The Best WordPress Plugins That You Dont Want To Miss Out In 2022

As a WordPress user, you probably know that there are plugins for just about everything. And while some plugins are better than others, it can be tough to keep track of which ones are the best.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best WordPress plugins for 2022. These plugins are all top-rated and come highly recommended by WordPress users. And guess what? These are absolutely free to use and customize. Though you can always purchase the premium version of the same for additional features. So whether you’re looking for a plugin to help with SEO, security, or just general site maintenance like image optimization, you’re sure to find something on this list that will help you out.

Dont worry we will not choice paralyse you like the rest by listing down hundreds of WordPress-free plugins that make no sense. Cause there are more than 50,000 plugins available in the WordPress plugin directory. We will just list down the 10 best WordPress plugins from every area your site needs.

We will discuss 10 must-have plugins for WordPress if you are starting out with a new niche blog and explain everything that each WordPress plugin can do for you. Being in the blogging industry for more than 7 years we assure you the following list of the 10 best WordPress plugins is more than enough for anyone running their site on WordPress.

Let’s quickly see what we have in store for you.

What Are The Best WordPress Plugins For Blogs?

1. Rank Math SEO – WordPress SEO Made Easy.
2. Site Kit – Googles official WordPress plugin.
3. Updraft – WordPress Backup Plugin.
4. WP Forms – Drag & Drop WordPress Form.
5. Akismet – Spam Protection.
6. Smush – Image Optimization.
7. Ad Inserter – For any Ad Network
8. Lite Speed Cache – Cache plugin

The Best WordPress Plugins Detailed List | Top 8 WordPress Plugins

#1. Best Plugin WordPress: Rank Math SEO

RankMath is by far the best plugin I have used throughout my blogging journey for SEO-related tasks. It is the best WordPress plugin for SEO however some of you may argue about the YoastSEO plugin but I will convince you why RankMath is the best WordPress plugin for SEO just hold on. Rankmath is the most mind-blowing and FREE SEO WordPress plugin to offer a lot of features which is available in the premium version of other plugins. With just RankMath you can handle your site SEO, redirects, Analytics, Indexing status, Readability score of posts and their search appearance in SERPs and a lot more feature. So it ranks #1 in our list of the best WordPress plugins.

Key Features:

• It offers an instant indexing API to get your posts indexed in no time thus saving from installing another plugin for instant indexing
• Provides Schema type feature for free thus helping you in ranking for featured snippets while Yoast Premium has the schema type feature.
• On a single screen, you can see index status, sitemap index, and Keywords for which your blog is ranking.
• As of now comes with Google Analytics 4 integration.

Price

For individual use, the premium version costs $59 per year.

Please note that only Rankmath alone cant boost your site’s SEO performance. You need to follow some on-page and off-page SEO strategies to rank on google.

#2. Best Plugin WordPress: Sitekit By Google

Alright, so Sitekit By Google is another awesome plugin which you shouldn’t miss out on at any cost. Why? yes because google created it and for just anybody in the blogging world it’s always a tiring job to check the status of the blog, it’s ranking, revenue generated each day or the locations from which you are getting the most traffic.

At least for me, it’s always been a big pain to open 4 tabs in the browser containing Search Console, Analytics, Adsense and Pagespeed. Now here google site kit comes to the rescue and offers all of the above on a single screen what a great freaking relief isn’t it? And considering the huge WordPress users google made these free plugins for WordPress.

In the dashboard of the site kit WordPress plugin, you can see all your analytics, AdSense revenue and current traffic regions and a lot more. So this is #2 in our list of the best WordPress plugins.

Key Features:

• Single Dashboard for Search Console, Analytics, Adsense and Pagespeed insights.
• Easy setup with just 3 steps.
• Get the status for the entire website and page speed for each of the pages.

Price:

The site kit by google is free and has no premium version.

#3. Best Plugin WordPress: Updraft Backup

If you are the kind of person that experiments a lot with your blog this plugin is built just for you. It is the best free WordPress backup plugin so far in the WordPress plugin directory. Regardless of the issue like your theme file got corrupted or suddenly all of your posts & files got corrupted in the hosting server, server crashes, hack, security flaws updraft can recover your site from all of the issues.

With more than 3 million-plus users worldwide updraft is also a database backup plugin for WordPress. It can back up all your site content including the database and restore them in a single click. So it is the best free plugin for WordPress for backup and restoring your data. So we have ranked it #3 in our bucket of the best WordPress plugins.

Key Features:

• It is the best free WordPress backup plugin which restores the database also.
• Uses local or cloud storage like google drive, Dropbox, and Amazon S3 to store a backup of the site.
• Automatic backup at scheduled dates without user intervention.

Price:

Updraft premium version costs around $70 per year.

#4. Best Plugin WordPress: WP Form

Amongst the hundreds of plugins to build forms in WordPress WP Form is the best WordPress plugin. Let me tell you why? It features a simple drag and drops feature to add fields or buttons in the forms which any beginner can do without any coding knowledge. Not only this if you want to apply a condition to a particular field which is also possible. If you want the people to enter their Gmail id only for subscribing to your newsletters it is very much doable with WP forms.

WP Form is the only WordPress form plugin for free which sends you notifications directly to your inbox when a new user fills up the form and it is also mobile-friendly to support all screen sizes.

Key Feature:

• Only WordPress form plugin for free which provides spam protection.
• It delivers you a monthly report of how your form is doing online.
• Lets you collect payments, donations, and orders easily without hiring a developer.

Price:

WP Form premium version costs around $31.60 per year.

#5. Best Plugin WordPress: Akismet Spam Protection

Akismet is a free anti-spam plugin for WordPress though it also has a premium version for large businesses. But for bloggers like us, the free version of Akismet is more than enough for protecting our site from spam. Thank me later for suggesting you this anti-spam plugin for WordPress because you just can’t imagine how many spammers visit your site daily to do nasty stuff.

And not only spammers many advanced bots these days automatically come to your site when you post new content and puts in spam comments and some of them even contain phishing links which are very harmful to your blog and also to the readers. It also contains comments sometimes in Chinese, Russian or other languages. Installing this anti-spam plugin for WordPress that is Akismet lets you sleep peacefully while it automatically blocks the spam out of your blog. And Akismet ranks the #5 plugin on our list of the best WordPress plugins for 2022.

Key Features:

• This free anti-spam plugin for WordPress is in service since 2005 so it has a huge database of spam.
• On average Akismet blocks out 75,00,000 spam per hour.
• Automatic spam blocking and storing the spam elsewhere.

Price:

Akismet premium version costs around just $8.33 per year.

#6. Best Plugin WordPress: Smush Image Optimization

If you have already been using WordPress, switch to Smush if you are already using any of the image optimizer WordPress plugins for free. smush will provide you with a better experience to increase the amount of online traffic to your site while improving the quality of the images. We all here understand the need for fast-loading sites and the impact it can make while ranking in the SERPs. Large Images often interfere with the site loading speed and make the main thread of the browser wait for the images to load completely.

So, image optimisation is necessary for all web ventures as it helps to improve the overall loading speed of your site and helps to increase the likelihood of keeping your users on your website for longer periods. Smush does all of it seamlessly and additionally it lazy loads images by itself while your browser loads the other resources of your site. So your site gets functional much faster which improves the CLS time of page speed. This is the must-have WordPress plugin that should be on your list. So, It ranks #6 on our list of the best WordPress plugins of 2022.

Key Features:

• Image compression & optimisation is automatically performed by this best image optimizer WordPress plugin Smush.
• Lazyloads images automatically thus saving you from installing a separate plugin for lazyloading images.
• Unlimited image compression and optimization even in the free version of smush.
• Automatically convert images to the Next Gen format which is WebP.

Price:

The Smush pro plan costs around $19 per month.

#7. Best Plugin WordPress: Ad Inserter

Alright, let’s get into some serious business now which nobody talks about in any blogs I really don’t know why. The most important thing if any is there in the blogging then one of them must be the earning part. At the end of the day all the grind you are putting in to earn some quick money through your blog right? And the most common way to monetize your blog is through ads.

Now how do you insert an ad if you are not a developer? Well, it’s easy through this plugin called ad inserter. I dont think anybody has covered this plugin while listing the best WordPress plugins. Anyways, this is a WordPress advertising plugin for free to insert ad code into your blog. You just copy your ad code (Google Adsense mostly) for different ads and insert it in any of the regions of your post like before content or after, before a paragraph or after, or after the comments.

It is the best WordPress advertising plugin if you are not confident enough to update your theme file manually by inserting the Ad code. This is a must-have WordPress plugin in everyone’s bucket. It is must-have WordPress plugin in our bucket of the best WordPress plugins for anybody who is planning to earn from their blog.

Key Features:

• This free WordPress advertising plugin supports Google Adsense, Ad manager, media.net, Infolinks etc.
• You can also add ads before or after any particular HTML element on your page.
• It works best if you are using it along with auto ads.

Price:

Ad inserter pro plan comes at a cost of €20.

#8. Best Plugin WordPress: Litespeed Cache

We all know here that speed is one of the ranking factors Google uses to rank pages in the SERPs. Now I hope you know how caches work in computers in general. In the same way, this free cache plugin for WordPress works by caching your pages and posts into the server and also locally in the user’s browsers.

Now when a request for a page comes the browser directly serves the user the cached page instead of making a new HTTP request which consumes a lot of time thus improving the user experience on your site. Litespeed cache is the best cache plugin for WordPress for free. Now some of you might argue that WP Rocket is the best cache plugin for WordPress which is true to some extent.

But I already told you at first here we will cover only the best free WordPress plugins in 2022. And WP Rocket has no free version.

Coming back to the LiteSpeed cache, it only works if you are using a LiteSpeed, Nginx or Apache web server. For example, Hostinger uses a LiteSpeed web server with which Litespeed cache works excellently and additionally the plugin provides a FREE Quic Cloud CDN with it if you are using a LiteSpeed server. Nevertheless, you can use this plugin with Bluehost also to get all its benefits.

I cant list down all the features here it provides because the list is huge. Some of them are this cache plugin for WordPress provides all the control in your hands like you can minify the CSS, defer Javascript loading or can purge all caches if things are cached incorrectly. So it is the last plugin on our list of the best WordPress plugins.

Key Features:

• Free Quic.Cloud CDN with LiteSpeed cache plugin.
• Great improvements in page speed score and it also supports browser caches.
• Minify CSS, HTML, and JS with this free WordPress caching plugin to improve the loading speed.
• Delay loading the javascript to release the main thread to improve your CLS time in page speed.

Price:

Litespeed cache is free for LiteSpeed servers along with the FREE Quic.cloud CDN.

The other thing which affects the page speed is the type of hosting you are using. So you need to have a clear idea of how web hosting works and how a server serves a user the pages requested.

Note:- I could have included more plugins here like elementor, Woo-commerce, Adobe fonts, Search WP, WP Legal pages etc. But as I have already told you I’m not gonna choice paralyse you with a bunch of plugins that are non-essential. This list contains only those free WordPress plugins which are mandatory to setup a successful blog in WordPress. I will be adding more in this list of the best WordPress plugins for 2022 so, keep following. And for plugins that I missed out, you can always comment down below to suggest any plugins that is essential for any successful wordpress blog.

Points to Consider Before you Install the Best WordPress Plugins.

Now, we have listed down all the best WordPress plugins that you need to get started with a blog/site. But there are certain points you need to keep in mind when you install a free wordpress plugin into your blog site. Lets see what are those:

1. Always make the free wordpress plugins that you are installing is compatible with your current version of wordpress.
2. Never install a free wordpress plugin from third-party website instead of the wordpress Dashboard.
3. Try not to burden your site with tons of plugins which will make your site slow.
4. The max limit for plugins can be 8 or 9 else your site will load slow in spite of all the optimisation.

The Best WordPress Plugins FAQs

If you liked our post “The Best WordPress Plugins That You Dont Want To Miss Out In 2022” let us know in the comments section. And don’t forget to let us know your experience with these plugins.