10 WordPress Plugins Essential to Monetizing Your Blog

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WordPress plugins are essential in helping increase conversions, improve user experience, and earning more with your blog. Here are the plugins that most bloggers can't live without.

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In the bustling world of blogging, turning your passion into profit is more achievable than ever, thanks to a wealth of tools designed to enhance your site’s earning potential.

WordPress, the platform of choice for many bloggers, offers an expansive library of plugins that can transform your blog into a revenue-generating powerhouse.

From direct monetization strategies like ads and affiliate marketing to optimizing reader engagement and dwell time, the right plugins can make all the difference.

In this article, we’ll dive into the WordPress plugins that not only help you monetize your blog directly but also strengthen your connection with your readership and optimize your site for maximum earnings. Whether you’re new to the blogosphere or looking to enhance your existing site, these tools will equip you with everything you need to turn your blog into a thriving business.

Plugins for Direct Monetization

These plugins will directly impact the money you earn from your blog.

1. Google AdSense

Whether or not ads are appropriate for your site to begin with is a discussion we could have all day. But no one can deny that AdSense provides an immediate return on the work that you’re putting into your blog.

As with most things in life, there is likely an appropriate balance of ad usage that negates the all-or-nothing approach. You should seek to achieve a balance that 1) maximizes your return on time invested and 2) does not substantially detract from your user’s experience. The Google Adsense Plugin allows you to:

“…place AdSense ads using a simple point-and-click UI rather than manually inserting snippets yourself. Google automatically determines potential placements for AdSense ads, suggests an initial ad layout, and allows you to lay out ads on your site.”

The latest version includes the following features:

  • Easily add AdSense ads to your site to make money from advertising.
  • With one click, enable mobile-specific ad layouts with Automated Mobile Ads.
  • Manage your ads quickly and easily through a point-and-click interface.
  • Manually insert ads in locations that you determine yourself.
  • Exclude pages from having ads on them.
  • Verify your site with Webmaster Tools with just one click.

Related: How to Make Your First $1,000 Blogging

2. Shareaholic

Shareaholic plugin

If you’re not using Shareaholic on your site, you could be missing out on valuable traffic. The plugin is primarily designed to be a social sharing expansion, but it is so much more than that.

It is a money-making machine if you’re using it right. I am not endorsed by Shareaholic in any way, I just really do like it that much. Some of the many benefits include:

1. You can turn on floating social sharing.

Expanding your blog’s reach, in part, is about making it easy to share. Don’t go all overkill and put sharing buttons everywhere, but a good balance of near the top, on the side, or near the bottom of all your pages/articles will do.

You can’t monetize your blog if you don’t have people coming to it. If you’re paying attention, you’ll see we have the social sharing option enabled at the bottom of our articles as well.

Shareaholic floating social sharing buttons

2. There is a related posts feature.

This is likely far more important than you’re giving it credit for.

Why?

Bounce rate.

Everything is about bounce rate. Your Google search rankings, your self-esteem, your dinner choice tonight, the number of page views per visit each visitor has…everything.

The longer you keep people on your site, the more money you make. Plain and simple. If you can get your average pageviews/visit to increase from 1.17 to 1.59, you can expect to see a similar positive correlation in your earnings. It really is that important.

3. There are multiple ways to directly monetize your site.

a) You can enable ads amongst your related content at the bottom so that they don’t clutter the page and/or your sidebar. How many ads you place is up to you and can be tailored towards your advertising goals.

b) You can enable ads on all your social sharing pages. If someone chooses to share a post, it will display a targeted banner ad similar to the content they’re already viewing. How’s that for reaching your target audience?

c) While I have this option disabled as we utilize our own affiliate links, Shareaholic has the ability to append normal links to products into affiliate links that generate sales for you. Pretty cool.
And like I said, these are only but a few benefits. As with most trusted plugins, if you don’t like it, you can deactivate and uninstall. You need to give this one a try.

Related: How This RN Build a $100,000+/yr Side Hustle at 28

3. WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce WordPress plugin

WooCommerce is everything you ever needed to start an online shop packaged into one little click of a button.

From fully-functional product description pages to a shopping cart to checkout and refund pages, you really can sell physical or digital items online with essentially 0 coding knowledge.

If you have a unique idea, service, or product that you can sell, you’re missing out by not having WooCommerce installed. Consider this: with over 7 million installs, WooCommerce now powers over 30% of ALL retailer websites in the world.

It’s trusted because it works. It is also developed by the same people that designed WordPress, so that comes as no surprise.

WooCommerce eCommerce store example

And while the WooCommerce platform itself is open source and free to install, there are a number of paid enhancements that are well worth the money. However, it’s fully functional without any paid enhancements, so don’t let that discourage you.

One of my favorite add-ons is the WooCommerce Subscription Plugin. The subscription package allows you to make certain content private and then sell it on a renewing basis to your members.

If you’d like to have a membership product on your site with a renewing revenue stream, this is the easiest way to do it. It’s about $200/year but more than pays for itself if you’re generating revenue from it.

Plugins for Social Sharing, Email List Growth, and Search Engine Optimization

I considered putting this category first because while these plugins don’t lead to direct monetization of your blog, they are one of the most important when it comes to revenue growth. If you’re not constantly striving to expand your social reach, grow your email list, or optimize your website for search engine crawling, your priorities are seriously misaligned.

If your goal is to make blogging your primary income, then you need to scale. The sad truth is the highest-quality content in the world is still going to fall on deaf ears if you don’t have an audience that is willing to share it.

These plugins will help with that.

4. Yoast SEO

Best WordPress Plugin for SEO- Yoast SEO Plugin

You need to think of Yoast SEO as a liaison between you and Google. And on that same note, you need to think of Google as the top prize. Let that sink in for a minute – Google is the top prize.

Nearly every action you ever take should be with the search engine in mind. Why? Because traffic. Traffic is why. Search traffic is why. Purchase intent is why. It’s so important I can’t stress it enough.

Perhaps one of the best plugins on this list, Yoast SEO is essentially a framework of things to keep in mind when choosing a blog topic and writing the ensuing article. By implementing good keyword usage/research (highly-searched, long-tail keywords with the least competition) and including all the ingredients of good metadata, you prime yourself for Google to take notice.

Yoast SEO analysis
Now, none of this will help if Google doesn’t like your site to begin with (low domain authority, high spam score, poor backlink profile).

That said, if you’re constantly working on the parenthesized items and your scores start to improve, you allow Google to find your content easier by having excellent metadata. Google can learn what each page is about, which helps when ranking your content.

You start seeing targeted search traffic. You start seeing traffic with purchase intent; buyers found your website because they were actively looking for your product/information.

Be smart, help Google know how to index your page. Pinterest or Facebook may be your largest referrers now, but Google (or search engines in general) is the ultimate prize.

Related: How to Create a Sitemap with Yoast SEO

5. Social Warfare (or Shareaholic)

Social Warfare WordPress plugin

As I mentioned earlier, Shareaholic is a great social sharing tool and one of the better free plugins for WordPress. However, we’ve moved away from Shareaholic’s free plan to the Pro version of Social Warfare (there’s a free version as well).

Social Warfare simply one-ups the other social sharing plugins out there. More features, more versatility, more ways to share your content. If someone can’t share your article within 1 second of searching for share buttons, they’re just going to give up.

Attention spans keep getting smaller and smaller, so if your social sharing isn’t well placed or immediately available, readers are just going to move on.

Don’t make that mistake.

A single share could expand your reach by thousands of readers (the average Facebook user has 338 friends, and that assumes you get 0 further organic reach). Furthermore, social sharing increases the likelihood that you get backlinks to your site, and backlinks equals more authority, which means search engines rank your content higher.

Features of Social Warfare include:

  • Support for every popular social network.
  • Display total and individual share count.
  • Display floating share buttons.
  • Add “click to tweet” boxes within your content.
  • Display popular posts widget organized by share counts.
  • Upload Pinterest-specific images and descriptions to your posts (great for boosting Pinterest traffic).
  • Tracks social shares with UTM tracking code (see exactly how much traffic this plugin is sending your way).
  • Fully mobile responsive.

6. MailChimp for WordPress

Mailchimp plugin for wordpress

When you first start a blog, you quickly realize that there are a million different directions blogging “experts” recommend you take. You need to be on 1,347,234 social media sites, figure out Facebook ads, write 17 life-changing blog posts a day.

With so many distractions and directions you could take, you need to be really intentional about where you focus your time. The two areas with the biggest payout: SEO and your email list.

You need to be building an email list. Of all the big-name bloggers we know, including ourselves, not focusing on their email list early on is the number one mistake the majority of them say they made.

If someone gives you their email, they’re signaling to you that they are interested in what you have to say or what you’re offering. And those same people are way more likely to be interested in similar things in the future.

Email lists are excellent for building an engaged and loyal audience. They can also help boost your traffic, get to know your target demographic, and have a major impact on your bottom line.

MailChimp has a free version that will allow you to start building your email list right away. It allows you to design custom fields/forms for readers to sign up, create separate email lists for certain audiences, and gives you analytics on how well your emails are performing.

Note: We use ConvertKit for all our email marketing needs and highly recommend it. ConvertKit was created by bloggers for bloggers, and it’s by far the superior email marketing tool, in our opinion. ConvertKit used to only offer paid options, but now they have a free plan for up to 1,000 subscribers.

7. SumoMe

SumoMe Email List Building Plugin for WordPress

Have I mentioned that email lists are important?

Well, let me stress it further by adding a second plugin to this list that is an absolute must-have. For free, you can install SumoMe on your website and start testing numerous methods for collecting email addresses.

From a slim, interactive bar at the top of the page to polite pop-ups as you scroll down the page to minimized collection forms in page footers, SumoMe allows you to test which email method works best for you and your site. It’s one of the most versatile and user-friendly methods for collecting email addresses without burdening and/or annoying your readers.

The Pro version of SumoMe also integrates with all the major email service provides, so you don’t have to worry about manually entering new subscribers.

Plugins for Website Speed and Optimization

I really wanted to include this last category because I think it is something that a lot of bloggers never address and/or are afraid of. When terms like compression, minifying, and render-blocking JavaScript are all used in the same sentence it’s like this primordial fear is ignited in all of us. And it shouldn’t be that way. Website speed is super important.

Search engines have long placed an emphasis on user experience, and website speed is a huge factor in ranking algorithms. If your desktop or mobile speed scores are low, odds are Google (or any search engine, for that matter) is penalizing you for providing a poor service.

Ironically, installing numerous plugins on your WordPress website can negatively impact your speeds (plugins are resource-intensive and just add to the number of things your user has to download when they access your page). While plugins add to the functionality of your website, having too many can be a huge burden on your load times.

You can check out how your website scores using Google PageSpeed Insights. Google also suggests what you can do to speed up your page so you can get started on fixing things right now.

Furthermore, the awesome plugins below will help keep your website moving faster by compressing images, caching information for future visits, and hosting resource intensive images on outside servers.

8. JetPack

Jetpack by WordPress plugin

JetPack is like 16 plugins in 1, but the most interesting feature that relates directly to website speed is called Photon. This plugin uses a CDN (content delivery network) hosted by WordPress.com itself to display your images.

This speeds up your website by not burdening your servers with the task of delivering large image files to the user. Instead, they serve a saved image off the WordPress.com cloud that helps reduce your page load times.

Again, SEO rankings depend heavily on page load times, so anything that could plausibly reduce them gets a thumbs up in my book.

Plus the plugin is designed by Automattic (the parent company of WordPress), so you can pretty much always count on it to be functional/not break your website each time a new update comes out. Other cool features include downtime monitoring (get an email if your site goes down), daily backups, increased social exposure, and brute force prevention.

9. WP Smush

Image optimizer WP Smush plugin

JetPack serves a cloud-based image from a CDN, but you can speed up the process further by compressing unnecessarily large images that take a long time to load. WP Smush will crunch those file sizes down and serve a much cleaner, lighter version of media that you uploaded in your admin panel.

Better yet, WP Smush has a bulk cleaning tool that allows you to clean up dozens of pictures at a time. So if you’ve had your WordPress website up for a long time with thousands of images scattered about, don’t fret, just let WP Smush run in the background for a few hours and see just how much file space it cleans up.

10. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is one of the best plugins to help speed up your website

Think of WP Super Cache as doing the same thing Smush does for images except for the web pages (HTML) themselves. The plugin allows you to serve static HTML to the vast majority of your users.

This results in reduced bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived lag issues.

Don’t understand much of that? You don’t really need to. Just understand it’s a good thing. After all, that is the entire purpose of many of these plugins — to add functionality to our websites with code snippets that we would otherwise know nothing about.

Monetization Should Be Hardly Noticeable 

It may be hard to wrap your mind around why some of these plugins are important. However, each one serves its own purpose in making your site the best it can be. From improving your user experience (speed, design, etc.) to getting your name out there and making money (SEO, social sharing, ads, etc.), each piece is crucial to your success as a blogger.

My advice (from blogger to blogger): take the time to create a solid foundation for your blog using some of the plugins listed here, most of which are free. You’ll see progress a lot more quickly, and you’ll be more motivated to stay with this whole blogging thing for the long run.

Author
Ben Huber

Hi! I'm Ben. A personal finance nerd on a mission to help DollarSprout readers make and save more money. A quoted contributor for Business Insider, Business.com, Discover, Intuit, MSN, NBC News, Yahoo Finance and more, I work to help others live their financial best life.

29 comments
Liz
Liz

Brilliant post thank you. I’m just starting out so these tips will come in handy

Glad this was helpful for you, Liz!

michael
michael

I have been blogging for a while (on and off) and haven’t really looked into these plugins, thank you for sharing these tips, I tried jetpack and yoast. I will try woocommerce next

Stephanie
Stephanie

Great posts. I started a wedding blog and am going to use a lot of ur tips for it!

http://Www.sweetsouthernsteph.com

katecampion
katecampion

Thanks for that- am doing smush and super cache as we speak. Tried shareaholic but my theme already has share buttons that I can’t figure out how to get rid of, so it looked too messy even though I vastly prefer shareaholic’s aesthetic.

Linda Hatch
Linda Hatch

Thank you so much for this information! It was super helpful!

nekraj bharitya
nekraj bharitya

Awesome Post,
This is my first time on your blog and I really loved your each aritlce.
However as I seo guys I always has some cofusion:-
#1:-Making “Read more” link nofollow can give some boost in ranking[Many Gurus in BHW talks about it].
#2:-I want to rank my one of my site only in uk so what are the best link building practise to ranking in particler country?[I think this is not local SEO]

Waiting for reply.

Cheers Nekraj

P.S: Just bookmarked your blog.
P.P.S:Just subscribed in your email list.[wating for free knowledge is coming in my inbox]

finewineandtatertots
finewineandtatertots

I am SO genuinely thankful for this post! I came across it on Pinterest, pinned it, and came back to read it. Several of the plugins you mention are ones I have, but I recorded the other ones to make sure I can optimize my site for load time. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Finewineandtatertots.com

Susan Velez
Susan Velez

Hi Ben,

These are some great plugins for anyone who is just starting to start a blog. I use some of them that you listed. I couldn’t imagine running my blog without Yoast SEO.

I always use it to help me write my blog posts. While I don’t focus 100% on SEO. It’s nice to know that my blog post is SEO optimized before I hit publish.

Another great plugin that I would recommend for your list is Revive Old Posts. This plugin helps promote my old blog posts on auto-pilot so they don’t die in the blog archives.

Other than that plugin, I think you’ve covered some very important plugins that people should consider using. You definitely did a great job Ben.

I know anyone who is just getting started with WordPress will appreciate all the hard work you put into this writing this blog post. I know I do.

Thanks again and I hope you have a great day. 🙂

– Susan

Marianne
Marianne

How do I merge sumo me and mail chimp and will it be ok to use both of them ?im currently using sumo me but I started before with mail chimp

What we do is just import our new email signups via Sumome once a week into our Mailchimp database. If you go into Sumome and export your list into a CSV file, Mailchimp will let you upload that CSV file and add them to your list. Hope this helps!

Tiffany
Tiffany

This article was very helpful, thank you!

DNN
DNN

Good thing you posted this blog. Would you happen to know by chance a WordPress plugin that sends daily random quotes as WordPress drafts to your draft posts section so you can add content to the post with the random quote in it before publishing live to your blog? I found you on Pinterest and figured I’d ask. Thanks. 🙂

I don’t know of a specific plugin per se but it sounds like you’re looking for an RSS feed plugin of some sort.

I’ve used WP RSS Aggregator in the past and it works well.

If you can find an RSS feed for a site that provides quotes, you can import their RSS feed into your own WordPress dashboard and it will create post drafts.

I think this is almost exactly what you’re looking for!

Hearher reed
Hearher reed

This is a great post for me. I am starting my blog and it helps me with how to make money off my blog

Megan Perkins
Megan Perkins

I just started my own blog over the weekend that talks about my experiences coping with my son’s behavioral and mental disorders. I’ve wondered how people get the sharing buttons on their websites and now I know and will be implementing this on my own to help grow my site. Thank you so much for the info, and, if anyone would like to check out my site, it’s copingwithmykids.com.

Thanks again!

That’s awesome Megan, congrats! Ben and I have done a fair bit of work/volunteer stuff in the behavioral health field so its definitely something we’ll check out.

Thanks for stopping by and if you have any questions about getting started just give us a holler!

Danial Wilson
Danial Wilson

All your described elements are very essential. I am using Blog Designer WordPress plugin for my blogging site. It is perfect plugin to design any blogging site. It has all kind of features what you have never seen in any blogging plugin.

Katie
Katie

Ben,

Thank you so much for compiling this list of valuable resources! I can’t wait to start implementing some of these as I start my own blog. As a fellow healthcare professional (by day, thankfully), it’s encouraging to see you having success in both of your ventures. Best of luck with your endeavors, and thanks again for the advice and tips!

Sure thing!

And thank you. Really happy about how the way things are going with both right now but I wont be crushed if this eventually replaces the current nursing setup 🙂

AB Rajputt
AB Rajputt

Hi Ben,

These plugins are so good to have on a wordpress blog or website.

If someone really want good result from their website these are quite essential. Thanks for compiling them into a single list.

Thanks for sharing it’s really worth for me and many more.

Regards
AB Rajputt

Leo Fernandez
Leo Fernandez

Amazing Content. Keep up the good work. Thank you 🙂

JOHN MULINDI
JOHN MULINDI

Learned some new and useful plugins from this post. Thanks for sharing.

Kristina
Kristina

I DO NOT recommend Shareaholic for bloggers. They owe me (and at least 2 other bloggers I am aware of) money for ad services- we are going on 7 months now. I have submitted countless support tickets, tweets, emails, etc. and have gotten only 1 response, promising me a payment that did not happen. Bloggers be ware!!! There are better ways to monetize your blog and get paid on a monthly schedule.

Yikes, that’s definitely not a good look. We don’t use them anymore (mostly because of speed issues more than anything), but if it turns out their non-paying to affiliates we’ll definitely be removing them. Thanks for the heads up Kristina – hope you get your issues resolved. 🙁

Kavitha
Kavitha

Hi Ben,
Nice post. I use almost all the plugins you have mentioned. I used Woocommerce to create store for Affiliate marketing. Do you have any method or idea to use woocommerce for affiliate marketing? Thank you.

The last time I used WooCommerce, there actually wasn’t the ability to use external links/sell affiliate products (which was a huge shortfall) — I think in recent updates you can now use external URLs which is really nice/keeps pace with other platforms (like Shopify). We don’t often promote actual physical products so using WooCommerce isn’t as functional for us anymore but it could still be useful if you sell physical products yourself and would like to mix in affiliate products, too.

Joel
Joel

Great post!! I run a personal finance blog myself, and I have been looking for ways to monetize it. I think I am gonna try either shareholic or social warfare. Again thanks for sharing this article.

Brain
Brain

Useful article. Almost all of these plugins I use. Also from new recently found stepFORM which allows you to create great forms.

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