Readers often ask us what tools we use to manage and grow our WordPress blogs. They want to know the secrets behind our success so that they can replicate it on their own blogs.
While we have listed some of them in our WPBeginner Blueprint, we actually use a wider range of tools across our various projects.
In this article, we’ll share our list of 40 useful blogging tools to manage and grow your blog. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a seasoned pro looking for an edge, you’ll discover valuable resources here.
Looking to Start a Blog?
Do you want to start your own WordPress blog? We know that it can be a daunting thought, especially if you’re not a techy expert. But you’re not alone.
At WPBeginner, we have helped over 370,000+ users start a blog. And you can too!
Simply work through our comprehensive step by step guide on how to start a WordPress blog. You don’t need any technical knowledge. We explain everything in plain English.
Once your blog is set up, go ahead and check out these powerful tools that will help you grow your blog.
1. All in One SEO
All in One SEO is the best SEO plugin for WordPress. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps you bring more free traffic to your website from search engines.
With All in One SEO, you get an instant score for all your posts, pages, and website. This helps you see how you’re doing and it gives you a checklist of exactly how to improve your SEO.
Its built-in tools let you easily create XML sitemap, markup your pages for rich schema, optimize for local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, and more.
Plus, there’s a powerful Author SEO addon that will help you showcase your authority and expertise. This will make it easier for search engines to trust your content, resulting in higher rankings.
You can get started with the free version of All in One SEO. However, to access more powerful features like SEO revisions, redirection manager, internal linking assistant, and more, you need to upgrade to the premium version.
2. SeedProd
SeedProd is the best drag and drop website builder for WordPress. It allows you to create custom WordPress themes, landing pages, and more.
By default, WordPress allows you to showcase blog posts on your website’s homepage. SeedProd helps you quickly create on-demand landing pages for every occasion. Whether you want to launch a product, run a seasonal sale, capture new leads, or grow your email list.
It comes with pre-built templates that you can quickly customize using an intuitive drag and drop interface. This allows you to create stunningly professional pages without writing any code.
SeedProd works with any WordPress theme and it comes with special blocks like countdowns and call to action buttons, optin forms, and more. It also integrates with all top email marketing services, WooCommerce, and other essential WordPress plugins.
3. MonsterInsights (Google Analytics)
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily install Google Analytics on your site and see where your users are coming from and what they do on your site.
MonsterInsights shows you the data you need right within your WordPress admin area. Over 3 million sites use it to see important stats about their website traffic.
You can create special reports in MonsterInsights to see things like which categories or authors are most popular on your blog. You can also track affiliate link clicks, see real-time traffic stats, and make Google Analytics compliant with GDPR.
There’s also a free version of MonsterInsights you can use to get started.
4. ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates lets you easily manage affiliate links, which can become a time-consuming task. Many website owners use affiliate marketing to monetize their blogs as it’s easy to get started with.
ThirstyAffiliates is an affiliate link manager that allows you to easily add affiliate links, cloak links with pretty URLs, and auto-insert links for keywords.
For more details, check out our guide on how to add affiliate links in WordPress with ThirstyAffiliates.
Alternative: Pretty Links
5. LowFruits
LowFruits helps you find competitive search data, so your blog can rank high for the right keywords. You can discover longtail keyword ideas and analyzes SERPs to find websites with low domain authority that are ranking for your chosen keyword.
Using all these tools from LowFruits, you can outrank your competitors and dramatically increase your website traffic. This means you will get more leads and more customers.
Alternative: Semrush and Ahrefs
6. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the best WordPress lead generation tool. It allows you to add beautiful optin forms to your WordPress site and helps you get more subscribers. You can use it to create popups, slide-ins, floating bars, coupon wheels, and more.
OptinMonster comes with page level targeting, split testing, analytics, and Exit-Intent® technology which allows you to display a lightbox popup when a user is about to leave your website.
See how to build your email list in WordPress with OptinMonster.
7. WPForms
WPForms is the most beginner friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag and drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other types of online forms with just a few clicks.
We use WPForms on WPBeginner and all of our other sites. There’s a free WPForms Lite version available that comes with basic features and a Stripe integration for collecting online payments.
The full version of WPForms lets you create surveys and polls, advanced payment forms, file upload forms, user registration forms, conversational forms, and much more.
8. Novashare
Novashare is a useful social media plugin for WordPress. It lets you show the number of times your posts have been shared on social media. This is a useful form of social proof.
Novashare gives you multiple button styles, and you can choose where to show the buttons (before or after the content or manually). You can also enable Novashare for custom post types.
9. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the best email service providers. It allows you to build your email list, design emails, and send them to your users.
It is very beginner-friendly and at the same time powerful enough for experienced users.
It comes with a free email builder, hundreds of mobile-optimized email templates, marketing automation features, and more.
Alternatives: Brevo (Sendinblue), Kit (ConvertKit), and Drip
10. MemberPress
MemberPress is the best membership site plugin for WordPress. It lets you easily turn your website into a membership site. This allows you to lock content on your site so that only members can access it by paying either a one-off fee or a subscription.
You can create different levels of membership with MemberPress, with each level having different access permissions. You can even use MemberPress to run an online course.
11. PushEngage
PushEngage is a powerful push notification plugin for WordPress. It helps you to get more website traffic, boost user engagement, and ultimately make more money.
With push notifications, you can quickly and easily send out alerts to your site’s users. For instance, you could let them know that you’re running a sale. Here on WPBeginner, we find that push notifications get a higher click rate, engagement, and opt-in rate compared with our email newsletter.
You can get started with PushEngage’s free plan to send 30 campaigns to up to 200 subscribers per month.
12. RafflePress
RafflePress is the best giveaway and raffle plugin for WordPress. It lets you grow your traffic, engagement, email list, and social media following by running a fun giveaway on your site.
By using RafflePress, you can incentivize actions like visiting your social media profiles, sharing posts, watching videos, and much more. Each time a user takes one of the actions you specify, they will get an entry into your prize draw.
13. Beacon
Beacon is the best lead magnet software on the market. It allows you to easily create professional lead magnets, including ebooks, checklists, workbooks, resource libraries, and more, to help you grow your email list.
You can get started quickly with one of the many pre-made lead magnet templates. Or, you can use the drag and drop lead magnet creator to make your own from scratch.
It even comes with a handy Blog Post Recycle feature. Simply enter the blog post URL and the tool will instantly convert your article into a lead magnet.
14. Canva
Canva allows you to create beautiful graphic designs, edit images, and create posters, with a simple and intuitive drag and drop interface.
It is extremely easy to use to create things like featured images for your blog. Even beginners can create professional-looking graphics with Canva.
Alternative: Visage
15. ClickSocial
ClickSocial provides a better way to share your content across social media. It allows you to schedule and share your content across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram right from your WordPress dashboard.
It comes with a user-friendly post editor that you can use to plan your whole day’s or week’s tweets and status updates in one go. You can also set up revival campaigns to automatically share your old WordPress posts.
Alternative: Buffer
16. Smash Balloon
Smash Balloon has a set of social media feed plugins that let you easily bring your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube updates onto your website. This is a great way to keep your site fresh with new content.
Using Smash Balloon’s plugins lets you embed your actual social media posts on your site so users can interact with them. You can even create an Instagram shoppable feed to boost your eCommerce sales.
17. Grammarly
Grammarly is a powerful AI (artificial intelligence) editor for your website posts and pages. You can copy and paste content into the Grammarly website app. However, the easiest way to use Grammarly is to install the Grammarly Chrome extension.
As well as pointing out spelling mistakes, Grammarly will let you know about grammatical errors and stylistic mistakes. The basic version is free, but you may prefer the pro version for help with tone, formality level, and word choices.
18. Headline Analyzer by MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer is a free tool that lets you optimize the headline for your blog post or landing page. It will give you a score out of 100 along with specific suggestions for improving your headline.
The headline analyzer also includes several helpful lists, such as the list of Power Words and Emotion Words. These can help you make your headlines extra compelling.
19. WPBeginner Keyword Generator
WPBeginner Keyword Generator is a free tool that can help you discover new keyword ideas to improve SEO and drive more traffic to your blog.
Simply enter your main topic keyword into the tool and it will instantly generate 300+ new keyword ideas from Google that you can download in a report.
WPBeginner also offers many other free, useful tools for your blog, including:
- Keyword Density Checker – Find the most optimized keywords in any content to fix over optimization. Or, discover the keywords your competitors are optimizing for.
- Blog Idea Generator – Instantly generate 250 new blog posts ideas based on the main topic keyword that you enter into the tool.
- Website SEO Analyzer – Performs an SEO audit of your site, finds critical errors, and provides a free SEO report to fix them.
- Email Signature Generator – Easily design a professional and customizable email signature to build your personal brand and promote your blog.
See the free business tools page to discover more free tools created by the WPBeginner team.
20. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker, created by the same team behind All in One SEO, is an essential WordPress plugin for finding and fixing broken links on your blog.
It crawls your website periodically and checks both internal and external links to ensure they’re working correctly, which is important for the user experience and SEO.
When broken links are found, you can quickly fix them right inside of the plugin, instead of having to update each individual post or page. For more details, see our complete Broken Link Checker review.
21. Formidable Forms
Formidable Forms is a powerful forms plugin for experienced WordPress users. It offers advanced functionality like the ability to create calculators on your site to help you gather more leads.
For instance, you could create a BMI calculator on a health or fitness site. If you run a real estate website, you could use Formidable Forms to make a mortgage calculator.
22. WPCode
WPCode is a simple but very useful plugin. It lets you easily add code to the header, footer, and body sections for your site.
This is something you will often need to do when verifying your site with third-party tools. For example, many people use WPCode to add their Google AdSense code or Facebook pixel in WordPress.
Many WordPress tutorials will also ask you to add code snippets to your theme’s functions.php file. With WPCode, you can easily add custom code in WordPress, without editing that file.
The free version of WPCode has all of the features you need. The premium version offers advanced features like conversion pixels, code revisions, and more.
23. Duplicator
Duplicator is one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins. It lets you easily create a full backup of your site, which you can then store in the cloud or on your own computer.
You can even set up scheduled backups, so your site will be backed up on a regular basis without you needing to do anything. It supports multisite installations of WordPress, lets you clone your website, and more.
There’s also a free version of Duplicator that you can use to get started.
Alternatives: UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, Jetpack
24. Sucuri
Sucuri is a website monitoring and security service. It provides real time alerts for any suspicious activity on your website. It prevents malware from infecting your site. If your site is already infected, Sucuri can detect and remove malware.
Take a look at how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.
Alternative: CloudFlare.
25. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best caching plugin for WordPress. It speeds up your site by storing copies of your website pages. These can be quickly shown to people who visit your site.
There are lots of useful features in WP Rocket, such as built-in lazy loading of images. This helps speed up your site even further, which is better for users and for your Google ranking.
Alternative: WP Super Cache
26. Uncanny Automator
Uncanny Automator is a clever automation plugin that lets WordPress plugins and even different WordPress sites ‘talk’ to one another. For instance, you could use it to sell products on one site but create user accounts on another.
It works like Zapier, but for WordPress. Uncanny Automator is a fantastic way to automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time to handle.
27. ChatBot
ChatBot lets you create an automated chatbot on your website. This means users can get instant answers to their questions at any time, 24/7. It’s a much cheaper option than hiring extra support team members.
ChatBot is powered by AI (artificial intelligence). It integrates with your WordPress site and with live chat software so that the conversation can be easily transferred to a live person if needed.
28. LiveChat
LiveChat is the best live chat software on the market. It works seamlessly with your WordPress site. Your support team members can access the live chat through apps on their computer, tablet, or mobile device.
We use LiveChat on our eCommerce website. It’s very fast, works on all devices, and offers a great user experience. Make sure you use our LiveChat coupon to get 30% off your first payment.
29. Tailwind
Tailwind is a social media automation tool for Pinterest and Instagram. It lets you schedule 10 pins with a single click.
You also get Tailwind’s analytic tools to help you figure out what’s working best. That way, you can schedule your content for times when you will get more engagement.
30. Thrive Comments
Thrive Comments is the best WordPress plugin for improving WordPress comments. It helps you build an engaged and interactive community on your blog.
To encourage conversations, you can add up-votes and down-votes, reward users with badges, allow social sharing for individual comments, show featured comments, and more.
31. WP Mail SMTP
WP Mail SMTP is a free plugin that allows you to easily send WordPress emails using any SMTP service provider. This replaces the default WordPress mail function and fixes the WordPress not sending email issue.
With WP Mail SMTP, you can ensure your important WordPress email notifications actually get delivered.
The free version connects with all popular SMTP service providers. WP Mail SMTP Pro comes with extra features like white glove setup, email logs, email tracking, and more.
32. Shutterstock
Shutterstock is a huge stock photography library that lets you buy high-quality images to use on your website. It’s cheaper per image if you get a monthly subscription.
We use Shutterstock’s images here on WPBeginner. They have a wide range of vector graphics, photos, and much more.
33. Google Workspace
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is Google’s set of connected tools. It includes Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and more.
Many companies use Google Workspace as a key part of their systems. It’s suitable for even small companies as it’s priced per user.
Alternative: Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)
34. Asana
Asana is a project and task management tool that helps teams to organize their workflow. You can use it to create lists of tasks, see your tasks on a calendar, assign tasks to others, and much more.
The basic version of Asana is free and can be used by up to 15 teammates. This is a good option for individuals or small startups.
Alternative: Trello
35. Camtasia
Camtasia is screen recording software available for Windows and Mac. It’s extremely useful for sites where you need to walk users through a process step by step.
With Camtasia, you can easily edit your videos, add graphics, animations, arrows, sounds, subtitles, and more.
Alternatives: Screenflow, CamStudio
36. LastPass
LastPass is a password manager that stores all your passwords in a single secure vault. This means you can easily avoid the temptation to use insecure passwords, or to use the same password for multiple sites.
After installing LastPass, you can use it to autogenerate strong passwords and save them in just one click. Check out our guide on securely managing passwords for more details.
Alternatives: 1Password, Dashlane
37. Google Trends
Google Trends is a free tool that lets you see what topics are popular on Google. You can compare different keywords to see the interest in them over time.
The ‘Trending Searches’ option gives you a real-time view of what people are most commonly searching for. This lets you create content that’s likely to get traffic. You can filter Google Trends by country, too.
38. Quora
Quora is a huge questions and answers website, and is a form of social network. Anyone can post a question and anyone can answer it.
You can drive traffic to your website by looking for relevant questions on Quora to answer. This helps you position yourself as an expert. Plus, if you see a question coming up frequently, that could make a good topic for a blog post.
39. Google Search Console
Google Search Console was previously known as Google Webmaster Tools. It allows website owners to check how Google sees their website. You can see the most commonly used queries where your site appears.
It offers a comprehensive set of tools that show reports on duplicate titles, crawl errors, search queries, indexed content, and more. Take a look at our guide on adding your WordPress site to Google Search Console for help getting started.
40. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps you analyze what content performs best for any topic or even for your competitors. You can find key influencers to promote your content, monitor your brand mentions, and so much more.
This tool is a must have for all serious bloggers. You can search for topics by region, language, time period, and more.
Bonus: Nextiva
Nextiva is the best business phone service on the market. You can use it for customer calls and conference calls, as it has excellent audio quality.
With Nextiva, you get lots of useful extras like a free local or toll-free number, call forwarding, custom greetings, text messages, online faxes, and much more.
We hope these tools help you manage and grow your WordPress blog. You might also like our article on how to start an online store, or our guide on how to create a free business email address.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Olaf
This is what I like about WordPress. There’s an enormous number of plugins that can turn it into a perfect website or blog, e-commerce store, forum, or community page, basically, anything. Sometimes, though, the flood of plugins is overwhelming, and choosing the right one requires a lot of time, research, and preferably testing as well. That’s why I appreciate tutorials like these. A website with a reputable name, backed by a team of specialists, and a list of tools that are clearly well-tested. From this, you can conclude that a plugin on the list is trustworthy and that if someone puts their name behind it, they know what they’re talking about.
Jiří Vaněk
This is an absolutely amazing and comprehensive list of tools. Many of them you have already taught me to use correctly in other tutorials. Some of the tools on this list are still new to me, but I will bookmark this article and gradually check each one to see if I can use any of them to improve the functionality of my website.
Dennis Muthomi
What an amazing collection of tools for bloggers! I manage several blogs, I know firsthand how essential it is to have the right tools in your arsenal. This roundup of 40 useful tools is a goldmine for anyone serious about growing their blogging business. I can’t imagine running my blogs without essentials like All in One SEO, MonsterInsights, and OptinMonster – they’re total game-changers.
Huge thanks to the WPBeginner team for putting together such a comprehensive and valuable resource!
Mrteesurez
These are collection of useful tools and resources for anyone to grow a website not blog.
I will try out that ‘Shared Counts’ on my blog as it lets one shows the number of times the posts are shared.
Helpful Article.
Moinuddin Waheed
Most of these plugins are must have for any online business or blog.
I have already made list of all the essential tools for growing online from one of another such tutorial.
I am making sure to implement all those to scale my online presence.
Thanks for making effort to educate wpbeginner and WordPress community.
WPBeginner Support
You’re welcome, we hope you continue to find our content and community helpful
Admin
Ackson
Comprehensive list of digital marketing tools. Thanks a lot for sharing
WPBeginner Support
Glad you found our list helpful
Admin
SanaUllah Khaan
Is LastPass is better than Google password manager?
WPBeginner Support
That would depend on your personal needs as well as your personal preferences.
Admin
Richard Baker
Amazing Article. Thanks for sharing with us.
WPBeginner Support
Glad you found our list helpful
Admin
Al Klein
Quora IS NOT a social media site. People using it as one get their posts … or their accounts … deleted. It’s not even a discussion site, it’s strictly a question and answer site. (I don’t have anything to do with Quora, other than as a user, but I’ve been using it for years, and I’ve seen accounts get closed.)
WPBeginner Support
You are correct that it is for questions and answers, we recommend answering questions and/or creating content based on the questions asked. That can help with ensuring there is content that people are looking for on your site as well as you can possibly link others with the same question to your post on the topic.
Admin
Shayur Maharaj
As a marketing analyst and budding blogger I found this piece highly useful. Thank you.
WPBeginner Support
You’re welcome
Admin
Acha Mercy
thank you so much; this is very helpful as I m still considering building my own website by myself. it is very scary but reading your posts has help give me some courage to start.
WPBeginner Support
Glad we could help, if you wanted to create a test site you may also want to take a look at our article on how to create a site on your local computer: https://www.wpbeginner.com/how-to-install-wordpress/#installlocal
Admin
Rosie Mania
Thanks for sharing these methods. These are really helpful to our business growth especially for WordPress.
ethan
Those Tools are very useful thanks for sharing ..
Gwyn Thomas
I found some new tools to check out and keep updating us with new business tools. Thanks.
Don Harold
Thank you for this solid list! Actually, I’ve tried using Buffer, Feedly, Trello, Semrush, Google Drive and Canva—and these tools have been very helpful to me for the past few years at work. Will also try to check out the other tools you’ve mentioned. Thanks again
Zarphyu
Thank you for sharing these amazing tools…
Francisco
Thank you for sharing this list of amazing tools
Muhammad Usman
thank you for the amazing list. The list of my bookmarks keep growing, thanks to your articles.
Would love to checkout the new tools. Thanks again mate.
Enex
After the Deadline plugin for WordPress not updated in 2 years, and may have problems with current WP versions.
Sam
Thank you for sharing this.
I did get an accident which was completely my fault to delete wrong file from the server. And I had not made any automatic backup for my page before that. Seeking for a help from GoDaddy where I rent the hosting server. They asked for US$500/time per database backup ! ~,~
I can now try VaultPress for my data automatic backup.
Once again, appreciate the list of useful tools for Wordpress Blog
Lydia
Thanks for the update. I found some new tools to check out. Beaver Building I am especially interested in testing.
Bhupendra jaiswal
Which Image editting Software do you use for your blog…..
WPBeginner Support
Adobe Photoshop.
Admin
Ankitaa Gohain Dalmia
Hi,
I love this list! It has helped me with my websites so much.
I just have a suggestion – maybe you could update “Google Webmaster Tools” to “Google Search Console”. I know you’ve recently added WPForms to this list, so this update could help a lot of users, since “Google Search Console” sounds like yet another new Google Tool to be used for websites, when in fact it’s our good ol’ Webmaster Tools. Just a thought to make this post even awesome
Thanks!
WPBeginner Support
Google Webmasters Tools is now rebranded as search console. It is still the same tool.
Admin
Alex
a great help
tafara
I always take your recommendations seriously, they are very helpful. keep up the good works. You are an inspiration.
Syazaluqman
Thanks for sharing this amazing tools. It helps me alot
Connie
I strongly recommend Broken LInk Checker, so helpful!
https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/
Nisha Pandey
Hi Syed,
What a woderful post indeed! All the tools you have shared are most useful. Thanks for sharing this awesome list with us.
Have a amazing year!
WPBeginner Staff
ThirstyAff doesn’t offer server level redirects.
Carthage Buckley
A really nice list with some great tips. I am glad to say that I am using many of them already but it is great to learn of new tools too.
rjspks
Thanks for this list; some old friends and many new ones. I did not yet know about Wordpress SEO. I agree with Kate_H. I am cheap! I do buy plugins, Soliloquy is one, but the free ones are obviously my first look.
Kate_H
Great post and set of useful tools and plugins. With so many plugins out there it is nice to get trusted recommendations. One thing that I feel would have helped is maybe next to the name you could have indicated if the service or plugin was free, one-off payment or subscription based?
Keep up the great work WPBeginner. You are one of a select few blogs I religiously follow and have gained so much knowledge and insight from.
Justin McGill
This is a really great list. Some of these I hadn’t heard of and am looking into now. Thanks!!
BillyB
Many thanks for this useful list. It should prove a helpful time saver for site developers who don’t have a lot of time to test out all the alternatives.
Those areas with which I am familiar jive well with my own understanding leaving me with a high degree of confidence in your assessments.
Correen K
Most excellent list of tools. Some I use already
bookmarked those I’d like to read more about.
Giving a shout out to PicMonkey, which seems to be a nice alternative to Canva. Their free version has an ample supply of features, enough to make stunning graphic designs. They also offer an inexpensive, yet powerful upgrade.
Jesse
Thanks for sharing this with us. There are at least 6 or 7 of these tools I’m going to try.
Hari Jeevakumar
Absolutely love Canva. In the beginning I was like WTF is this? Why would I use this? But then I got addicted to it. Haha.
Raghuram Sukumar
Amazing Post. Question on Affiliate Link tracking. I’m using PrettyLink plugin for Affiliate link tracking. My hosting provider said the following
“Redirects should always be done by the server, not by PHP. If the server handles it, the request comes in and gets redirected. If you do it with this plugin, the request comes in and the plugin will wake everything up, PHP, MySQL and the server, which is a very bad thing to do.”
But, by using PHP redirect, I can’t tack the clicks ( or I’m not sure if there is a way to track it).
How does Thirsty Affiliates work?
Do you have any comments about what my provider says about redirection?