10 Essential WordPress Plugins for the Absolute Beginner

Plug-in is one great way to beautify and standardize a blog, am I right? We use plugins because WordPress platform alone don’t have all the functionalities that we bloggers/ websites owners crave for.

But as great and awesome a plugin can make your site look, it can also create havoc to your blog/ site and your host provider as well if not be careful.

10 Essential WordPress Plugins for the Absolute Beginner

Every new bloggers wants to install as many plugins as they can, because they believe that the more the plugin, the more attractive their site becomes. But in reality, those many plugins does nothing but slow down your blog/ website.

Must Read: Embed pdf Document to Your WordPress Blog Without Plugin

As bloggers, we should have limits to the plugins we install. Install those we truly need and Remove those we don’t need.

What’s the maximum amount of plugins a blogger should have?

Every blogger has their definition of maximum. My definition of maximum is having 25 useful plugins in your arsenal.

Me? Sometime back, I was having 23 plugins till I recently did a blog cleanup because most of the plugins I had work similarly but with just a slight difference. But now, I am having just 15 active plugins in my arsenal.

If you ask me, I don’t intend to add more to my 15 plugin, instead, I will manually code what I want to appear on my blog.

Why do you need to keep your plugin to its minimal?

The two main and most important reasons why we need to keep our plugin to its minimal;

√  Too much of it slows down any blog heavily
√  It puts load on your database
  It consumes resources
  And you know, nobody likes to visit a slow or inaccessible site…

I came up with 10 Essential WordPress Plugins for the Absolute Beginner to help new bloggers pick the best plugin for their blogs and to also push them positively in their blogging journey.

10 Essential WordPress Plugins for the Absolute Beginner

So, are you ready to receive the 10 Essential WordPress Plugins you must have as a new/ baby blogger?

Let’s start with the most important ones.

Optimization

After creating our blog, the first thing that comes to mind is optimizing our blog. but what’s the cool way to optimize a blog? Check out this plugins for that answer.

WP-Optimize:

This is one awesome plugin every blogger should have in his/ her arsenal, why? Because it helps stabilize and maintain any wordpress blog database without you maintaining it manually.

What wp-optimze does is, it helps you optimize and fixes your database tables. Aside that, it helps you easily delete your post revision, auto draft posts and more…

Database is one area you don’t want to mess with if you are a non-techie. So make sure you always backup your blog when performing any database config.

Smuch it

One of the main causes of a slow blog is image. It is good to compress heavy images before adding it to your blog. and if you don’t optimize it, your blog will definitely run slow.

Must Read: Best WordPress Image Optimization Method

What smuch it does is, it helps optimize your images by compressing them to its minimal.

Now we have that option to cut the heaviness of our images and put speed back in order.

W3 Total cache

Believe it or not, your plugin works harder when your traffic increases and without a good optimization, I assure you that your host provider will issue you a warning.

W3 Total Cache is one excellent optimization plugin any good and professional will recommend you use. But the truth is – it is not all bloggers that need this plugin, why? Because, it will not work or take any effect if your site traffic is only 200+ visitors per day, but if your site traffic is more than 1k per day, you can use it.

Security

Theme my Login

We all know that millions of blogs get hacked daily especially the WordPress platform. Protecting our blog the best way we can, should come first in our mind. But what can we do to protect our blog?

Okay, the “theme my login” plugin helps to change your wp-login.php to a different link of your choice. So if somebody tries to get access to your admin login area, he will be redirected to a specified link set by you.

Must Read: How to Create a Custom WordPress Login page

You can also change your admin login name from “yourname” or “admin” to something hard without going to your database to change it manually.

Limit login attempt

Okay, the best thing you can do to your blog is protecting it with everything you got. Knowing the IP’s that access your admin panel and how many times they tried to get access to it, is one great way to help secure your blog.

What Limit Login attempt does is, it simply block any ip that tries to access your blog admin panel (depending on the limit login you set it). Now tell me, how awesome can that get?

SEO

All in one SEO

Okay, what if you don’t know much about seo, can you survive the blogging world? Yes, you can. And how can you do it? By using a trusted seo plugin…

All in one seo” is one of the best seo plugin for beginners, why? Simply, because you do not need any “how-to” knowledge to make it work… Just install the plugin and you are good to go.

But if you are that blogger that want more technicalities and some more features, then SEO by Yoast is your other option 🙂

Google xml Sitemap

Without sitemaps, Google or any search engine will get lost trying to index your page accordingly. Believe it or not, you need a site map for your blog so you can get indexed faster and rank well in search engines.

Must Read: Top 20 WordPress Plugin I Just can’t Do without

Google xml Sitemap is by far the best sitemaps there is. With this, and the other seo plugins, I am sure your blog will rank well if you put effort.

Encourage Comment

Commentluv

Sometimes it takes a push and some encouragement to get other bloggers to comment on your blog.

As a new blogger in the blogging world, you need to do three things to get comment on your blog – comment on other bloggers blog, be everywhere and make sure you have something to reward your commentators with when they visit you.

Commentluv is that plugin, meant to reward your commentator by adding their links to your blog. Trust me, this means do encourage blog and website owners to comment on your blog post.

Social Plugin

Sharethis

Many people are willing to help you grow your blog only if you allow them to. So are you ready to push your blogging game to the next level?

People copy content from our blog right, Sharethis plugin help you add link to that copied content and helps you track down the url.

It also helps you analyze your traffic stat, where you get the highest traffic from when a visitor shares your content to their network

Tweet old post

Twitter is one cool social network to get valuable traffic from. And to maximize your traffic flow from that network, you need to post often.

Tweet old post, allows you to automatically tweet your blog post to get more traffic. It sends out post base on how you configure it. And it also automatically add hashtags base on your labels and category.

Concluding part

Remember that to gain maximum success with your blog speed and seo, you need to have minimum amount of plugins. And always try to manually code some things that don’t necessarily need plugin.

Let’s talk

Look like I have said so much about so much on my today’s topic, it time to pass the keyboard to you my friend.

Are these mentioned plugins awesome for the absolute beginners? In your own view, what amount of plugin can one install before calling it maximum? Please do drop your answers using the comment box below.

Must Read: Best ad Networks for Publishers and Their Secrets

Do you have comments, questions and or thoughts you’d love to share with us? Then, please do by using the comment box below. Remember that your comment, question and thoughts are highly welcomed and much appreciated.

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30 Comments

  1. Hi Babanature,

    All the plugins you have mentioned are great. I am using many of them. W3cache, All in one SEO pack and else are important plugins. Though now I have switched to Thesis so I don’t need any plugin for SEO.
    I have used sharethis plugin, it’s free to use and really helpful. We are given special setting to fill the twitter handle and many else in this plugin.

    Thanks for providing us such a great post. 🙂
    Have a great day.

    ~Ravi

    1. Hello Ravi,

      Many themes, especially the Genesis and Thesis theme, do have an inbuilt seo kit. but to me, i prefer a separate plugin for seo, why? because they offer more seo options 🙂

      It is good to know that you’ve also used the sharethis plugin and glad to know that you liked it as well 🙂

      Thanks for stopping by and dropping your wonderful comment. Do have a blessed day ahead…

  2. Well when I first started my new blog I was using ALL IN ONE SEO plugin which is best to handle all seo optimization part in wordpress blog later I moved to seopresser.

    Thanks

    1. Hello Robin,

      All in One SEO plugin is a good choice for bloggers coming up… and from your comment, it looked like you did enjoy the plugin.
      SEOPressor is also a good seo plugin that does its work swiftly 🙂

      Thanks for stopping by and dropping your wonderful comment. Do have a beautiful weekend ahead…

  3. Well I’m not a beginner but I found these plugins very useful. SEO plugins are really essential for every one to get the blog and posts optimized and so other plugins have their own use.

    1. Hello Samir,

      We were once beginners, right? And i believe that at some point in your earlier days, you had some recommended plugins 🙂

      Thanks for the stopping by Samir. And do have a wonderful week ahead…

  4. I definitely agree to all your explanation.Wordpress plug-in just makes blogging to become a piece of cake for newbies like me. Though am still on Blogger platform, hoping to port to wordpress soon :P. Anyways, thanks for sharing.. 😀

    1. Hello Victor,
      i am sure that you’re going to love the WordPress platform when you decide to migrate… and do remember these post so you can come back to it for ref.

      Thanks for stopping by and hope you have a peaceful weekend

  5. Hi Baba,
    what an amazing post you have posted, I’m a newbie in the blogging world and all the plugins that you have mentioned above are simply good and seems very helpful and useful for me not specially me but all the beginner in the blogging field.
    Very informative article indeed!!! 🙂
    Thanks for sharing.
    Keep posting

    1. Thanks for the good words, MikeStephens.
      The plugins mentioned above, are great for any timer and i am sure some of the plugins will help you in your blogging journey.
      Thanks for stopping by Mike and do have a great weekend… 🙂

  6. Hey Babanature,

    I have to admit that I had to do some spring cleaning this past spring. The last thing I did was deactivated and deleted some of the plugins that I had no use for. Why? well I noticed that my blog was getting slower.

    Besides that, these are some great pluggins you mentioned here. I really love commentluv and tweet old post. Getting more engagement and more shares at the same time is like killing two birds with one stone. Just from this, I see more new people commenting on my blog as well as getting more readers!

    Thanks for sharing and I hope you have a great week ahead!

    1. Hello Sherman,

      Doing blog cleanup should always come often in other to keep our running fast and free from clusters and hacks 🙂 .
      Tweet old post and commentluv are indeed great plugin every blogger should have in their plugin arsenal.

      Thanks for stopping by and dropping your valuable comment as always. Do have a peaceful weekend as well.

  7. Hey Babanature,

    Plugin lists are difficult these days because it depends on your level as a blogger because as you said since these are recommended for newbies they probably aren’t up on how to code things quite yet. I think though that plugins need to help your blog function better but at the same time make things easy for you.

    The sitemaps are a given, they should come standard with a blog I think. Hopefully they’ll all purchase a theme that has the SEO functions built in so that won’t be a necessity either.

    I only use four of the ones you’ve mentioned and I too try to code things when possible. I do have about 17 plugins right now and I use one more for checking links on my blog but I don’t keep it activated or on my blog until I need it.

    Great job though and you explained what these are for and why they may need them.

    Hope you’re enjoying your week and another great informative post.

    ~Adrienne

    1. Hello Adrienne,
      Codding is a great way to minimize the use of plugin in our blog and many newbie should know that 🙂

      Ahh… The inbuilt seo function of a blog theme (thesis and Genesis) are great for bloggers who wants the simple and basic seo. But for advance seo users or bloggers who want more, should go for the seo plugin. But as a newbie, the inbuild seo will work fine 🙂

      Thank you for stopping by and dropping your good comments as always dear friend. Do have a wonderful weekend ahead…

  8. It can be really time consuming to decide which plugins to use as beginner blogger. I use less than 15 plugins right now. This is useful post my friend. Thanks for sharing it.

    Hope you will have great weekend

    1. Hello Okto,
      You use less than 15 plugins? That’s awesome dear friend. i am sure your site will be pretty fast 🙂

      Thank you for stopping by and dropping your good comments as always. Do have a faithful weekend ahead…

  9. Hi babanature
    You are absolutely right; installing a lengthy list of different plugins mostly proves counterproductive and instead of increasing the value of your blog it hits its speed and off and on reports various conflicts which may lead to non-display of your blog or poor impression in its appearance. That is why is wise to be selective and just install those plugins which are must and you also know what they are meant for and how to install them without any conflict.
    The list you mentioned here is really the beginner level plugins and work for the most essential requirement of your blog to provide best to readers.
    Thanks a lot for sharing this wonderful list which does have lot of value especially for newbie bloggers.

    1. You’re so right Mi,
      Plugin kills speed and also installing the needed is what we truly need 🙂

      Thanks for stopping by and dropping your comment. Do have a wonderful week ahead

  10. Hi Babanature,

    Thanks for the great advice. I have about 28 active pulgins and I think I need to do some cleanup as you said.

    I am glad I read this post as I need to add “smuch it” to compress my images. I went back to the list of my plugins and I found one that is called SEO friendly Images, do I need that you think or shall I just replace it with “smuch it”? I am using the thesis theme!!

    Thanks Babanature for the heads up. Have yourself a great rest of the week.

    Be Blessed,

    Neamat

    1. Hello Neamat,
      Before doing that cleanup, first, try to know which plugins do similar works before uninstalling. That will definitely help you 🙂

      There is a huge difference between SEO friendly Images and Smush it. Both plugins don’t work the same ways.
      SEO friendly Images, helps to add alt and title attributes to your blog images so you can get more images traffic visibility. While Smush it, only helps in compressing your images so your blog will be faster and get more search favours. Remember that images also slows down our blog, so by using the smush.it, you will see some good optimization improvement 🙂

      Thanks for stopping by, any questions or assistance, don’t hesitate to ask. Have a blessed weekend

  11. Hello Babanature,

    For a beginner, these options you have are great – and okay. My experience is that as a blog matures (and a reader gets more experience), it is easy to decide what should stay or go. Pretty simple and easy if you ask me!

    Best regards,
    Terungwa

    1. You’re right, Akaahan, But before then, they need some direction and this would definitely help 🙂

      Thanks for stopping by. and do have a nice weekend ahead…

  12. Hello babanature,

    i always recommend to use minimum three to five plugin because plugins increase the load on blog that’s we always mind about it and should not use heavy loaded themes and plugins.

    Thanks and best regards
    kapilheera

  13. WordPress is uncompleted without WordPress Plugins ! Plugins always makes WordPress strong & great ! There are many & various kinds of WordPress Plugins ! There is much used of WordPress Plugins, The Plugins which has shared in this post, Are such a userful !

  14. For professionals there’s SEOPressor truly the best wordpress seo plugin in my opinion, I’ve read many reviews about it, so many options, useful ones not just options, you know what I mean. Agree or not Babanature?

  15. Yes you are 100% right,
    Without plugin we can not make SEO friendly website. like SEO plug I mean Yoast SEO plugin. that have lots of feature.
    for example. Sitemap, noindex sub pages, tags, categories etc.
    with out this plugin we can noindex tags or subpages etc.
    WordPress SEO by YOast is my favorite plugin and I am using this plugin for my 3 sites.

    Any way these plugins are very helpful for us.
    Thanks for sharing these essential plugin to us.

    Areesha Noor

  16. Hi Babanature,
    Thanks for your awesome information. I appreciate it. I don’t have much idea about this but after reading your article it will help me much.

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