Finding the best WordPress plugins for your blog can be hard and troublesome. Having too much unnecessary plugins can slow down your blog. Having too little plugins may not adequately help your users or the performance of your blog.

Here are the 5 best WordPress Plugins that you need for your blog:

5. Akismet Anti-SpamDescription:

Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against a global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Major features in Akismet include:

• Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
• Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
• URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
• Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
• A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

PS: You’ll be prompted to get an Akismet.com API key to use it, once activated. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

Thoughts

Akismet is the best at filtering spam comments, which you will get alot as your blog grows.

4. Analytify – Google Analytics Dashboard

Description:

Analytify makes Google Analytics simple for everywhere in WordPress (posts, pages and custom post types). It presents the statistics from Google Analytics in a beautiful way under the WordPress Posts/Pages at front end, backend and in its own Dashboard. Now you can get Google Analytics Dashboard inside your WordPress Dashboard within a minute.

Top Features of this Google Analytics plugin:

• Super easy installation. 1-Click Authentication process and It adds Google analytics tracking code to your website. No need to copy any code manually.
• Enhanced ecommerce Google analytics Tracking Add-ons for WooCommerce & Easy Digital Downloads are available (Premium)
• Google Analytics Stats (General) under the single posts/pages as a block in wp-admin
• List of top Countries
• List of top Cities
• SOCIAL MEDIA Statistics
• List of top Referrers Browsers
• List of top Referrers
• Mobile device Statistics
• See What’s happening when users come to your site (Bounce rate of top pages)
• REAL-TIME Statistics of your site in dashboard.(Premium)
• Campaigns Statistics (Premium)
• ShortCodes (Simple and Advanced) for Custom Statistics of your own choice (Premium)
• Use ShortCodes in Widgets (Premium)
• Helps in SEO optimization and allows you to see traffic data for individual blog posts and pages.
• It can be easy customizable with CSS, you can give it any shape you want.
• You can extend it to at any level. Usage of API’s are very easy to work with.
• Google Analytics Stats (Full) under the single posts,pages & Custom Post Types as a block in wp-admin (Premium)
• Google Analytics Stats (Full) under the single posts,pages & Custom Post Types as a block at front-end (Premium)
• General Statistics (Sessions, Users, Bounce rate, Average time on site, Average pages, PAGEVIEWS, NEW/RETURNING Visitors)
• How people are finding you (TOP KEYWORDS)
• [New] Dashboard dropdown menu now remembers your last selection of time period.

Thoughts

Keeping track of your analytics and data is a must for any blogger. Staying on top of your analytics can help you spot trends as well as see what post are getting the most traffic.

Unfortunately, Google Analytics can be intimidating for beginners because of the amount of information it provides.

Luckily, Analytify helps make the data easy to read. Other plugins don’t make the data as visually pleasing or as organized as Analytify.

3. Imagify

Description:

Speed up your website with imagify and get lighter images without losing quality.

Imagify is the most advanced tool to optimize images. You can now use this power directly in WordPress.

After enabling it, all your images including thumbnails will be automatically optimized when uploaded into WordPress. You can also use Imagify to convert WebP images for free.

You already have lots of unoptimized images? Not a problem, you will love the Bulk Optimizer to optimize all your existing images in one click.

Imagify can directly resize your images, you won’t have to lose time anymore on resizing your images before uploading them.

Three level of compression are available:

• Normal, a lossless compression algorithm. The image quality won’t be altered at all.
• Aggressive, a lossy compression algorithm. Stronger compression with a tiny loss of quality most of the time this is not even noticeable at all.
• Ultra, our strongest compression method using a lossy algorithm.

With the backup option, you can change your mind whenever you want by restoring your images to their original version or optimize them to another compression level.

HOW ABOUT WEBP IMAGES?

Now, for each image you optimize with the Imagify plugin, you will also get its WebP version (if you tick the option in the settings); in your Media library, this will result in the following image versions:
– full-sized optimized image,
– full-sized WebP image,
– optimized thumbnails,
– WebP thumbnails.

The optimization will also work for images included in your themes and plugins.

If you want, Imagify can also display WebP images on your front-end in two ways:
– <picture> tag,
– rewrite rules in the .htaccess file.

If you kept a backup copy of the original images, you have the possibility to create their WebP version separately (one by one or via the bulk optimization).

Thoughts

Optimizing your images is a must for bloggers. Having large images can slow down your blog and provide a terrible experience for your users. A bad user experience also hurts your rankings on Google.

Imagify is useful plugin that optimizes your images as soon as you upload. Very useful!

2. WP Super Cache

Description:

WP Super Cache plugin generates 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.

The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users:

• Users who are not logged in.
• Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
• Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

99% of your visitors will be served static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them.

The plugin serves cached files in 3 ways (ranked by speed):

1. Expert: The fastest method is by using Apache mod_rewrite (or whatever similar module your web server supports) to serve “supercached” static html files. This completely bypasses PHP and is extremely quick. If your server is hit by a deluge of traffic it is more likely to cope as the requests are “lighter”. This does require the Apache mod_rewrite module (which is probably installed if you have custom permalinks) and a modification of your .htaccess file which is risky and may take down your site if modified incorrectly.
2. Simple: Supercached static files can be served by PHP and this is the recommended way of using the plugin. The plugin will serve a “supercached” file if it exists and it’s almost as fast as the mod_rewrite method. It’s easier to configure as the .htaccess file doesn’t need to be changed. You still need a custom permalink. You can keep portions of your page dynamic in this caching mode.
3. WP-Cache caching: This is mainly used to cache pages for known users, URLs with parameters and feeds. Known users are logged in users, visitors who leave comments or those who should be shown custom per-user data. It’s the most flexible caching method and slightly slower. WP-Cache caching will also cache visits by unknown users if supercaching is disabled. You can have dynamic parts to your page in this mode too. This mode is always enabled but you can disable caching for known users, URLs with parameters, or feeds separately. Set the constant “DISABLE_SUPERCACHE” to 1 in your wp-config.php if you want to only use WP-Cache caching.

If you’re not comfortable with editing PHP files then use simple mode. It’s easy to set up and very fast.

Recommended Settings

1. Simple caching.

2. Compress pages.

3. Don’t cache pages for known users.

4. Cache rebuild.

5. CDN support.

6. Extra homepage checks.

Garbage collection is the act of cleaning up cache files that are out of date and stale. There’s no correct value for the expiry time but a good starting point is 1800 seconds.

Consider deleting the contents of the “Rejected User Agents” text box and allow search engines to cache files for you.

Preload as many posts as you can and enable “Preload Mode”. Garbage collection of old cached files will be disabled. If you don’t care about sidebar widgets updating often set the preload interval to 2880 minutes (2 days) so all your posts aren’t recached very often. When the preload occurs the cache files for the post being refreshed is deleted and then regenerated. Afterwards a garbage collection of all old files is performed to clean out stale cache files.
Even with preload mode enabled cached files will still be deleted when posts are modified or comments made.

You can optimize for free 25MB of images (about 250 images) every month. Converting to WebP is free.

Thoughts

WP Super Cache is a plugin that helps optimize your speed by caching your files.

This helps reduce the load on the servers, which improves your blog’s performance.

1. Ad Inserter

Description:

Ad management plugin with many advanced advertising features to insert ad codes at optimal positions.

Supports all kinds of ads including Google AdSense, Google Ad Manager (DFP – DoubleClick for publishers), contextual Amazon Native Shopping Ads, Media.net and rotating banners.

This plugin is more than AdSense plugin or plugin for ads. It provides many advanced options to insert opt-in forms, header scripts, Javascript, CSS, HTML, PHP, analytics, tracking or advert code anywhere on the page.

Pro version supports additional advanced features:

• Geolocation using Webnet77 or MaxMind databases (works also with caching)
• Country, state, region and city level geotargeting
• Blacklist/Whitelist IP addresses or countries/cities (works also with caching)
• Ad impression and click statistics (works also with <iframe> Javascript ads like Google AdSense)
• Statistics reports for clients in PDF format or public web pages
• External tracking via Google Analytics or Matomo (Piwik)
• A/B testing – discover adverts and settings that perform best
• Frequency capping – limit impressions or clicks
• Click fraud protection
• Lazy loading
• Sticky ads with optional close button
• Sticky sidebar ads (stick to the screen or to the content)
• Floating slide-in banner adverts
• Sticky (floating) ads with animations (fade, slide, turn, flip, zoom)
• Animation trigger for sticky ads (page scroll in % or px, HTML element becomes visible)
• background ads (skin ads)
• Support for sticky ad bar
• Support for scheduling date and time with fallback option
• Support for ads in iframes
• Ad blocking detection – replace ads, protect content
• Ad blocking statistics
• Multisite options to limit settings on the sites
• Individual post/page exception management
• Export and import of settings
• Support via email

Thoughts

Chances are eventually you’re going to want to monetize your blog. Google Adsense is a good place to start.

However, inserting the ad code into your files can be difficult and a headache for beginners.

Ad Inserter makes it easy with just a click of a button.

Not only does it work for Google Adsense but other ad platforms as well.

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