23 Jul 10 Must Have WordPress Plugins for 2021
In today’s guide of “must have WordPress plugin in 2021“, we will go through some of the best WordPress plugins used by WordPress experts all around the world.
These plugins are hand-picked by me by three important factors as listed below:
- Functionality
- Popularity
- Stability and Update Frequency
If I miss one of the above three factors, the plugin may not qualify for the list. The popularity factor is optional and the other two factors are necessary to completely gauge the importance of the plugin in the day-to-day life of bloggers.
Without wasting too much time, let’s start our list of must-have plugins in 2021.
Must Have WordPress Plugins In 2021
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
It doesn’t matter if you are starting a business blog or a personal blog, WordPress SEO by Yoast is the finest of the plugins you will ever get. Why? It facilitates the SEO aspect of the plugin and improves its ranking on Google.
Getting traffic from google is one of the most important things in a blogger life and this plugin just makes it easy by providing a lot of small on-page optimization and overall site optimization so that Google take notice.
The plugin is easy to install and setup and that makes the deal even better.
2. W3 Total Cache
Another plugin to improve your site functionality. W3 Total Cache takes care of the loading speed of the website and helps improve both the user experience and the Google page rankings.
With speed optimization, you can easily reduce bounce rate, which Google take seriously as one of the ranking factors of the website. The plugin is easy to install and setup and it will reduce the loading speed of your website by half!(in most cases).
The main functionality of the plugin is to compress the pages, setup browser caching, optimize database, minify HTML and CSS and other tons of small improvements to make the website loading speed better.
3. Disqus
Disqus is one of the popular comment plugin in the WordPress community. With a beautiful integration to the web site and easy to setup option, you will not regret a single moment using the plugin.
The plugin management is done through their website and you will be provided an account for doing so. Furthermore, you can add more than one website and handle all of them from a centralized place.
4. VaultPress
VaultPress is a WordPress plugin that backs up your website in regular intervals. WordPress is huge and popular, but that doesn’t mean that it is completely safe. There are zero-day vulnerabilities, and other bugs that can be exploited by the hackers easily to bring down your website.
In case of the breach, you will be able to load the most stable backup and start making your website more secure with patches and other security plugins.
VaultPress is not free and is hosted by Automattic, the makers of WordPress themselves. But, the package is affordable and it will cost you only $5 per month, and you can easily make yourself feel secure.
5. ThirstyAffiliates
ThristyAffiliates is one of the popular plugin in the WordPress marketplace for managing your affiliate links. With the help of the ThirstyAffiliates you can manage all your links in a single place. With hundreds of links conjuring in your spreadsheet, it is always a great idea to export them and use them for certain keywords.
The plugins offer auto insert on some keywords. You can also choose to clock links which in turn improves the SEO of the website.
6. AdSanity
Ads are the basis of many websites. Without generating revenue, it is tough for the owner to survive. With the help of the AdSanity, you get a complete Ad management plugin which focuses on creating a more focused approach on creating and using ads on the website.
It offers widgets, shortcodes and the ability to display ads on posts, pages, and sidebar. With customization such as time-based ads, you can be in full control over the plugin and your website.
A must-try plugin for anyone who is using WordPress.
7. JetPack
JetPack is yet another Automattic plugin, the developers of WordPress. The plugin is a combination of plugins and offers tons of different features related to the WordPress website.
Prime examples are parallax support, the spelling and grammar support, social-network posting and much more. It also offers email subscription and CDN service.
Anyone who is blogging for the first time should try the plugin as it offers all the major functionality in just one place.
8. iThemes Security
No security plugins until now. Well, here is one. iThemes Security(formally known as WP security) is a popular security plugin. It offers both basic and advanced features for protecting your website against hackers.
With a lot of websites being hacked each day, this plugin keeps everything intact and offers various functionality to combat hacking attempt by bots and hackers.
Few notable features of the plugin are 2-factor authentication, password expiration, strong password generation, user action logging and much more.
It also offers Google reCAPTCHA to protect against the spammers.
9. Contact Form 7
Have a website and no contact form for others to connect to you? Well, the problem can be solved by Contact Form 7.
Just like any other plugin in the list, this plugin is also popular and offers all the tools to create a customized contact forms for the visitors or advertisers to contact you.
10. WP Smush.it
Slow sites can kill a lot of interaction capabilities and also your Google rankings. One of the major factors of a slow site is using heavy images on the website.
WP Smush.it provides the necessary smashing to the image as soon as it gets uploaded to the website, saving the precious image size. Low image size in return improves the loading speed of the plugin.
Wrap Up
Oh, well, these plugins are must have plugins for WordPress website. With so many plugins in the marketplace, I have done my job representing the ten must have plugins in 2021.
If you think, I missed a plugin that should have been there in the list, then comment below and let us know.
Dipak C. Gajjar
Posted at 03:59h, 24 JulyHi Nitish,
All the mentioned plugins are must have, I agree. ????
Have you looked in ‘WP Performance Score Booster’ ( https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-performance-score-booster/ ) yet? This plugin speed up the WordPress site and improves the site scores in services like PageSpeed, YSlow, Pingdom and GTmetrix.
Nitish Singh
Posted at 14:24h, 24 JulyThank you for passing by Dipak. I will sure test it and add it to the list if it exceeds my expectation of must have plugins.
Keep visiting, 85Ideas.
Dipak C. Gajjar
Posted at 14:45h, 24 JulyI am sure it will. ????
Davis Brown
Posted at 08:37h, 21 SeptemberThanks for sharing the list of all the essential WordPress plug-ins. I think your article is worth sharing among beginners who are struggling finding the right plug-ins for their blogs or website. A part of these WordPress plug-ins there are more plug-ins I want to suggest to you that you may like to add to your next blog post . Install must-have WordPress plugins. I’ve listed the most essential must have WP plugins 2015 .
Brian H
Posted at 12:01h, 25 SeptemberHi Davis,
Thank you for stopping by. However, we do not allow self-promotion in our comments.