What Are the Best WordPress Plugins?

First of all, You may be wondering what is a Plugin?

Plugins are snippets of code that can be added to your WordPress blog to give it more functionality and features. 

 Here are my Top 10 Favorite WordPress Plugins, just for you. 

Some of these plugins will be things you can see, like specific sidebar plugins, while some will be more behind the scenes like Google Analytics that allows you to easily add your tracking script to your blog without touching the code. It’s not something your readers will notice, but it’s super helpful!

Which Plugins Do You Recommend?

There are so many plugins out there! Some are free and some are premium-like themes. Premium plugins typically offer more support and are better maintained, but there are still so many amazing free plugins worth installing.

A few of our favorites that you can download straight from the backend of your WordPress account are below:

1. Google Analytics:

This allows you to drop in your Google Analytics tracking code without having to touch the code! Some themes might have a spot for this already, so make sure you don’t add it twice or else you’ll get incorrect reporting data.

2. jQuery Pin It Button for Images by Marcin Skrzypiec:

You can easily add a Pin It button over your images with this simple plugin! Easy Peasy Done!

3. WordPress Popular Posts by Hector Cabrera:

This plugin allows you to add popular posts to your sidebar. It’s a feature we love. The settings are pretty customizable, so have fun!

4. Yoast SEO:

WordPress is great for SEO on it’s own, but Yoast helps you make sure that each post is set up for SEO by giving you simple fields to fill out. This one is an absolute MUST for everyone! update: we have switched to RANK Math recently.

5. Pretty Links- Link Management, Branding, Tracking & Sharing Plugin

Affiliate links can be long and ugly. Pretty Links is a premium WordPress plugin with multiple plan tiers that allows marketers to cloak links using their own site and domain name. Pretty Links include auto-linking to keywords and a year of support and updates with all plans

6. Simple Custom CSS

by John Regan, Danny Van Kooten: This plugin allows you to add custom CSS without touching your blog’s hard code, which means if you mess something up, you can just delete your code without worrying about breaking your theme!

7. Pre-Publish Checklist

by Brainstorm force: Do you get worried about tasks that you might forget? Like adding a featured image, updating the permalink, etc. just when you are about to click the publish button?

This plugin lets you create a checklist you wish to maintain for every post type on your website. How’s that for Helpful!?

8. Broken Link Checker (free):

Broken Link Checker monitors and tests all internal links & external links on your site looking for broken links. It helps you fix bad links to improve SEO and user experience. You don’t have to run this one all the time, as it can slow down your site.

9. ShortPixel Image Optimizer:

Optimizes images automatically, while guarding the quality of your images and making your website load faster! Win-Win!

10. Really Simple SSL

Really Simple SSL converts a site from http to https with one click. This plugin allows you to safely migrate your entire site to a secure site in a single step and avoid the “Not Secure” warnings on Google. Really Simple SSL updates site URLs, handles redirects and enhances site security. You’ll need to acquire a free SSL certificate in order to use this free plugin.

Bonus:  Check out our Favorite Tools page to see the complete and growing list of tools we love. 

Do you feel we missed a few, if so let us know your favorite?

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