The Best WordPress Plugins for Publishers in 2023
Are you ready to take your website to new heights? Then you’re in luck. We scoured the WordPress blogosphere and handpicked the most effective plugins that help grab your users’ attention.
From enhancing your site’s SEO and loading speeds to improving user engagement and monetization, we cover it all in this handy guide.
But first, let’s go over some best practices for choosing and installing plugins.
Contents
WordPress Plugins Best Practices
- Use keywords related to your needs in the search bar to find the most relevant plugin options
- Check the plugin description and rating to understand its effectiveness before you install it
- Follow the installation instructions carefully to complete the installation without problems
- Don’t use too many plugins because they will slow your website down. Limit yourself to the 30 most useful plugins for your site
Learn about choosing the best CMS for news website in 2023
Now that best practices are covered, let’s dive right into our top WordPress plugin recommendations!
Yoast SEO
If you’re familiar with WordPress, then you’ve probably heard of Yoast before. This plugin is popular for a reason – it’s extremely powerful. It optimizes your site content and improves your search engine rankings.
Features:
- Improves search engine rankings and optimizes website content
- Sets post keywords, meta descriptions, URL slugs, and related key phrases
- Analyzes content readability, keyword density, and overall structure for improvements
- Enhances website loading time
MonsterInsights Lite
Strong analytics are at the heart of every successful website. MonsterInsights Lite connects your WordPress website to your Google Analytics account in a few clicks. Use it to see how your audience discovers and behaves on your site.
Features:
- A simple way to connect your WordPress site to your Google Analytics
- See real-time user discovery and behavior stats from an easy-to-read dashboard report
- Uses universal tracking to provide accurate stats, even when visitors switch from mobile to desktop
OptinMonster
If lead generation is your no.1 focus, then this is the plugin for you. This plugin comes with a huge variety of features to grow your business and email list – perfect for small business owners, bloggers, and any website that needs to get leads.
Features:
- Converts abandoning website visitors into email subscribers with an Exit-Intent feature
- Converts any link or image into an opt-in form to boost conversions by 785%
- Provides geo-location targeting to help you get more leads by personalizing campaigns based on visitor location
- User-friendly interface – OptinMonster uses a drag-and-drop builder to create visually stunning forms in minutes
Uncanny Automator
There’s nothing better than automating your website and letting it do the work for you. Uncanny Automator gives you the tools to do just that.
Features:
- Customizes automation flows with course signup, autocompletion, and more
- Integrates with countless programs, and offers a wide range of actions and triggers
- Easy for all languages – this plugin works with a range of translation plugins
- No code required
HubSpot
If you’ve done a little bit of marketing for your site before, you’ve probably discovered HubSpot somewhere along the way. Widely known as the best free WordPress CRM on the market, it’s a great solution for contact management, list segmentation, and analytics.
Features:
- Live chat, forms, analytics, and email marketing
- Automatic syncing – forms and live chat submissions automatically sync with the CRM so you can see a contact’s page views, live chat conversations, and form submissions from one place
- Integrates with 850+ other tools, including many of the most popular WordPress plugins
Visualizer
This is a WordPress plugin that’s made for powerful data visualization. It uses your data to make beautiful, responsive, and customizable charts and tables that you can edit on your posts.
Features:
- Multiple chart types, including pie charts, line charts, bar charts, and more
- Charts are both beautiful and interactive
- Easy to customize, you can edit design, colors, and behavior to match your website’s branding
- Ability to edit live charts so you can see changes in real-time
- Responsive design so your charts will look good on all devices
- Import data from CSVs or Google Sheets
W3 Total Cache
Site speed is one of the most important factors for positive user experience and search engine ranking. W3 Total Cache is a free plugin that works to help you improve your site speed.
Features:
- Speeds up your site by serving visitors compressed and cached files to reduce load times on your server
- Saves bandwidth and minifies HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and feeds
Smush
Smush is the best WordPress image optimization plugin on the market. It automatically optimizes your site’s images every time you upload a new image to your Media Library.
Features:
- Automatically resizes, optimizes, and compresses all of your images
- Does not sacrifice image quality, so your website performs at top speed without sacrificing quality
- Smush servers do the heavy work
Optimole
Like Smush, Optimole automatically compresses images when you first upload them.
Features:
- Easy to use with a simple user interface and design
- Fast image processing time
- Does not put a strain on your server, stores data in the cloud
- Uses lazy loading to display images when the user scrolls to them
- Offers the ability to add custom watermarks to your images
WP RSS Aggregator
Interested in Autoblogging? WP RSS Aggregator can help. An Autoblog, also known as an automated blog, is a site that automatically pulls content from other websites using RSS feeds.
Features:
- Automatically pulls fresh content from blog posts, job listings, podcasts, and YouTube videos from across the web to display on your site.
- User-friendly and easy to get started with
Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO
As your site grows, small bugs like broken links grow too. AIOSEO’s free Broken Link Checker plugin actively monitors your website for broken links and notifies you when it finds them.
Features:
- Automatically scans for broken links on your posts, pages, comments, and blog posts
- Controls search engine behavior by preventing them from following broken links
- Allows inline URL editing for quickly fixing broken links from your dashboard
- Offers link scanning controls so you can choose which post types and statuses it should check for broken links
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin designed to accelerate your site’s page download speed and improve conversion rates.
Features:
- Achieve better GTMetrix and PageSpeed scores
- Improve SEO ranking
- Suitable for developers of all experience levels
Jetpack
This universal plugin for almost everything comes highly recommended by some of our very trusted Publisher Partnership Managers. It enhances your WordPress site security, speed, and growth potential.
Features:
- Real-time backups, malware scans, spam protection, and brute force protection
- Improved website speed on mobile devices
- Easy integrations with statistics and design tools included
Contact Form 7
Create customizable and flexible contact forms with Contact Form 7, a simple yet powerful plugin.
Features:
- Easily customizable forms with simple markups
- Translation support through translate.wordpress.org
- Integration with CAPTCHA, Ajax-powered submitting, Akismet spam filtering, and other add-ons
Akismet Spam Protection
This handy plugin makes sure that your comments and contact forms aren’t flooded by spam.
Features:
- Automatically check and discard repeat spammers
- View caught or cleared status history for each comment checked
- Secure comments and contact form
Disable comments
Efficiently disable comments on your website with the Disable Comments plugin.
Features:
- Disable comments on all posts, pages, or attachments
- Remove related features and options
- No special coding skills are required
Note: Not recommended for websites that plan to keep comments enabled in certain sections.
MemberPress
Establish a successful membership program with MemberPress, offering various paid plans and access rules.
Features:
- Easy setup and management of membership programs
- Define access rules for the website, posts, post types, categories, and tags
- Include content dripping and relevant reporting features
Image via Wpkube
Monetag
With our plugin, you can increase your revenue, by monetizing your traffic. Plus, we’re also giving you an effective AdBlock bypass solution that helps you monetize AdBlock traffic as well.
Features:
- Monetize your website without advanced code editing skills
- Access worldwide coverage, 24/7 ad moderation, and easy payouts
- Effective AdBlock bypass solution to monetize AdBlock traffic
Kickstarting Your WordPress Site Starts Now!
With these top plugins in your arsenal, your website will run at lightning speed, your content will be sharp and targeted, your SEO will be optimized for high traffic volumes, and your monetization strategies will be streamlined. You’ll be ready to kickstart 2022 like a pro!
