25 Must have WordPress Plugins That Power ShoutMeLoud To Success

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Over a period of eleven years of blogging on WordPress, I have tried and tested many WordPress plugins.

Every now and then I need to remove the outdated plugin and pick something which offers a better feature and let my blog grow.

I understand that searching for right plugins could be a daunting task and this is why I keep sharing about using WordPress plugins here at ShoutMeLoud. Based on my research and experience, I have created a secret list of plugins which I use on all my blogs.

However, today post is an exclusive post which is part of our transparency culture. I love to share how we do things, what tools we use and other important stuff which will help you to grow your blog just like ShoutMeLoud.

Today, I’m sharing the list of must-have WordPress plugins we are currently using at ShoutMeLoud.

Do remember, these plugins are the outcome of my years of experience with blogging.

If you have just started with WordPress, you should first read: How to add plugins to WordPress.

Do remember, I keep changing our plugins, so I suggest you to bookmark this page and keep checking after a month to see the updated list of plugins.

The list is not in any particular order, and at the time of updating (February 2020), these are the must have WordPress plugins which power ShoutMeLoud.

Since many of you asked: : Right now ShoutMeloud is currently using Genesis Theme + Custom skin design and hosted on Kinsta hosting.

List of Must Have WordPress Plugins I use on ShoutMeLoud:

Here is a quick  list:

  1. Advanced Ads: This is the ad management WordPress plugin I’m using to run ads on ShoutMeLoud. This is a feature rich plugin, which let you add direct ads, banner ads, AdSense ads. The coolest part is, you can run A/B test, show/hide based on category/tags, to make most out of the ads on your WordPress website.
  2. Advanced database cleaner: I use this to reduce the size of my database.  A free alternative is WP Sweep which doesn’t offer advanced feature but it’s alright for new blogs. For a serious blog, Advanced database cleaner is recommended.
  3. AMP for WP: I use the free version of AMP for WP plugin.
  4. Akismet: For handling spam comments
  5. Broken link checker plugin: 
  6. Clicktotweet: To add a tweetable code within an article.
  7. Easy table of content: To show table of content in WordPress (Helps in SEO and UX)
  8. EasyDigitalDownloads: This plugin helps in setting up a digital download store.
  9. Email post changes: This sends me a notification when an author or editor make changes.
  10. Jetpack by WordPress.com: One of the most popular WordPress plugins offer great features.
  11. Limit modified date: This plugin helps me to prevent updating the timestamp when making minor changes to an old post. This practice is good for SEO.
  12. Linkwhisper: For internal link building
  13. OptinMonster: To add email subscription box.
  14. Pushengage: Push notification for desktop browsers.
  15. Pixel Caffeine: Fastest way to integrate Facebook pixel on your website.
  16. Premium Yoast SEO: For SEO optimization (On page & On-site)
  17. Peter’s Collaboration E-mails: Sends an email to admin & editor when a contributor submit a post.
  18. Q2W3 Fixed Widget: Fixed widget plugin
  19. Redirection: Manages 301 redirection & 404 errors from WordPress dashboard. However, I shifted a lot of redirection now using Yoast SEO premium. Over the time, I will be moving everything to Yoast SEO for redirection.
  20. ShortPixel: Compress images without degrading quality. Helps in faster loading of the articles.
  21. Ultimate Nofollow: Helps in adding nofollow tag from the WordPress post editor section.
  22. WP Link Status: The purpose of this plugin is to find broken links. I use it for more than this.
  23. WP Forms: To add contact form & create a variety of forms here at ShoutMeLoud.
  24. WP security audit log: Keep an eye on user activities inside the WordPress dashboard.
  25. WP Advanced Ads: For adding ads
  26. WPS hide login

Here is a detailed explanation of most of the listed plugins:

SEO By Yoast Premium:

SEO by Yoast plugin
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This is a free WordPress plugin that is the powerhouse of my blog SEO. It helps to optimize on Site SEO, On page SEO & Social SEO of the blog. This is a must have plugin for every blog, and I have written a guide over here to learn about the configuration of this plugin.  Yoast SEO comes in two versions: Free and paid.

In the pro version there are few extra features like redirection and internal linking. This is why I useYoast premium. You can read my take on premium version here.

Akismet Plugin:

Akismet Plugin
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Akismet is a free anti-spam WordPress plugin that I recommend as it is the official plugin from WordPress creator, which lets you fight with spam comments. To use Akismet, you need an API key. You can get one by following this tutorial.

One downside of this plugin is that sometimes it skips spam trackback or comments or legit comments land in the spam folder. Though this usually happens due to a previous interaction with an I.P or with an email address but you can always address this problem by checking your spam folder daily.

This is also a must have plugin that you should have from day one to stop spam comments on your blog.

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Schema Pro plugin

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This WordPress plugin is useful if you do review post. Using this plugin, you can add a star rating to your blog post, and make it stand out in the search engine. It’s a premium plugin that cost only $79, and it’s a good one-time investment.

CloudFlare plugin:

Cloudflare WordPress plugin
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Cloudflare is a free service which offers security & free CDN. What I really like about CloudFlare is, you can block bots and spam traffic at DNS level. This saves a lot of bandwidth and also your server load is not affected due to the bot traffic.

If you are using a managed WordPress hosting, shared hosting or any web hosting where your bandwidth is a limit, you should definitely use a service like CloudFlare.

Social Snap plugin for social media sharing buttons:

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SocialSnap lets you add social sharing & social media follow buttons on the blog. This plugin offers beautiful looking social sharing button at various places such as Floating sharing buttons, after post, fixed bar, and a few other options.

If you need one plugin that takes care of your social media sharing needs, this is the best plugin for now. This is a paid plugin and cost about $39 only for a yearly license.

The analytics feature is also highly useful and you can get stats right inside your WordPress dashboard.

WP Forms plugin:

Enhanced contact form
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This free plugin lets you add the contact form on your blog, and I like it because it also shows the referral URL of the person who is using my contact form to send a message.

This helps me to filter down the real and spam message. If you are using Jetpack plugin, you should rather use contact form feature of that plugin.

Jetpack WordPress plugin:

Jetpack by WordPress
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This is a multi-purpose free WordPress plugin that adds the feature like stats, contact form, mobile theme, social sharing button and many more. This is a power packed WordPress plugin.

You need to have a free account on WordPress.com to use this plugin. You can learn more about this plugin over here.

LinkPatrol:

LinkPatrol Plugin review
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This is a WordPress SEO plugin that controls your blog external link. Using this plugin you can Nofollow, remove any existing external link of your blog.

It’s a premium plugin and is very powerful and useful for the SEO of your blog. You can read the review and how I use this plugin over here.

No Self Pings:

This useful and free WordPress plugin let me stop sending the trackback to interlinked posts inside my domain.

Read: No self-ping WordPress plugin: Stop pinging your Blog post.

OptinMonster:

OptinMonster WordPress plugin
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This is a feature rich plugin. I use it to show email subscription pop up and is highly configurable. Even without any designing skills, I can quickly configure and design an effective pop up for my blog.

If you are into email marketing and need an easy to use WordPress plugin, look no further than OptinMonster.

SEO Friendly Images:

This free plugin lets you optimize images for the search engine. It adds alt text based on the name of the image. Highly recommended.

Read: How to Alt Tag into Images.

WP Status Notifier Plugin:

This plugin notifies me when any blog post is submitted for review and notifies the user when his blog post is accepted.

Later on, we shifted to peter’s collaboration Email plugin that turns out to be more powerful.

Some additional plugins which I use for ShoutMeLoud:

I will keep updating the post whenever I add or remove a plugin here at ShoutMeLoud. You can bookmark this page & visit it after a month or so to see the updated list.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

166 thoughts on “25 Must have WordPress Plugins That Power ShoutMeLoud To Success”

  1. Sathish

    Harsh you have mentioned the WaterMark reloaded plugin. But when you insert images from Flickr, the watermarks are missing in them. Are u using any other plugin to upload images other than the wordpress default option? Please let me know.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Hey Sathish
      Images are still hosted here at SML server.

      1. Vikas Pandey

        I use most of them on my website. Social Warfare and Yoast is my favourite. Jetpack made my website slow (as I am on shared hosting). had to get rid of.

        I think you do not require clicktotweet plugin if you have social warfare as it has click to tweet inbuilt feature.

        Anyways great list for anyone looking for suggestions.

  2. George Serradinho

    Wow, 30 plugins listed above and your site still loads fast.

    At this stage I have around 19 plugins as I have created my own customized widgets for ads and subscription. I find it better to create my own so that I can customize it the way I want.

    I must say that my best plugin would be GoCodes, it has made life easier for me.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Go codes is one of my favorite too…
      I know 30 plugins is too much..actually I have almost 40+ plugin last month and I removed 10 of them a while back..Now working to lower down the no. to 25.. 🙂

  3. Sagar Rai

    Bro, nice list but you are making way lot of plugin and simply increasing the loading speed of your site. I compared yours and labnol site. You sites takes too much of time to load. Plugins usage also contribute to loading speed.

    BTW I like the “After the deadline” plugin so I’m making use of it for my coming blogs.

  4. Tinh

    Great list! I have used most of them and then remove 2/3 0f them to improve my blog loading time. Thanks

  5. Namit Gupta

    Hey Harsh, I was wondering from the time I did the guest post at Shoutmeloud about how the watermark is automatically added to the images. I got the answer in this post. Thanks 🙂 this is a really useful post.

  6. Roy Scribner

    WP Super Cache is still my favorite caching plugin, eespecially now that it will preload all the pages. If my blogs were on a more powerful server, W3TC might be better, but the compression almost doubled my page-load times, when I tried it. Smart 404 is great, too – definitely one of those “core” plugins that everyone should consider. Great list!

  7. NITYIN @Himachal Live

    Hi Harsh
    Nice post. I have one question. I am also using the Enhanced Wp contact form on my blog but the alignment of the form is not good. Can you pls let me know how do I make the contact form better aligned as it is here on your blog?

  8. Rajandran R

    Are you using any special subsciption plugin for your blog? I just want one like that in your blog?

    Iam looking for a feeburner subscription box along with twiiter, buzz , rss button subscription box

  9. indihow

    Though I am pretty sure you know tons more than me about blogging stuff, I guess reducing the number of plugins would decrease the loading time of your web pages, and quite definitely Google has started taking that into account. Just a suggestion 🙂

  10. Siddharth

    Great work.. this was actually i was about to ask you.. 🙂
    Installing some of these wonderful plugins on my blog now ..

    i would like to ask you.. why your page is reloading after few mins.. any plugins or coding or secrets ? 😉

  11. Shanker Bakshi

    Thats a good list, a complete mixture for design, SEO and user interface support. Some plugin mentioned above are new to me, let me check out. 🙂

  12. vijay

    These are great list of plug ins suggestions for all of us, My blog is recently migrated, so let me check this plug ins to add my blog…Thanking you mate 🙂

  13. check

    Sorry man Harsh Agrawal but I have ever thought your native language is English. The language related plugin you recommend will soon be my choice. But it seem you are not interested in some smile related plugin Harsh. Your blog will be fresh and more emotional.

  14. aatif

    Great list i will try to check plugins for my blog. thinking about what plugins u use . now got the answer

  15. Tech-n-Tricks

    Sory! but u r using Captcha, bcoz when I was trying to add link in comments it redirected me to Captcha page.
    🙁
    But I was not able to complete it, I was getting some error so I have not add a link to ur Previous post that Shows how to add Related Post without Plugin.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      I’m using conditional captcha plugin. Which shows captcha only when your comment is marked as spam By akismet plugin. So when you insert the captcha, your comment land into comment moderation queue instead of comment spam folder.

  16. Jens P. Berget

    Great list. I have only installed a few of the plugins, but will definitely take a closer look at the plugins on the list (eespecially after the deadline).

    I have installed a few that you didn’t mention, that’s disqus for my comments, Contact Form 7 for my comments, and PopUp Domination (paid) to build my list (for my newsletter).

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Thanks for your comment Jens and do let me know which plugin you found useful from the list. I’m also trying pop up domination on my Webhosting blog and it seems very useful.

  17. Tech-n-Tricks

    Thnx Harsh! I was asking 2 u from last 2 months. Final I got d ans.

    But I confuse about, r u rally using Captcha plugin for ur comments?

    And last try W3Total Cache at d place of wp Supper Cache, It Provides lots of more option. And if u r using WLW then there is on need of “Watermark reloaded” plugin bcoz less plugin u use less time it take to load. & also use Code to show related posts in wordpress at the place of YARPP

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Thanks for your valuable comment. I will be using W3 cache soon as I will be using CDN.
      I will consider your opinion about using custom code for related post.

  18. Chicken Soup

    Really useful plugins, but I think All in one SEO pack plugin is missing!

      1. Rabi

        And most SEO plugins conflict with Thesis and Genesis frameworks, unless you edit the framework itself but that would break upon update. Editing Child Theme is probably the solution, of which I am not sure what would child theme update cause and certainly isn’t my stuff! There isn’t much on editing themes on SML (Thesis, of course, is an exception).

  19. Manish

    Nice list of plugins

    These are good number of plugins , I feel that one should not exceed above 20 plugins on his blog . I feel like around 6-7 plugins must be providing not more than 4-5% value in terms of performance/easyness . Its better to get rid of them , Its my view 🙂

    Manish

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Thanks for your comment Manish.I’m considering disabling few plugins soon and replace them by using custom codes. 🙂

  20. ashwin

    Hoh…these are many,is tr any prob by usage of these much plugins?

      1. pushkaar

        Dear Harsh,

        Nice and complete info of SML plugin…….but is there any way that we can add the plugin code in theme code to avoid slowdown as too much plugin slow down the performance. I mean objective is to not slow down the web.

        1. Harsh Agrawal

          @Pushkaar
          Yes, you can always add the functionalities in the theme itself…For this you need to know coding, or you can hire a WordPress developer to do it for you… Using code directly have many advantages compared to using a plugin. Though, coding is not everyone cup of tea, so to make things simpler, plugins are useful.

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