15 Best WordPress Plugins We Use

Do you which 15 best WordPress plugins we recommend and use on QOT? Here is a list of my favorite WordPress plugins that run Quick Online Tips WordPress blog and you can give them a try on your site and take your WordPress site to the next level.

best wordpress plugins

Content Plugins

  • Classic Editor –  Is maintained by the WordPress team which allows you to switch back to the original simple WP interface and not use the Gutenberg latest one. Some old timers like me find it useful and so do 5 million others as per its usage.
  • YARRP – Also known as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. It is the most popular plugin to generate related post links. It helps to increase site interactivity and pageviews. Has been around for a long time now. You can easily configure the custom PHP option to integrate into your theme the way you like.
  • Post-Admin Word Count – displays the word count of all posts. Useful for finding thin content on your site to counter Google Panda penalties.
  • Advanced Ads –  A cool plugin that allows you to take control of multiple ad units, ad rotation, and group placements easily and without much code. Very easy to insert Adsense inside posts and anywhere you like.
  • WP Last Modified Info – It is a powerful plugin to insert post-updated date instead of published dates on a granular basis across your site. Loaded with many options to customize this. Also provides sortable word count options.
  • Q2W3 Fixed Widget – This is a simple plugin that will fix any widget in the sidebar and hold it there while readers continue to scroll across the content. Can be added to any widget.
  • Smart Recent Posts Widget –  a must-have plugin for your sidebar, which will load content based on a number of cool filters. The fresh modified posts you see on the side and bottom of this site are powered by this plugin.

SEO Plugins

  • Yoast SEO – the all-in-one SEO plugin which challenges other common SEO plugins like All in One SEO and Rank Math SEO plugins. Combines the power of several SEO plugins together in a clean and clear easy to understand interface to manage your blog SEO. It helps to set up canonicals, titles, descriptions, and nofollow/noindex large areas on the fly.
  • Redirection – Another very powerful plugin to create and manage all 301 redirects on your site. Get detailed logs of redirects and detect broken 404 URLs and easily fix them in a click.
  • Broken Link Checker – this powerful plugin will help to find all broken links on your WordPress blog and fix them quickly. It will also bulk edit all these links to apply CSS to broken links and nofollow them as well to make search engines happy.
  • Link Whisper – this is a nifty plugin to make internal linking a breeze, find zero internal link posts and orphan pages and link to them in a click. This plugin has totally changed the way we interlink pages and it is a big and easy boost for SEO.
  • WP-PageNavi – Adds more advanced page navigation to WordPress. Better navigation options on index and category pages.
  • Google XML Sitemaps –  this is a dedicated sitemaps generator plugin we used to feed Google webmaster tools. Although Yoast will generate a sitemap, we have a lot of custom URLs, which can only be added to this plugin settings. We host WordPress in a subfolder, and other sitemap plugins do not even allow us to add the homepage!

Site Speed Plugins

  • W3 Total Cache – it is specially optimized to work with our super fast A2 Hosting, where we proudly host this site. The superfast caching plugin which stores webpages as HTML and saves precious server PHP calls, allowing for a more stable and faster website. It leverages the power of our turbo web hosting package which we paid to get super fast site speed and uses Database and Object cache in memory instead of on disk.
  • Litespeed Cache – Since we now have Lite speed installed on our high-speed hosting servers, the Litespeed caching plugin works best to speed up the site.
  • Flying Scripts – a simple plugin which delays Adsense loading by 2-3 seconds so that the website loads faster and the core web vitals are well optimized, as adsense ads can lead to poor web vitals easily.
  • WP-Optimize –  An awesome plugin which safely optimizes WP database tables and can optimize your site speed and stability. Also provides other caching etc options that I don’t use.

Span Control Plugins

  • Akismet – The powerhouse anti-comment spam plugin which comes packed inside WordPress by default. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. Needs an API key and connects with your WordPress.com account.
  • Cookies for Comments –  My choice to stop comments spam in their tracks. It works very well and is possibly the only plugin you need to work with Akismet. See more comment spam blocking plugins.

Site Maintenance Plugins

  • Vaultpress – silently works in the background and backs up our entire database, images, plugins, and themes daily. Helps to back up the site and restore the database safely if needed. There are many other WordPress backup tools available also. They charge us $3 per month but is worth the money!  Made by guys at WordPress itself. Previously we used WordPress Database Backup which provides on-demand backup of your WordPress database. Now we use Vaultpress and also back up the database to Amazon S3.
  • Companion Auto Update – I use it simply to keep my WordPress plugins updated automatically. Of course, this functionality is coming in WordPress 5.5 and will make it obsolete. Till then I don’t need to log in and update manually.