Here is our list of what we consider to be the best WordPress plugins for business blogs. You can greatly improve the functionality of your blog by installing plugins.
However, there are some risks involved as plugins can slow down your site, or can have bugs which cause conflicts within the programming. Even worse, they can be used as trojan horses for viruses or hackers to get into your site.
So it’s important to know which plugins have the green light. Also, please be aware that plugins can become outdated with each new WordPress update and with changes in Google’s algorithms and various other changes in the technology and methodology of doing business online.
So here are our considered choices as of 20th March 2020. There are of course many many more plugins out there, but these are the ones that we use on our WordPress blogs.
Most plugins are free and can be installed with a few mouse-clicks after you log in to your WordPress dashboard. Simply click “Plugins” link in the menu, search for the plugin…
Note: Some of these plugins were “untested with the latest version of WordPress” when I checked their status on 20th March 2020. They are marked in red, “No Longer Up To Date“. Perhaps they will be updated by the programmer later on, so I have not removed them from the list for now.
#1 Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO optimizes your WordPress blog for the search engines. When you create a new blog post you will be able to fill in a few fields below your blog post field to help search engines find your post.
What I really like about Yoast SEO is the on-page content analysis; when you write a new blog post it monitors the Keyword SEO and Readability of the post and advises you how to improve your score on both metrics.
Yoast SEO comes with XML sitemaps so you don’t need a separate sitemaps plugin.
You don’t need to look at the options or set it up after installation, although you can easily modify the option if you want to via the options configuration panel.
#2 Share Buttons by AddToAny
This plugin makes it easy for people to share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages via their favorite social site, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, LinkedIn plus more than 100 other popular sites.
The settings are easy to use and you can choose which icons to show alongside of the standard share button. You can also choose where to place the share buttons, including a cool floating option.
#3 Related Posts for WordPress
Related Posts for WordPress is the best way to display related posts at the foot of your blog posts. It will check your blog post and add a list of “related posts” at the bottom of the post, which has several benefits.
First, it will help to keep visitors on your site longer by making it easy for them to find and click through to related content.
Second, that will increase the page-view count, which is a more important indicator of the quality of your website than the number of visitors you receive, so it is good for SEO; a high page-view count suggests to the search engines that people are engaging with your site.
Third, it will improve your blog’s internal backlink structure, which is also helpful for SEO purposes.
#4 Cookie Notice
This plugin allows you to inform users that your site uses cookies. This is now a legal requirement for websites that will be viewed in the EU. Cookie Notice helps you comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) cookie law and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) regulations.
#5 WP GDPR Compliance
No Longer Up To Date
This plugin helps you to bring your blog into compliance with European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations. It enables you to create a Privacy Policy page quickly and easily. It adds Consent checkboxes to give your visitors full control over what data they share. It also gives them their legally binding ‘Right to access’ through encrypted audit logs and double opt-in mail.
We recommend that you install both the Cookie Notice and WP GDPR Compliance plugins.
#6 Content Aware Sidebars
WordPress uses widgets to manage content in the side columns, header and footer area of your blog. However, you may not want the same configuration of widgets to appear across all your blog posts and pages. This neat plugin allows you to choose where to display, or where to suppress each widget, adding a great deal of flexibility and control.
#7 Copy or Move Comments
If you receive a lot of comments you will notice that some people post their comments in the wrong place. This plugin by biztechc allows you to relocate comments. I suggest that you install it whenever you need to use it, and then uninstall it when you have finished.
#8 Link Checker
This plugin By Marco Beierer will crawl all your links and let you know if any of them are broken so you can go and fix or remove them. Broken links are not just annoying for visitors who click through, they are also bad for SEO, so this tool will help you keep your blog links in good order.
#9 Statcounter
Adds the StatCounter.com tracking code to your blog. We recommend the free version as being adequate to our needs and easier to work with than Google analytics.
#10 Feed Them Social
With this plugin by SlickRemix you can create and display amazing looking social feeds for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest on your wordpress website. Simple shortcode generator will get you setup in minutes. Create Social Feeds of any or all your celebrities, family, friends, yourself, or businesses. Looks great on Desktops, Tablets, and Mobile Devices.
#11 Contact Form 7
An easy and powerful form builder by Takayuki Miyoshi that lets your visitors send you email. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize each form.
We recommend that you also install the Honeypot for Contact Form 7 plugin to protect the form from spam bots.
#12 Scheduled Post Trigger
A few WordPress upgrades ago, people suddenly noticed that their scheduled posts were no longer being published. So this plugin was created to trigger scheduled posts that were missed by the server’s cron.
#13 WP Limit Login Attempts
Limit the number of login attempts and temporarily block an ip. It protects your site from brute force attacks.
#14 WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is WordPress’s #1 most installed optimization plugin. With it, you can clean up your database easily and safely, without manual queries.
No Longer Recommended
#1 WP Wizard Cloak
WP Wizard Cloak Lite WAS the best link management and cloaking plugin for WordPress. WP Wizard Cloak makes it easy to cloak and track your links, split test offers, and with the pro version you… HOWEVER, it has not been updated for a while and is untested with the latest versions of WordPress.
Possible alternative: ThirstyAffiliates Affiliate Link Manager.
Personally, if I want to cloak a link I create a LeadsLeap tracking link to do the job for me.
#2 Ad Rotate
I used to post a lot of banner ads in the side columns of my site, but the result was slower loading speeds and also the site looked ugly and untidy. This plugin solved both problems by displaying one ad at a time in the side bar and randomly rotating them. HOWEVER, it has not been updated for a while and is untested with the latest versions of WordPress.
Plugins You Don’t Need To Use On WordPress Sites Hosted By SiteRubix
One of the benefits of a quality WordPress hosting service is that they cut out the need for a ton of plugins that slow down your website speed.
You do not need to install these two popular plugins if you use SiteRubix hosting, as we recommend.
#1 Akismet
Keeps spam from accumulating in your comments section.
#2 W3 Total Cache Plugin
A good cache plugin will speed up the download time of your blog. HOWEVER, if you host your WordPress sites with SiteRubix, their Proprietary WA Technology will speed up your WordPress Website without plugins or clunky software.
David Hurley
ThousandAMonth.com
#InspiredFocus