NOTE: before making any large changes to your website – such as adding plugins, updating your WordPress or theme version, or clearing your database – you should always create a BACKUP!
Our Top 5 Most Valuable Plugins
Check out our picks for top 5 most useful and practical WordPress plugins, and share your favourites in the comment section below!
Price: Free!
We’re starting out simple, and nothing is simpler than this light-weight quality-of-life plugin. Simply install and activate to enable content duplication site-wide!
Beyond what the title implies, this plugin can clone more than just blog posts. With Post Duplicator active, you can easily duplicate entire pages and entries in custom taxonomies from themes or other plugins. All content (except comments) is duplicated to a new page/post which you can then rename and edit for any purpose without affecting the original.
Price: $8/year
Sick of spam comments? Join the club… the Anti-Spam club!
With CleanTalk’s spam protection service, you can be rid of annoying (and potentially dangerous) spam comments one and for all. You can get a free trial by simply installing and activating the plugin, and the full version is dirt cheap if you’re happy with the service they provide.
No Captcha, no questions, no counting animals, no puzzles, no math. Fight spam!
Price: $59/year
The headline from their site homepage sums it up better than we ever could:
Gravity Forms is the Easiest, Most Trusted Tool to Create Advanced Forms for Your WordPress-Powered Website.
And not a word of a lie; this absolute powerhouse of a plugin does it all. It does so much, in fact, that it has entire communities dedicated to making plugins for this plugin! The base plugin comes packed with tons of useful features, and with the help of customization and add-ons, this souped-up form builder can do literally anything you could ask a form to do. (Seriously!)
Price: Free!*
*Paid Pro version is available with additional features.
Jetpack is the gold-standard in multi-purpose WordPress plugins. With the free version alone, you get in-depth site usage analytics, security essentials, SEO tools, and more.
Install JetPack and activate Site Accelerator tools and watch your page load times decrease — they will optimize your images and serve them from their own powerful global network, and speed up your mobile site to reduce bandwidth usage (and save money!). Connect JetPack to take advantage of:
- Images and static files (like CSS and JavaScript) served from their servers, not yours.
- Elasticsearch-powered related content and site search, for relevant results with no drain on your servers.
- Lazy load images for a faster mobile experience.
- Automatic updates for plugins.
Price: Free!*
*Paid Pro version is available with additional features.
Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines. Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO plugin, and has helped millions of people like you to get ahead, and to stay ahead.
Just to scratch the surface of what Yoast can offer you, the free version alone includes:
- Automated technical SEO improvements, like canonical URLs and meta tags.
- Advanced XML sitemaps; making it easy for Google to understand your site structure.
- Title and meta description templating, for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.
- An in-depth Schema.org integration that will increase your chance of getting rich results, by helping search engines to understand your content.
- Full control over site breadcrumbs, so that users and search engines always know where they are.
- Faster loading times for your whole website, due to an innovative way of managing data in WordPress.
- And a whole heck of a lot more!
To get the most out of your blog posts, you can use the powerful Yoast SEO tools below the text editor. In the Readability analysis tab, Yoast will proof-read your articles for you and provide suggestions on ways to improve it. From transition words to sentence length, passive voice analysis and Flesch Reading Ease score, Yoast is an invaluable writing assistant.
Wow! You’ve collected excellent plugins.
Blog Designer Pro plugin may be a great addition to this list. It has all the features and elements that you’ll ever need on your blog page on your website. So, lets you give a personal touch to each of the parts and make it look unique than others.