39 Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs in 2021 (Most are FREE)

A re you looking for the best WordPress plugins to start a blog? Plugins let you add great features and functionality to your blog, without having to write any code.

There are hundreds of thousands of free and premium WordPress plugins out there. It can be overwhelming to find the best plugins among all of those choices! And when you’re just starting a blog, you might not even know what plugins to look for.

At the start, you’ll need a few essential plugins to launch your WordPress blog, create a contact form, start growing your blog traffic, and more.

Below you’ll find some of the best WordPress plugins (paid WordPress plugins and free plugins) that you can install to make your blog instantly better.

1. MonsterInsights Lite

MonsterInsights is the best WordPress plugin for Google Analytics. You can use this plugin to connect your blog with Google Analytics in one click. It allows you to monitor your blog traffic and other important stats within your WordPress dashboard.

Why You Need It: Smart bloggers use analytics to understand their audience, get better blog post ideas, and make more money from their blogs. With actionable analytics, you can see what’s working and make data-driven decisions to grow your blog.

Pricing:

MonsterInsights Lite is FREE. To unlock more powerful features though, you can get the Pro version of MonsterInsights starting at $99.50 per year.

Alternative: ExactMetrics

2. WPForms Lite

WPForms is the most beginner-friendly and by far the best WordPress contact form plugin. It lets you create a simple contact form so that you can connect with your readers.

Why You Need It: As your blog grows, people are going to want to get in touch with you to talk about guest posting, display ads, partnerships, and other exciting opportunities. The last thing you want to do is share your email address on your blog, though, because your inbox will be filled with spam.

WPForms will help you quickly create a customized contact form that protects you from spammers.

Pricing:

WPForms Lite is FREE to use. You can upgrade to the Pro version of WPForms for more features like surveys and polls, smart conditional logic, payment integrations with PayPal and Stripe, and more.

3. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the best WordPress lead generation and conversion optimization plugin. It allows you to create beautiful optin forms to convert your abandoning blog visitors into subscribers.

Why You Need It: Did you know that on average, 70% of the people who visit your website will forget about it and never come back? That means that all the time, money, and effort you spent on getting that traffic is going to waste.

That’s why it’s so important to get those visitors to subscribe to your email list. And OptinMonster makes that easy with its beautiful popups, floating bars, and other campaigns.

Pricing:

Starts at $9 per month for the Basic plan.

4. SeedProd

SeedProd is the best WordPress landing page builder plugin. Bloggers can use this plugin to easily create beautiful landing pages. You can create sales pages, webinar landing pages, squeeze pages, coming soon pages, and more.

Why You Need It: Many bloggers struggle to increase their conversions. But landing pages are specifically designed to convert visitors into subscribers, leads, or sales.

Unlike your blog’s homepage, which has lots of information on it, a landing page is focused on a specific campaign. For example, you can create a landing page to get more signups to your webinar. Because there’s nothing else on the page to distract visitors, they’re more likely to sign up.

So, whether you want to get more email subscribers or increase sales, you can do that by creating high-converting landing pages with SeedProd.

Pricing: 

You can get started with SeedProd for only $39.50 per year. If you’re on a budget, check out the free version of SeedProd.

5. Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon is a complete social feed plugin suite that lets you easily integrate various social media feeds to your WordPress site. It is the best social media plugin for WordPress in the market.

To generate user-generated content from social media, they offer 4 different social feed plugins:

• Custom Facebook Feed: Dynamically generate Facebook photos, videos, events and more into your website from your Facebook Page, Groups, etc.
• Instagram Feed: Connect various Instagram feeds including hashtag, shoppable, and tagged feeds to display social proof.
• Custom Twitter Feeds: With its multi-column masonry layout, you can display what your users are talking about you on Twitter.
• Feed for YouTube: Educate your users by showing YouTube videos, including live streaming feeds.
• Social Wall Pro: Combine feeds from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube into 1 feed.

Why You Need It: Displaying user-generated content on your website is one of the best ways to increase trust, conversions, and sales. Since the content is originally created by real users on social media, it increases the trust factor and establishes yourself as an authority in your niche.

With its seamless integration with various social platforms, you can easily display social feeds content, customer reviews, and more. All you have to do is authorize the plugin, insert the shortcode within your articles or widgets and display the content instantly.

Pricing: 

Starts at $49 per year per plugin. Or, you can get the All Access Bundle which comes with all 5 plugins for $299 per year. You can also try out the free versions of Smash Balloon.

6. All in One SEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is one of the best WordPress SEO plugin. At Blog Tyrant, we recommend it over Yoast SEO. AIOSEO is an all in one plugin that you can use to improve your website search rankings and drive more traffic to your blog.

Why You Need It: Starting a blog can be easy but building an audience takes time and resources. You’ll need to drive readers towards your blog and for that, you’ll need to use a plugin like All in One SEO. This plugin attracts visitors from Google, Bing, and social media websites to boost your readership.

It helps you in writing content with proper keywords that ranks in the search engines. Plus, AIOSEO uses its TruSEO On-Page Analysis to provide you with an actionable checklist to optimize every post and page on your site. With your entire site optimized for SEO, you can unlock maximum traffic.

Pricing:

There is a free version of AIOSEO. To get more powerful features, you can use the Pro version of AIOSEO starting at $49.50 per year.

7. PushEngage

PushEngage is the best push notification plugin for WordPress on the market. This tool lets you send targeted push messages to users after they leave your website so you can drive traffic, boost engagement, and increase sales.

Why You Need It: If you want to encourage people to come back to your blog, you can use PushEngage to send personalized messages to users. These messages are sent straight to their web browsers or mobile devices, even if they’re currently browsing on a different website.

You can set it up to send new blog post notifications, abandoned cart reminders, price drop alerts, and much more. Push notifications are a great way to stay connected with your readers after they leave your site.

Pricing: 

You can get started with PushEngage for free! The free plan allows you to send 120 notifications per month to up to 2500 subscribers. 

If you have more subscribers and want to send more push notifications, you can upgrade your plan starting at $25 per month.

8. MemberPress

MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin. It allows you to restrict visitors’ access to specific pages, posts, and custom post types. It comes handy in managing your content perfectly. Also, when your blog grows, you can use this plugin to restrict access for guest authors.

Why You Need It: Do you want to turn your blog audience into an active community with forums? Maybe you’re looking for a way to monetize your blog with premium content for subscribers only?

MemberPress is the easiest way to turn your blog into a membership site, with all the powerful features you need to grow your membership and make more money online.

Pricing: 

Starts at $179 per year for the Basic plan.

9. WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is a free WordPress email SMTP plugin. This free plugin helps reconfigure the wp_mail() PHP function to use the proper SMTP provider. In simpler words, it makes sure that your e-mail delivers to the intended recipient.

You can integrate it with the email subscription and marketing services to promote your blog.

Why You Need It: Have you ever had issues with WordPress not sending emails when someone fills out your contact form, or if you try to reset your password? That’s because, by default, WordPress isn’t set up for reliable email deliverability.

Luckily, you can easily fix that with WP Mail SMTP.

Pricing: 

Free.

And if you don’t want to deal with the technical details of setting it up, you can get the premium version, WP Mail SMTP Pro, which includes white glove setup and amazing customer support. The premium version starts at $49 per year.

10. RafflePress

RafflePress is the best WordPress plugin for giveaways. It allows you to set up viral giveaways on your blog to increase traffic, get social media followers, and build your email list.

Why You Need It: Running a viral giveaway on your blog is a powerful tactic to boost your traffic and grow your email list. But managing the logistics of a giveaway contest can be a huge challenge.

Enter RafflePress. It’s a user-friendly plugin that asks your visitors to earn entries by following your social pages like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Pricing: 

There’s a 100% free version of RafflePress on WordPress.org! The Pro version starts at $39.20 per year and comes with more advanced features. 

11. TrustPulse

TrustPulse is the best WordPress social proof plugin. It showcases real-time activity of the blog to your new visitors. You can also redirect users to landing pages from the TrustPulse social proof notifications.

Why You Need It: Did you know that 60% of consumers said they made a purchase after experiencing Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)? Adding social proof notifications has been shown to increase conversions by up to 15%.

That means that adding TrustPulse to your site can instantly boost your email signups or sales – and you can get started for free.

Pricing: 

You can get started with TrustPulse for free.

The Pro version of TrustPulse starts at only $5 per month! It comes with powerful features like timed-display control, page level targeting, welcome messages, on-fire notifications, and more.

12. Sucuri

Sucuri is the best WordPress security plugin. It protects your blog from malware threats, DDoS, and any type of attacks. We use it daily on our websites and blogs to avoid being hacked.

Why You Need It: You might think that a new blogger wouldn’t be a target for hackers, but actually security is something every blogger needs to take care of. That’s because hackers target all kinds of websites in order to install malicious software to distribute to all your visitors. There are even scams to steal your site access and lock it up until you pay a ransom to get it back!

To avoid any of that hassle, it’s super important to use a reputable security plugin like Sucuri. That’s why we use it on all our sites.

13. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is a popular WordPress backup plugin. Before you take any major action on your blog like changing a theme, updating a plugin, or update WordPress core, it is recommended to create a complete backup. If anything goes wrong, you can restore the backup using UpdraftPlus right away.

Why You Need It: No matter how reliable your WordPress hosting is or how careful you are, there’s always a chance something can go wrong. If the worst happens and you get hacked or your site goes down, you want to be prepared. Updraft makes it easy to instantly restore your site, just in case.

14. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin. You can use this plugin to boost the page load speed of your blog. It also comes with Imagify which is an advanced image optimization service.

Why You Need It: Did you know that according to WPBeginner, a 1 second delay in your WordPress website loading time can lead to 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction? Plus, having a slow website can hurt your search engine rankings so you lose out on traffic.

That’s why it’s so important to make sure your website loads quickly. If it doesn’t, you’re missing out on a ton of traffic, subscribers, and sales.

And if you’re looking for a free WordPress plugin, W3 Total Cache is a good alternative.

15. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is an excellent WordPress image gallery plugin. It is beginner-friendly and easy to use. It allows you to create image galleries and photo albums on your WordPress blog instantly.

Why You Need It: Do you want to share a lot of images on your blog? If you’re running a photography blog or other image-heavy site, all those photos can ruin your site’s load time.

To boost your site speed, improve the user experience, and also display your images in a more beautiful way, there’s no better plugin than Envira Gallery.

16. WooCommerce

If you want to make money online by selling products on your WordPress blog, then WooCommerce is the perfect plugin. You can use this plugin to create a highly customizable eCommerce store. It comes with free and paid extensions to boost the functionality of your blog.

Why You Need It: Want to make money blogging? Opening your own online store is a great way to do it. You can sell any products you want, including digital products like ebooks. You can also integrate WooCommerce with other plugins to set up a drop shipping store with WordPress.

17. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is the most advanced form builder on the market. It comes with powerful addons you can use to build more complex forms. 

Why You Need It: If you want to offer complex forms on your blog like online calculator forms, quizzes, profile forms, surveys, and more, then Formidable Forms is the easiest way to do it. 

Plus, with the Formidable Views feature, you can format, filter, and display user-submitted data on the front-end of your website. This is perfect for bloggers that want to create directories, job board listings, event calendars, and rating systems.

Pricing: 

Formidable Forms starts at $49.50 per year. There’s also a free version on WordPress.org.

18. Grammarly

Grammarly is a simple browser extension that works great with a WordPress blog. It allows you to improve your content by avoiding small grammatical and spelling mistakes that you could miss unintentionally while writing blog posts.

Why You Need It: As a blogger, you wear a lot of hats – designer, writer, editor, proofreader, publisher, and more! It’s tough to catch every little spelling and grammar mistake when it all depends on you alone.

That’s why it’s smart to use a tool like Grammarly to double-check your work. Leaving those mistakes on your blog can give an unprofessional impression to your readers and hurt your brand.

19. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is a simple yet powerful WordPress automation plugin. This WordPress plugin helps you automate various WordPress admin tasks so that you can save time and money

Why You Need It: There’s a lot to manage behind-the-scenes when running a blog. Instead of spending so much time on routine WordPress tasks, you can have Uncanny Automator handle it for you.

You can connect your existing WordPress plugins together easily and create automation “recipes.” For example, when a user submits a form, you can automatically enroll them in your course, then create a calendar event for it. Instead of performing these tasks manually, Uncanny Automator helps your plugins talk to each other so that your site runs on autopilot.

Pricing: 

There’s a free version that comes with a bunch of integrations. To get more features and integrations, you can get the Pro version which starts at $149 per year for 1 site.

20. Easy Affiliate

Easy Affiliate is the best affiliate program plugin for WordPress. With this plugin, you can easily set up your own self-hosted affiliate program and start growing your sales by up to 30%. 

Why You Need It: If you sell products, online courses, or memberships, referral marketing is a great way to boost your sales. Other bloggers can promote your products/services and you pay them a small commission each time they make a sale. 

But, creating and managing your own affiliate program can be difficult, that’s why you need a plugin like Easy Affiliate. 

Easy Affiliate is super simple to set up. Once it’s installed, you’ll have a full affiliate program on your WordPress website. Your affiliates can log into the Affiliate Dashboard to monitor their stats, download their links and banners, and more.

Pricing: 

Easy Affiliate starts at $99.50 per year for 1 site.

21. CSS Hero

CSS Hero is an amazing WordPress plugin to customize your blog theme. It gives you the control to style your layout with point and click interface. You don’t need to edit any code, yet you can customize each element on your WordPress blog.

Why You Need It: If you don’t know any code, it can be hard to customize the design details of your site. What if you found a WordPress theme you love, but just want to change the colors or fonts to make it your own?

CSS Hero makes that easy with just a few clicks – no need to learn any code.

Pricing: 

CSS Hero costs $19 per year for 1 site.

22. Shared Counts

Shared Counts is a free WordPress plugin to add social network buttons to your blog. It allows your users to share articles on social media easily. This plugin helps in increasing traffic and engagement on your WordPress blog.

Why You Need It: Social media is one of the best ways to build your blog traffic and keep people coming back for more. If you want to go viral and grow your audience, you’ll need a plugin like Shared Counts to encourage your visitors to share your blog posts on social media.

Pricing:

Shared Counts is free!

23. AdSanity

AdSanity is the best WordPress ad management plugin. It allows you to display and manage ads on your blog professionally. You can extend the functionality using their basic add-ons.

Why You Need It: Putting ads on your blog is a really easy way to start making money from your content, but using a network like Google Adsense doesn’t give you much control. With AdSanity you can take control into your own hands and make more money with ads.

Pricing:

Starts at $49 per year.

24. Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a popular URL shortener, link cloaking, and affiliate marketing plugin for WordPress blogs. It allows you to shorten and customize URLs for your blog links and add affiliate links to your content automatically.

Why You Need It: Have you ever tried to share a really long link on social media, in an email, or on printed material like a business card? It doesn’t look good, and it doesn’t make it easy for your visitors.

With Pretty Links, you can easily create short links that are more memorable and professional. It’s truly a must-have marketing tool.

Pretty Links will also help you unlock more affiliate revenue from your existing and new content. You can add your affiliate links 1 time and then the plugin will intelligently place them throughout all of your content automatically.

No more manually searching for spots to add your affiliate links!

Pricing:

You can get the free version of Pretty Links from the WordPress.org site. For more features, the Premium version starts at $49 per year.

25. LearnDash

LearnDash is an LMS (learning management system) plugin that will help you create and sell online courses. It’s one of the most popular LMS plugins on the market. 

Why You Need It: Selling online courses is a popular way for bloggers to make money online. But, putting together an online course can be intimidating for new bloggers. 

Luckily, with LearnDash, you can easily put together online courses with the drag and drop course builder. 

Plus, LearnDash makes it easy to manage your course and students. You can approve, comment, and award points on submitted assignments and track enrollment, progress, and performance. 

Pricing:

LearnDash starts at $159 per year.

26. Smush

Smush is a free WordPress image optimization plugin. With this plugin, you can easily optimize, resize, and compress your blog images. 

Why Do You Need It: If your blog images aren’t properly optimized, they can actually slow down your site. And a slow blog can cause visitors to leave before they even check out your content. 

To speed up your site’s loading times, you need to optimize your images and Smush makes it easy.  

It will automatically optimize your blog’s images for speed and performance every time you upload a new image to the WordPress Media Library. 

Pricing:

Free!

27. Insert Headers and Footers

Insert Headers and Footers is a simple and free plugin that lets you insert code to your WordPress header and footer. 

Why You Need It: Sometimes you need to insert code like Google Analytics tracking, Facebook pixel code, or custom CSS, into the header and footer of your WordPress site.

But messing with the theme files isn’t something many bloggers want to do. 

Thankfully, Insert Headers and Footers gives you one place where you can insert code and you don’t have to worry about breaking your site. 

Pricing:

Free!

28. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker monitors and tests all of the internal and external links on your website and notifies you if it finds any that are broken. 

Why You Need It: If users click on a link in one of your blog posts and it doesn’t work, it can make for a poor reading experience. Plus, broken links can negatively affect your SEO too. 

But, it would take a ton of time to constantly check your content for broken links. 

Instead, you can let Broken Link Checker handle it for you. It will notify you of any broken links immediately so you can fix them. 

Pricing:

Broken Link Checker is a free plugin.

29. Redirection

Redirection is the most popular redirection plugin for WordPress with over 2 million active installs. With this free plugin, you can easily create and manage redirects, no technical knowledge required. 

Why You Need It: As we mentioned previously, clicking on a broken link can be frustrating for readers. Plus, it can hurt your site’s ranking. 

With a redirection plugin, you can make sure that any broken links on your site point to another relevant page or post on your site. So, instead of hitting a dead end, they can continue browsing your blog. 

Pricing:

Free!

30. Simple Author Box

This plugin does exactly what the name describes. You can use the Simple Author Box plugin to display an author profile at the end of your blog posts. 

Why You Need It: Instead of just displaying your name at the end of blog posts, by adding an author box, your blog visitors can get to know you better. 

When you have a deeper connection with your audience, it boosts your blog’s credibility and authenticity. 

With Simple Author Box, you can display your name, author gravatar, and bio. You can even promote your social media profiles by adding social icons in the author box. 

A plugin like this is also useful if you accept guest posts on your blog. 

Pricing:

This plugin is free.

31. Disable Comments

Disable Comments is another popular free plugin with over 1 million active installations. With this plugin, you can instantly enable or disable comments from any post type in WordPress. 

Why You Need It: While having a comment section on your blog can boost engagement, some bloggers prefer not to have one. 

After all, comment spamming can be annoying. 

So, if you want to get rid of all of the comment sections on your blog, you can use a plugin like Disable Comments to stop the spammers. 

Pricing:

Disable Comments is free to use.

32. Easy Google Fonts

Want more font options for your WordPress blog? With Easy Google Fonts you can quickly add custom Google Fonts to your WordPress theme, no coding required. 

Why You Need It: Creating a brand for your blog is important. Your brand shows your blog’s personality and it’s what sets you apart from the competition. 

And if you can’t find a font that fits your brand, it can throw off the whole vibe of your blog.

With Easy Google Fonts, you can take control of your blog’s typography and find the font that represents you perfectly.

Pricing:

Free!

33. WPML

WPML is a multilingual WordPress plugin that lets you easily create and run a multilingual blog. 

Why You Need It: If you want to create a blog that caters to audiences in multiple geographic locations, then you need a plugin like WPML. 

By default, WordPress doesn’t allow you to create a multilingual website easily. 

Luckily, WPML can help you out. It’s super easy to use; simply install the plugin, choose your languages, and start translating your content. 

Now your blog can reach people all around the world!

Pricing:

WPML starts at only $29 per year for 1 site.

34. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to sell digital products on your blog. It has over 2 million downloads and counting. 

Why You Need It: Selling digital products like ebooks, photos, graphics, PDF documents, songs, and software is a great way to make money online. 

The best part is that you only have to create a digital product once but you can sell it over and over again!

If you’re not sure how to get started, don’t worry.  

Easy Digital Downloads offers a complete system for selling digital products on WordPress. 

Pricing:

There is a free version of the plugin on the WordPress.org site. To get more powerful features, upgrade to the premium version starting at $99 per year.

35. Revive Old Posts

Revive Old Posts is a free social media auto post and scheduling plugin. You can use it to automatically share your new and old content on social media. 

Why You Need It: Revive Old Posts acts like a social media scheduler. Instead of manually sharing your content, you can automatically post to social media as soon as a new post is published. 

It can also help you drive traffic to your old posts and boost engagement. New visitors to your blog might not go back and read all of your content. But, with Revive Old Posts, you can share your old posts on social media and bring more attention to them. 

Pricing:

Revive Old Posts is free to use.

36. Sugar Calendar

Sugar Calendar is the best event calendar plugin for WordPress. It lets you easily create and manage a frontend calendar on your blog so visitors can see upcoming events. 

Why You Need It: Holding online events like webinars, workshops, coaching sessions, and Q&As is an awesome way to interact with your audience. You can even use these events to generate sales. 

But, they won’t be successful if nobody attends. 

With Sugar Calendar, you can quickly add a widget to your blog to display exciting upcoming events. 

Pricing:

Sugar Calendar offers a free version on WordPress.org. To get more powerful features, you can upgrade to a Pro plan starting at $49 per year.

37. Editorial Calendar

Editorial Calendar is another awesome free WordPress plugin for bloggers. With this plugin, you can plan out your content calendar easily and see when each post will be published. 

Why You Need It: A lot of bloggers wonder how often they should post. But what’s more important is sticking to a consistent blogging schedule. 

Publishing consistently will help you build a loyal audience and it will give search engines more opportunities to find your site and bring traffic to it. 

It can be hard to stay consistent but Editorial Calendar will make sticking to your schedule effortless. 

With the visual calendar, you can plan your posts and see when they’ll go live at a glance. 

Pricing:

Free!

38. TablePress

TablePress is a popular free WordPress plugin that lets you easily create and add tables into posts, pages, or widget areas using a simple shortcode. 

Why You Need It: Tables are a great way to organize data or other information on your website. 

For example, if you’re reviewing products on your blog, you can create a table to compare or list product features in a way that’s easy to read. 

With TablePress, you can make simple and beautiful tables quickly. It has a spreadsheet-like interface in the backend that lets you add or edit data, no coding required.

Pricing:

Free!

39. Enable Media Replace

Enable Media Replace is a free and easy-to-use plugin that lets you replace an image or file in your Media Library by uploading a new file in its place. 

Why You Need It: If you want to replace an image in your Media Library, you need to delete the old image, rename the new file, and then upload it to your site. 

That takes time. 

Enable Media Replace removes all of those extra steps. Now you can simply replace any uploaded file in an instant. 

Pricing: 

Free!

Improve Your Blog with the Best WordPress Plugins

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress plugins for blogs. With these plugins in your toolkit, you can take your blog to the next level.

And many of the plugins on this list offer free versions. So, if you’re a WordPress user on a budget, you can still use the free WordPress plugins to improve your blog. Then, upgrade to the pro versions as your blog grows.

You may also want to check out our tutorials on how to install a WordPress plugin and also on how to install WordPress.

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more blogging tips.