Today, we bring you a collection of the best must have WordPress plugins for beginners, new bloggers, and even experienced bloggers.

Now that you have created a blog and picked a top Wordpress host, you will need some awesome plugins to take your site to the next level. These plugins will help optimize your blog for search engines, while also making it more user friendly. The best part you ask? These plugins are all free to use.

Below are a variety of plugins to help you speed up your blog, add an online store to your website, making your site more social media friendly, and more.

1) WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is arguably the most vital plugin to have from this list of the best Wordpress Plugins. WordPress SEO by Yoast is a must have if you want your blog or website to rank well in search engines, thus leading to more visitors and a wider audience for your site. This AMAZING plugin will hep you optimize your posts, pages, images titles, and meta descriptions. It can also help you clean up your permalinks and write better content. Plus it now includes XML Sitemaps.

2) WordFence

Wordfence is arguably one of the most important plugins on this list. This is an incredible free WordPress security plugin that protects your website from hacks and malware. It does everything you can possibly imagine from alerting you when a plugin needs to be updated, to blocking the IP of anyone who has multiple failed login attempts into your admin area.  Did I mention it also increases the speed of your site? Yes it does on top of offering blocking features, login security, WordPress firewall, security scanning, and monitoring features.

3) Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a very simple WordPress plugin that gives you the ability to create your own Contact page with just a single line. This excellent plugin allows your blog visitors to send you a message that automatically gets forwarded to your email address. Did I mention it also comes with options for a CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering? Because it does! On top of that, it also gives you the flexibility to customize and create multiple contact forms.

4) WooCommerce

WooCommerce is rapidly becoming one of the most popular WordPress plugins as it allows you to sell anything on your website. Yes, this awesome eCommerce plugin enables you to easily create an online store of any kind. WooCommerce is powerful, free, and offers great options for shipping, payments, reports, and marketing.

5) Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps is the ying to the SEO optimization yang. This superb plugin automatically builds you a XML sitemap for your site that you can then submit to search engines. What is the benefit of having a Sitemap? Well for starters, the sitemaps include all the pages and posts from your blog and helps search engines to index your website in a better and faster fashion. This plugin also gives you the option to exclude any pages or posts you don’t want to get indexed.

6) WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a completely free WordPress plugin that creates static html files to help speed up your blog or website. And you definitely want a fast website as search engines take speed into consideration when it comes to rankings.  This super fast caching tool offers CDN support, cache rebuild, and the ability to not cache pages for certain users such as the site admin. The best part about Super Cache is that it’s easy to use and set up in comparison to its counterparts.

7) Transposh

Do you have a blog that appeals to foreign users? Or do you simply want your website to be multi-lingual? If so, this is where Transposh comes in. This terrific plugin gives you the ability to combine automatic translation and human translation for any of your website pages and posts.  It also supports 92 different languages.

8) AddToAny

Another way to increase your website traffic and popularity is through social media. And if you’re hoping to make that cool post of yours viral, you will definitely need to have AddToAny. This social plugin comes with multiple share buttons that you can add to your pages and posts. These buttons include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and many more.

9) bbPress

bbPress is a forum software that allows you to easily implement a forum or message board on your WordPress site. This wonderful plugin offers great speed and simple integration for your blog or website.

10) EWWW Image Optimizer

The EWWW Image Optimizer is another plugin that focuses on optimizing your blog by decreasing its workload and increasing speed. This plugin specializes in reducing image file sizes in WordPress including NextGEN galleries. EWWW Image Optimizer offers less bandwidth usage, and bulk JPG & PNG image optimization.

11) Shortcodes Ultimate

Shortcodes Ultimate offers multiple shortcodes for your blog. So the first question likely on your mind is what are Shortcodes? The best answer is they are simple codes that you can insert into posts and pages, allowing you to easily create a number of amazing things. Shortcodes give you the ability to quickly create & display tabs, boxes, columns, tables, line dividers, buttons, galleries, blockquotes, social media buttons and more on your site. As for the Shortcodes Ultimate plugin, it comes loaded with over 50 shortcodes.

12) Autoptimize

In case you haven’t noticed, a recurring theme from this collection of the very best WordPress plugins is all about speed. Speed is important due to search engine rankings and most importantly offering a great reader experience to your website visitors. Autoptimize works by speeding up your blog/site through minimizing and compressing JS, CSS and HTML files. It saves you bandwidth. This great plugin can be used alone or in addition to the WP Super Cache plugin.

13) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the final must have plugin on this list of the best WordPress plugins for beginners and new bloggers. This genius plugin brings Google Analytics to you by displaying reports and real-time statistics in your WordPress Dashboard. It automatically inserts your own unique Google tracking code into every page of your website. As an experienced blogger, I highly recommend implementing Google Analytics to your blog as it remains the most trusted source of traffic and website data collection, and offers very valuable stats if you ever decide to sell your blog in the future.

And there you have it, a complete list of the 12 best WordPress plugins for beginners and new bloggers. Feel free to add your own favorite plugin in the comment box below!

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