10 Must Have WordPress Plugins I Considered in 2014

WordPress is one of the most popular and golden content management systems used by a wide variety of bloggers and entrepreneurs and the availability of awesome plugins is like icing on the cake.

There are thousands of plugins present in the WordPress plugin directory that help developing a successful website without needing to know any programming or even markup language.

So, here’s the list of 10 must-have WordPress plugins for every beginner or professional blogger. I considered and tested these WordPress plugins in the year 2014.

1. All in one SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is my favorite SEO plugin I use on this blog. It has become my favorite SEO plugin just because it has very simple to use and doesn’t have extra formalities to be done.

However, Google hates the site or blogs that use any trick or strategy for beating the search results so I just use this plugin to set up the site title, description, and sometimes post titles and descriptions. There are lots of features in the plugin but I never touched them because I never needed it.

2. BWP Sitemaps

A sitemap plugin is very essential for all those blogs that wanna search engines to index their latest posts more frequently. However, a few months ago, I was using Google XML Sitemaps plugin for my WordPress blog but on having some trouble with the plugin I uninstalled that and start using BWP Sitemaps (Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps).

RECOMMENDED: The Best XML Sitemaps Plugin I Use for This Blog

3. Disqus Comment System

If you’re thinking that I will recommend you the Akismet WordPress plugin for spam protection, I won’t this time because I didn’t use this plugin for spam protection on my site the whole year (2014). So, how did I protect my site from comment spams? It’s Disqus comment system that is also free of cost and will make your site look professional without any fear of spam comments. This is because only registered users can comment with Disqus and depending on you to whom you allow.

MUST READ: How to Stop Trackback Spam on WordPress

4. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a very fast caching engine that generates the static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. I use this WordPress plugin to speed up my WordPress blog by serving static files to 99% of my visitors.

Another important thing is that it es very simple to configure as compared to other plugins like W3 Total Cache etc. So, if you’re a beginner to WordPress, this plugin will be a perfect choice for you.

5. Shareaholic

It always remained a confusing matter for me to select the best social sharing plugin but after testing many plugins finally I got the Shareaholic and loved it a lot.

Shareaholic is not only a social sharing plugin, it also provides many facilities like related posts for your site, social analytics, promoted content to monetize your blog, and more.

MUST READ: Here’s Why I Uninstalled Shareaholic Plugin

6. WordPress Popular Posts

What do you do to display the most viewed or popular articles on your blog? I use this WordPress Popular Posts plugin to display the trending stuff on All Useful Info.

This plugin can be customized in different means of ways such as multi-widget, time range, and layout set up according to your theme.

7. Login Lockdown

For your info, let me tell you that for a long period of time I was continuously using Limit Login Attempts WordPress plugin which is a quite popular WordPress security plugin but on having some troubles with the latest WordPress version I uninstalled it and installed the new one i.e, Login Lockdown plugin limits the number of login attempts from a given IP range within a certain time period.

Additionally, I wouldn’t recommend the Limit Login Attempt also because it hasn’t been in over 2 years and may no longer be maintained and supported.

8. Better Delete Revision

Have you’ve noticed in your WordPress database that revisions are unnecessarily taking up your useful space? Why should you not delete them? I use the Better Delete Revision plugin to delete old post revisions and optimize the database.

With the help of this plugin, you can first check for revisions (if available) and then easily delete them completely from your database. The plugin also gives you the facility to optimize your database in just a click without going to the database admin manager.

MUST SEE: How to Delete Old Post Revisions in WordPress

9. Contact Form 7

Have you ever needed to create a contact form on your website or blog for improving the user experience? Here’s my favorite plugin to create the most flexible contact forms very simply to be displayed on your site.

With this plugin, you can customize the form and mail contents very flexibly and it also becomes very handy to manage multiple contact forms.

10. WP Smush.it

This is yet another must-have WordPress plugin for every blogger who always worried about the large size of images due to decreasing the page loading speed.

So, using the Smush.it API within WordPress you can reduce the image sizes and improve your site performance really unbelievably.

Final Words

As I already mentioned in the title that all these WordPress plugins are must-have for every WordPress powered website. These all the plugins are for different tasks and if you’re running a WordPress site, you will have to go through all these tasks. However, there may be several alternatives of these plugins in the WordPress directory but the above-listed plugins are my favorite ones and as I told already that in this post I’ve listed all those plugins that I considered and installed on my blog in 2014 (so please don’t mind if your plugin is not listed).

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in December 2014 and has been recently updated in June 2020 to refresh, rectify, and elaborate with more useful information.