Improve Your WordPress Blog With the Right Plugins

First published in 2014, rewritten in 2026 so the advice holds today.

WordPress's plugin directory has grown from around 30,000 listings to well over 60,000. That's more choice, but also more noise. If you're running a blog or content section on WordPress, the real skill isn't finding plugins, it's working out which ones still do their job well and which have been abandoned, bought out, or quietly replaced by something better.

A few of the tools we'd have recommended a decade ago have gone the same way as Google+ and Universal Analytics: closed down, unsupported, or overtaken. Here's what's still worth installing and what's taken the place of the plugins that haven't aged well.

SEO: Yoast is still the starting point

Yoast SEO remains the sensible first plugin to install on any WordPress site. It won't put you top of Google on its own, but it forces good habits: readable URLs, meta descriptions, sensible heading structure, and basic technical checks. Rank Math has become a genuine alternative with a generous free tier, so it's worth comparing the two rather than assuming Yoast is the only option.

Internal linking still matters for both users and search engines. RB Internal Links, which we mentioned in 2014, hasn't been updated in years and shouldn't be trusted on a live site. Link Whisper is the modern equivalent, suggesting internal links as you write and flagging orphaned pages.

Analytics: GA4, not "Google Analytics for WordPress"

Universal Analytics, the version of Google Analytics everyone used in 2014, was retired in 2023 and replaced by GA4. The plugin once called "Google Analytics for WordPress" is now MonsterInsights, and it still does the same basic job: it connects your site to GA4 without you touching any code, and surfaces the numbers that matter (traffic sources, popular posts, bounce behaviour) inside your WordPress dashboard.

The underlying advice hasn't changed. Analytics won't improve your blog by themselves. They tell you what's working, what people ignore, and where visitors drop off, and that only matters if someone actually reviews the data and acts on it.

Forms and error pages

Contact Form 7 is still widely used and still does a straightforward job, though many sites have moved to WPForms or Gravity Forms for a more polished builder and better spam filtering. Gravity Forms remains a paid plugin but continues to be a solid choice for anything beyond a basic contact form, including multi-page forms and conditional logic.

On 404 pages: the old approach of silently redirecting every broken link back to your homepage (the job "404 to Start" did) is no longer good practice. It hides genuine problems and can confuse both visitors and Google. Use the Redirection plugin instead, which lets you see which URLs are actually returning 404s and set up proper individual redirects, or a well-designed 404 page that helps people find what they were looking for.

What to drop: Subscribe2 and Twitter feeds

Two of our original recommendations don't hold up and shouldn't be replaced with a like-for-like plugin.

• Subscribe2, for building an email list and sending updates, has been overtaken by dedicated email platforms. Mailchimp, Klaviyo and similar tools handle list building, automation and deliverability far better than a WordPress plugin ever will, and they don't tie your subscriber list to your hosting.
• Twitter Feed Pro is effectively unusable since Twitter's rebrand to X and the tightening of its API access in 2023. Embedding a live feed of posts is no longer a reliable or affordable option for most small sites. If you want social proof on a blog, a simple manually-updated "follow us" link works better than a broken embed.

Related posts, still worth doing

Showing readers other relevant posts at the end of an article is still one of the simplest ways to reduce bounce rate and increase pages per visit. The original WordPress Related Posts plugin is no longer actively maintained. Yoast SEO Premium includes related posts as a feature, and Jetpack offers a free related posts block that does the same job without a separate plugin.

The lesson from 2014 still stands: plugins are tools, not strategy. Pick a small number that do a clear job well, check every so often that they're still maintained, and be prepared to swap one out the moment it stops being updated or gets replaced by something better. A blog with five reliable plugins will always outperform one with twenty abandoned ones.