17 Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers to Increase Blog Traffic

If you publish blog posts on the regular, increasing traffic is likely an important priority. Luckily, there are countless WordPress plugins for bloggers that will help you drive more visitors to your posts, earn more subscribers, and boost the authority of your blog.

In this article, we’ll go over essential plugins for bloggers. Each one plays a critical role in attracting more traffic to your WordPress articles and posts. Let’s get started.

Why use a WordPress plugin to increase traffic?

Quality traffic plays a critical role in the success of your WordPress website. With more site traffic, you can boost awareness about your brand, persuade advertisers to promote on your site, and increase product sales. All of these benefits can add revenue to your business.

There's no easy, one-off solution for increasing visitors — several factors affect how much traffic your blog earns. You must create engaging content, frequently promote your content on multiple channels, and use relevant keywords to rank your content in search engine results. It’s a daunting task for a small business or a single blogger.

Fortunately, WordPress plugins are here to help you. There are plenty of plugins available to assist you with SEO keyword optimization, social media sharing, page performance, and contact management, all of which help you to get more visitors in less time.

Below, we’ll cover must-have WordPress plugins for bloggers that will help you increase traffic to your blog. Once you’ve earned that traffic, it’s time to download a traffic plugin to analyze it and optimize it.

1. HubSpot WordPress Plugin

Before you can start increasing your traffic, it’s important to ask yourself, “Who is visiting my website?” With the HubSpot WordPress plugin, you’ll get the tools you need to answer this question and understand where to focus your efforts.

The HubSpot WordPress Plugin automatically tracks your visitors' interactions on your WordPress website and organizes them as contacts within HubSpot CRM. You can also add a form to capture visitors' information, which goes straight to your CRM.

With built-in analytics, you can get a holistic view of your marketing performance in an easy-to-understand dashboard. You can see which pages are driving the most leads, what days and times are most effective for publishing new content, and what channels are sending the most traffic. After collecting this data, you’ll have everything you need to grow traffic strategically.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Website Analytics: Leverage data about your existing traffic to create new traffic driving strategies.
• Marketing Automation: Engage existing subscribers to keep them coming back to your website.
• Live Chat: Get users to stay longer on your website, increasing dwell time and boosting your SEO.

Best For

Intermediate-to-advanced bloggers with a growing subscriber base.

Pricing: Free

2. Yoast SEO

According to Backlinko, less than 1% of Google search users click links on the second results page. With help from the fantastic Yoast SEO plugin, you can optimize your content to rank on the first.

Yoast SEO is the top on-page SEO tool for WordPress — among its numerous free features, it offers title and meta description templates, optimization for images, XML sitemaps, readability analysis, breadcrumbs, and a tool that automatically sets canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content. Yoast takes care of every tiny detail required to improve your posts for search engines.

Still, perhaps the most standout feature of Yoast is the Content Analysis Section, which displays red, green, and orange lights against the parameters that are listed below your content section. These lights tell you how well or poorly your website follows SEO best practices. With so many features, this plugin frees up your time so you can write high-quality content.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Content Analysis: Improve your content on a qualitative basis so that you can create better content that drives more traffic.
• XML Sitemap: Create a search-engine-friendly sitemap that gets your pages crawled more quickly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Canonical URLs: Avoid duplicate URLs in the SERPs, which would confuse users and decrease traffic to your blog.

Best For

Beginner-to-advanced bloggers who’d like to fulfill basic SEO requirements on their blog.

Pricing: Free; $99/year (Pro)

3. Hummingbird Pro

You can optimize all you want, but it won’t matter much if your website is slow to load. Page performance is key in determining how your pages rank in search, not to mention how visitors feel about your user experience.

Created by WPMU DEV, the Hummingbird Pro plugin modifies aspects of your WordPress site to shave precious seconds off your loading time. The plugin minifies file load position, compresses website files, performs browser caching, and sends files via a content delivery network (CDN). Plus, the tool scans for and fixes files that slow down your site.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Content Delivery Network: Deliver content more quickly to your users to keep them coming back to your website.
• Caching: Keep a user’s browsing data for up to ten years to personalize the experience and improve loading times.
• Uptime Monitor: Ensure your site is actually up and running; an unavailable site won’t drive any traffic.

Best For

Beginner bloggers who’d like to optimize their blog’s performance without tinkering too much with individual assets, CDNs, or optimization plugins.

Pricing: $7.50/mo

4. Monarch

Monarch is a powerful social media plugin that encourages visitors to share your content on multiple networks. You can choose from more than 20 social networks to link on your website with a custom collection of sharing options. Sharing buttons may be added to five areas of your site: the sidebar, images and videos, automatic pop-ups, automatic fly-ins, and above and below content.

With Monarch, you can also set custom triggers for pop-up and fly-in social media buttons to prompt action at key moments in the visitor experience. When done right, social sharing can help you generate tremendous WordPress traffic from multiple sources.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Social Sharing Buttons: Make it easier for users to distribute your content to their friends and followers across social platforms.
• Social Sharing Stats: Learn which button configurations are most successful so that you can add them into every page and post.

Best For

Bloggers who’d like to increase their presence on social media platforms without needing to post themselves.

Pricing: $89/ year (Yearly Access); $249 one-time payment (Lifetime Access)

5. Bloom

Email marketing is an effective way to drive consistent traffic to your site and to keep potential customers updated about your business. But first, you actually need to get visitors on your mailing list. Bloom is an email opt-in plugin from Elegant Themes that helps you generate and convert leads this way.

Bloom allows you to create six different opt-in pop-ups that are triggered by timed delays, so they can appear when a visitor reaches the bottom of a page or even after they make a purchase. Bloom also seamlessly integrates with 19 email marketing platforms for you to send messages to your subscribers.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Targeted Content: Show specific offers to specific users, keeping them longer on the page and ensuring they return to your website.
• Gated Content: Limit access to certain types of content based on subscriber status, which will ensure users sign up and return to access more content.
• A/B Testing: Find out which methods and copy are most effective for your site visitors.

Best For

Beginner bloggers who’d like to build their subscriber list from the bottom up.

Pricing: $89/ year (Yearly Access); $249 one-time payment (Lifetime Access)

Note: Bloom and Monarch are made by Elegant Themes. They would be included in the same subscription.

6. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is another popular WordPress plugin for lead generation. Many visitors will visit your website once and never plan to come back — this plugin helps you to remind them about your site by capturing their email.

The OptinMonster plugin can track user behavior quite effectively and captures attention with relevant messages at the right moments, including exit intents. It also lets you build automated, personalized offers based on visitor activity to maximize the chance of a conversion.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Personalized Offers: Show personalized offers, down to the subscriber’s name, to keep them coming back to your website.
• Traffic Redirection: Send users to the most important pages on your website, ensuring that they’re exposed to high quality content.
• A/B Testing: Find out which methods and copy are most effective to your site visitors.

Best For

Advanced bloggers who want to establish a highly personalized opt-in strategy for prospective subscribers.

Pricing: $16/mo (Basic); $32/mo (Plus); $49/mo (Pro); $82/mo (Growth)

7. All In One SEO

All In One SEO is one of the best plugins for those looking to increase organic search traffic. From submitting XML sitemaps to adding meta tags to notifying search engines about changes in your website, this plugin does everything to simplify your job.

All In One SEO is known for being a simple solution and requires little to no configuration to start working. Just install and activate the plugin, and it will automatically implement measures to make your content more indexable. Of course, you can configure the plugin to your needs, but this isn’t necessary to start seeing results.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• SEO Schema Markup: Increase the chances of winning a featured snippet and driving more traffic to your blog.
• Google AMP Integration: Create better mobile experiences for users, ensuring that they stay on your site.
• Video, News, and RSS Sitemap: Go beyond a basic XML sitemap and ensure your videos, news, and news pages are crawled by Google.

Best For

Intermediate-to-advanced bloggers who want to fulfill advanced SEO requirements.

Pricing: Free; $49.60/year (Basic); $199.60/year (Pro); $299.60/year (Elite)

8. Revive Old Posts

It’s a time-consuming task to post your content on social media, especially if you publish several blog posts per week. The Revive Old Posts plugin eliminates this friction by automatically sharing your old and new WordPress posts to your social media accounts. You choose the social platform, decide the number of posts to share, and set time intervals between shares.

As the name suggests, this plugin was created to give a new life to your old posts. As you continue to create content, older posts can get buried and hard work gets wasted. When you reshare posts on social media sites, they receive more exposure and you get a new audience for those articles.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Social Media Scheduling: Schedule older posts to your social media profiles to drive referral traffic to your site.
• Social Media Auto Post: Automatically share older posts on your social profiles with little manual work.
• Auto Republish: Republish old posts with new published dates, which can help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Best For

Bloggers with a growing library of older content that they’d like to republish and reshare on social media.

Pricing: Free; $75/year (Personal); $149/year (Business); $299/year (Marketer)

9. WP Notification Bars

The lightweight WP Notification Bars plugin lets you put customized, mobile-friendly alert bars on your WordPress pages, which can help drive more traffic to specific posts on your site. It’s also perfect for notifying visitors about new content and product promotions.

To use the plugin, just set the notification bar in the header or footer section of your website. Then, customize the bar to fit your brand’s style by changing the color, font size, and call-to-action button.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• CTA Button: Add a button that drives traffic to specific pages on and off your website.
• Facebook or Google Visitor Toggle: Show different notification bars to different types of users to personalize the experience.
• Responsive: Ensure the notification bar doesn’t hamper the user experience.

Best For

Beginner bloggers who’d like to add a simple notification bar at the top of their blog.

Pricing: Free

10. WPtouch

A growing number of people are using smartphones to access the web. This means that all websites, including those powered by WordPress, must be mobile-friendly. A major aspect of mobile-friendliness is responsive design, in which page elements shift and resize to adapt to screen dimensions.

A responsive website improves your search ranking and the visitors’ experience, and a mobile-friendly plugin like WPtouch can help you get there. WPtouch automatically adds a simple mobile theme to your site without modifying any code. This improves the browsing experience for smartphone users, and helps Google index your mobile site and place you higher in search results.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Multi-Language Support: Ensure your international readers reach a reader-friendly version of your mobile website.
• Device and Browser Support: Determine which devices and browsers your mobile website will support.

Best For

Bloggers who’d like to create a simple, mobile-friendly version of their website without needing to tinker with code.

Pricing: Free; $79/year (Pro); $189/year (Business); $259/year (Developer); $359/year (Enterprise)

11. Quick Page/Post Redirect

Broken links can quickly drive visitors away from your content. Luckily, you can fix those broken links by redirecting 404 errors to another existing page. That way, you keep your visitors on your site and engaged with your blog.

Using jQuery, the QuickPage/Post Redirect plugin lets you redirect old URLs to new URLs in under five minutes. This plugin works well with WordPress navigation menus and the custom post types as well, and also handles 301 and 302 redirects.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• 301 Redirects: Permanently redirect outdated pages to updated ones, creating a seamless user experience.
• 302 Redirects: Temporarily redirect pages, creating a seamless user experience.

Best For

Bloggers who’ve recently migrated to WordPress or who have a library of outdated content to redirect.

Pricing: Free

12. Rate My Post

Have you ever noticed star ratings in Google search? Rate My Post is a review system plugin that allows your visitors to rate each of your posts out of five. It implements review structured data so that Google can easily index these ratings and display them with your page link. A high rating will encourage more people to visit your site — just make sure you’re publishing quality content to earn those stars.

The plugin’s shortcodes make it easy to display the rating poll on your site. Then, you can use schema markup to display the aggregate ratings as a rich snippet in your search results. And if stars seem a bit too cliché, you can use hearts, smileys, thumbs-up, or trophies instead.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Review Schema: Include star ratings in your Google search result listing, encouraging click-throughs.
• Rating Analytics: Learn which types of users leave better ratings for improved targeting in the future.
• GDPR Compliance: Show that your users can trust you — and that search engines can, too.

Best For

Bloggers that publish rate-able content such as recipes, tutorials, or tips.

Pricing: Free

13. XML Sitemaps

An XML sitemap lists the important pages on your website, which helps search engines crawl your webpages and understand your site structure. This plugin has helped millions of WordPress users create their own sitemaps with ease.

For your sitemap to work on a site like Google, there’s a long list of guidelines you have to follow. Fortunately, the XML Sitemaps plugin does all the heavy lifting. It supports all WordPress-generated pages as well as custom URLs. Plus, the tool notifies Google, Yahoo, and Bing about changes to your site.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• XML Sitemap: Create a search-engine-friendly sitemap that gets your pages crawled more quickly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Best For

Beginner bloggers who’d like to create an XML sitemap without additional SEO frills.

Pricing: Free

14. LinkPatrol

Made by the Search Engine Journal, LinkPatrol allows you to continuously monitor your internal and external links.

Internal linking, or links to other pages on your site, helps search engines crawl your content and denotes page importance. Given the role of internal links in your relevance score, you don’t want any unnecessary links on your website.

With the premium LinkPatrol plugin, you can track, review, and remove any irrelevant or spammy links in your posts and pages. The plugin scans your site, sorts the links by anchor text, and lets you manually delete specific links.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Spammy Link Deletion: Improve the trustworthiness of your site by removing bad links.
• No Follow Addition: Add a ‘nofollow’ meta tag to links that could hurt your site’s trustworthiness.

Best For

Bloggers with an aging library of content that could potentially have outgoing links to spammy websites.

Pricing: $50 one-time fee (Blogger); $100 one-time fee (Consultant); $200 one-time fee (Agency)

15. Inline Related Posts

Inline Related Posts helps you capture the attention of your visitors by placing links to related posts and offers in the body of your blog posts. This encourages readers to visit other pages on your website, increasing your page views and reducing your bounce rate.

Inline Related Posts is an especially fitting option if you'd rather display related posts within your posts, instead of in the sidebar. You can choose from more than 20 different style combinations of links to match your brand, including blue links, lists, and links with thumbnails included.

For more plugins like this one, see our list of the best WordPress related posts plugins.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Related Post Widgets: Improve your internal linking structure while driving more traffic to other posts in your library.

Best For

Bloggers with an expansive library of content that offers strong internal linking opportunities.

Pricing: Free; $47/year (Personal), plus $5/year per additional site; $145 one-time fee

16. TaxoPress

By tagging your post smartly, you can push your content to the top of search results. But doing that correctly is tough. To help, the TaxoPress plugin lets you manage the taxonomies of your posts. This plugin makes it easy to configure tags, categories, and custom taxonomies, and it comes with a great tag management system. Additionally, TaxoPress allows you to mass-tag posts (more than 50 posts once) and auto-link tags in post content, all for free.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Category and Tag Auto-Addition: Improve the categorization of your posts and pages by automatically adding related terms.
• Automatic Internal Linking: Add links to internal archive pages wherever a related term appears.

Best For

Bloggers with an expansive library of content that would benefit from automated categories and tags.

Pricing: Free; $69/year (Single); $129/year (Business); $199/year (Unlimited)

17. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is a powerful caching plugin that implements multiple forms of caching on your website, and also optimizes delivery with a CDN integration.

In simple terms, caching is the process of storing website files in a location where they can be easily accessed later, such as local storage on a visitor’s computer. When a user returns to the website, their browser will load the cached files instead of requesting them from the server a second time. Caching boosts page speed, which in turn boosts rankings and user experience quality.

Downloaded over one million times to date, this leading plugin is compatible with other advanced plugins and works wonderfully with any theme installed on your website. Just make sure that your WordPress host is okay with you using a caching plugin like this one.

Key Traffic Driving Features

• Lazy Loading: Improve page performance and the user experience by making images load as the user scrolls.
• Code Minification: Minify code that doesn’t serve your website, improving your SEO.
• WebP Image Conversion (Pro): Make images load more quickly, improving your performance metrics and SEO.

Best For

Bloggers who need a caching or performance plugin without additional SEO frills.

Pricing: Free; $8.25/mo (Pro)

Essential WordPress Plugins for Bloggers to Drive Traffic

Quality blog traffic can boost your brand awareness and encourage visitors to purchase your products, adding revenue to your bottom line. The above-mentioned plugins can get your content ranked on search engines, shared on social media, and enjoyed by a growing audience. With this toolbox of plugins, you’ll be one step closer to increasing traffic to your blog.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.