20 WordPress Plugins to Manage a Blog

A blog can promote your brand and provide valuable content. WordPress is arguably the best platform to host a blog, mainly due to roughly 50,000 free or inexpensive plugins to add useful features and functionality.

Here is a list of plugins to manage a blog on WordPress. There are tools to create and edit content, improve your organic search rankings and site performance, generate leads, and promote and secure your site. Most of these plugins are free, though some have premium versions with added features.

Plugins to Manage a Blog

MonsterInsights provides advanced tracking features for Google Analytics. See useful information about visitors right inside your WordPress dashboard. Get reports on audience demographics, behavior, traffic, conversion, ecommerce activity, contact forms, search engine optimization, and custom topics. Price: Basic is free. Premium plans start at $99.50 per year.

Editorial Calendar provides an overview of your blog and its publishing schedule. Drag-and-drop to move posts, and edit posts within the calendar. Price: Free.

Edit Flow helps you to collaborate with your editorial team inside WordPress. Use the calendar to review content, define the stages of your workflow, have private discussions with your team, and get updates. Price: Free.

Yoast SEO is a leading tool for WordPress SEO. Improve your rankings with title and meta description templating, advanced XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, and more. Use Schema.org markup to ensure Google, Pinterest, and others know about your page. Analyze readability, avoid duplicate content, and optimize for keywords. Price: Basic is free. Premium is $89 for one site with one year of updates and support.

bbPress is forum software from the creators of WordPress. Quickly set up a place for discussions, subscriptions, and more. Price: Free.

Jetpack is a plugin for security, performance, and site management. Guard against brute-force attacks and unauthorized logins. Activate site accelerator tools to decrease page load times. Customize your site with widgets, image galleries, and embedded media. Get updates on site traffic, successful posts, site searches, and comments — all in real-time. Price: Basic is free. Premium plans at $39 per year.

InfiniteWP is a plugin to manage and secure your site. It features one-click admin access and updates, one-click backup and restore, bulk-scanning, monitoring through advanced parameters, client reporting, and more. Price: Basic panel is free. All add-ons are $147 per year for 10 sites.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) displays posts and pages related to the current entry. Using a customizable algorithm, YARPP finds related content from across your site. Price: Free.

OptinMonster is a lead-generation pop-up tool. Use the drag-and-drop builder to create different types of pop-up campaigns, such as WordPress forms, exit campaigns, sidebar forms, scroll-triggered boxes, and more. Use A/B split testing to make data-driven decisions on what works best for your pop-up and opt-in email forms. Price: Plans start at $14 per month.

Shared Counts lets you add social sharing links to your WordPress website. Add buttons for Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yummly, and more. Increase your audience by helping your readers share your posts and pages. Price: Free.

WPForms is a drag-and-drop form builder to quickly create custom contact forms, feedback forms, surveys and polls, and more. Price: Basic is free. Premium plans start at $39.50 per year.

Members is a membership plugin to edit, create, and delete roles, as well as capabilities for these roles. Determine which users have access to post content. Price: Free.

Pretty Links is a plugin to help you shrink, track, and manage your web links. Shorten links using your domain name, and get reports on the hits. Clean up affiliate links, and generally increase your reach by sharing clean links. Price: Free. Pro version starts at $99 for one site and one year of support and updates.

Smash Balloon Social Post Feeds lets you display Facebook posts on your website. Display feeds from multiple Facebook pages, and use the shortcode to embed them into a page, post, or widget anywhere on your site. Customize to match the look of your site. Price: Basic is free. Paid plans start at $49 per year.

WP Rocket is a caching and performance optimization plugin to improve the page speed of WordPress sites. Price: Plans start at $49 for one website and one year of support and updates.

Crowdsignal Polls & Ratings lets you create and manage engaging polls and ratings within your WordPress dashboard. Choose from 20 styles to customize. View all results as they come in. Price: Basic is free. Premium plans start at $15 per month.

Beaver Builder is a drag-and-drop page builder for WordPress. Use templates for contact pages, newsletter sign-ups, about pages, pricing tables, and more. Choose a template, replace the images and text, then hit publish. Use with any theme, and switch themes without losing content. Price: Free. Premium plans start at $99.

wpDiscuz is a self-hosted commenting plugin for WordPress. Designed for active websites, it comes with commenting functions and features, including live updates of new comments, social network login and sharing, multi-level comment threads, comment voting, and security and anti-spam features. Price: Free. Add-on bundle is $99.

VaultPress is a plugin for real-time backup and security-scanning. Back up your entire site, including comments and dashboard settings, to the VaultPress servers. Price: Plans start at $3 per month.

Sucuri Security is a security suite plugin that complements your existing security setup. It features security activity auditing, file integrity monitoring, remote blacklist monitoring, effective security hardening, post-hack security actions, and security notifications. Price: Free.