitors and keep them engaged. It provides you with a set of tools to collect email addresses, send automated new blog post notification emails, create & send newsletters, and also to manage them all in one single place. Check out the Email Subscribers and Newsletters plugin for your blog. 13. Super Socializer- WordPress Social Share, Social Login and Social Comments Plugin – (free) to place share and follow buttons on your site

The Super Socializer plugin integrates fully responsive social share buttons from more than 100 social networks and social counts for Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Buffer, Reddit, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, and Vkontakte, with multiple free customization options for size, shape, background and logo color, and more.

Icons can be positioned at the top or bottom of your content or with horizontal or vertical floating bars.

Enable visitors to log in with 9 social network accounts for checkout pages and customer login forms and social comments for Facebook Comments, Google Plus Comments, Disqus Comments.