8 Must Have WordPress Plugins For Bloggers And Business

Are you overwhelmed by WordPress Plugins? Find out what the 8 Must Have WordPress Plugins Bloggers and Businesses Owners Need to be running on their websites.

7 Must Have WordPress Plugins

WordPress is the CMS of choice for bloggers and businesses for good reason. For starters WordPress is flexible enough, robust enough and user friendly enough to power blogger hobbyists sites all the way to enterprise level website like MTV News. With all of this flexibility comes a myriad of choices, decisions and pitfalls primarily focused around what WordPress plugins bloggers and business should use.

With almost 55,000 plugins available for free at WordPress.org, and who knows how many thousands more premium plugins around the internet, is it any wonder that people who are new to site building get confused and download a bunch of things they will probably never use?

I have been there, and I’ve used so many of them that through trial and error I have come across a select few plugins that I almost always install on my WordPress websites. they might not fit everyone’s needs every time, but I’m willing to bet there will be a few good ones in here that you haven’t heard about before.

Before I get into these must have WordPress plugins, if you are a blogger or a business in the process of setting up a WordPress website, you should check out this Guide and handy website checklist to help you make sure your WordPress Website is both user friendly and responsive. It’s so important that the foundational theme you’re running on WordPress is a good one otherwise you’re not going to get the real benefit from any plugin.

With that being said, let’s get to those 8 must have WordPress plugins for bloggers and business.

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1. 404 Redirection

Have you ever deleted posts or pages from your WordPress site?

Pretty harmless you might think, but here’s the problem. If anybody has linked to these pages in the past, they will now lead to the dreaded 404 page. If this happens, and the owner of the site that is linking to you is doing their due diligence (see next plugin) you will lose that link for sure. As you probably know, links help you to rank better in the search engines, so that’s a bad thing.

The lightweight 404 Redirection plugin will at least turn these 404’s into a redirect to your homepage so you can keep some of that link juice, and avoid sending potential visitors to a useless page. (But you should really make that 404 page useful of course!)

2. Broken Link Checker

As we just spoke about, it’s not a good idea to have lots of links out to pages on the internet that no longer exist. This also goes for internal links within your site, Google doesn’t like this!

thankfully, the Broken Link Checker plugin scans your site and tells you right in the dashboard where you have any problems which you can then clear up with just a few clicks of the mouse. Magic!

3. Compress JPEG & PNG Images

The Compress JPEG & PNG Images plugin is a lifesaver, in more ways than one!

You have probably heard that site speed is a major factor for ranking in the search engines now, especially with so many people out and about on mobile devices that are slower than your average desktop connection. This plugin helps speed up your site by decreasing the file size of every image you add to your website without you ever having to think about it.

I like it more simply because I don’t have to jump through hoops to try to reduce these image sizes on a separate website or with a specialist application. OK… It isn’t perfect, but do you really want to have all the extra work to get images perfectly optimized when you can just have ‘good enough’ and get back to the real work?

4. wpDataTables

With wpDataTables you can create responsive WordPress tables and charts.

Resize the browser window to see how a responsive WordPress table works. Play around with the WordPress table to see how the charts and the sum row adjust. Cells in the Price column are highlighted depending on the revenue.

5. OneSignal Push Notifications

You ever see those little boxes that are popping up everywhere lately? You know, the ones that say “such-and-such site would like to send you notifications”. This neat little plugin does that for your site, totally free of charge.

There’s a caveat here, if you are not producing great information for your visitors, it’s highly unlikely that anyone is ever going to click that ‘allow’ button. Best not to bother going to the trouble of setting OneSignal Push Notifications up if that is the case.

If you’re providing knock-your-socks-off information, however, this is a great way to get some extra return visitors who might not otherwise follow you via other avenues.

6. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore

Scared your website may one day get hacked, or that you do something that might send it haywire? Trust me, it happens, and if you have not taken measures to back your site up you will be in a world of pain when you experience it for yourself.

This is where UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore helps out.

It takes a total backup of your site on a schedule you have control of. It takes that backup and uploads it to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 or a variety of other places where you may have an account so you don’t even have to worry about any of it. Just worry about doing the restore if you ever need to.

7. Webcraftic Clearfy – WordPress optimization plugin

Webcraftic Clearfy – WordPress optimization plugin is a pretty new plugin still, but it’s pretty darn brilliant!

If you are less experienced with WordPress sites, you should probably only use the basic features as you could break something quite easily.

To give it to you straight from the horse’s mouth, Clearfy can:

  • Clear website code from trash
  • Eliminate the WordPress vulnerabilities
  • Speed up search engine indexing
  • Fix another plugin’s bugs
  • Make your WordPress easier, more convenient and faster

Really, you need to check out this plugin page for yourself to get an idea of how powerful it is. But I’ll say this, if you are having trouble getting your site speed down to a reasonable level then this will be a dream come true for you. If your site is already fast… well, be prepared for greased lightning!

8. WP Rocket

This final plugin is the only paid, premium plugin in the lineup, but I really think this is a must for most webmasters. WP-Rocket will literally make your site go warp speed, especially if you pair it with Clearfy.

I’ll come clean, I’m no coder. I can hack some HTML together when I’m forced to, but when it comes to cache plugins and all the advanced stuff like that, I like to leave it up to the experts. You can do more harm than good with some of the free cache options out there. The majority of these plugins are easy to install and easy to use, but just in case — it’s always better to get help from an expert if by some small chance you do manage to make a mess of things.