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Our new course — Monetize Your Website — helps you turn the value you’re already creating into sustainable income, using the built-in tools available on WordPress.com.
Whether you share knowledge, create content, or offer services, this course walks you through practical, beginner-friendly ways to get paid. No traditional eCommerce setup required.
The course is fully self-paced, so you can dip into individual lessons as needed or follow along from start to finish at your own pace.
Across a series of practical lessons, you’ll learn how to:
If you’re already creating something valuable, this course helps you take the next step in a way that fits your site.
You’ll learn what’s possible on WordPress.com and get practical steps you can use right away, without setting up a full commerce store or reworking your site.
If you’re new to WordPress.com or ready to keep leveling up, check out our other popular courses and video tutorials:
There are thousands of WordPress plugins out there. But to get started, you really only need a handful.
We pulled real usage data from WordPress.com sites to see which plugins people rely on, and we selected the ones that address core website needs. Then, I personally tested each plugin and looked at user reviews.
This guide covers the most essential WordPress plugins. These are helpful if you’re launching your first WordPress site, filling gaps in your current setup, or something in between:
Let’s explore each of them in detail.

The Jetpack plugin is a comprehensive suite of tools that help launch and grow your WordPress site, which essentially replaces five or six separate plugins.
Instead of installing separate tools for backups, security, speed, and analytics, you get everything in a single dashboard.
I like that the essential features activate with one click — no digging through settings:

Unlike smaller plugins that can go months without updates, Jetpack is actively maintained.
You’re not left dealing with compatibility issues or security gaps when WordPress releases new versions.
If you’re new to WordPress or just don’t want to spend hours researching plugins, Jetpack covers the basics in one install — security, speed, stats, and content tools.
You can always add specialized plugins later, but Jetpack gives you a solid foundation to start.

Akismet filters out over 99.99% of spam comments, form submissions, and texts, keeping your site and inbox clean.
The best part of Akismet is that you probably won’t even notice it’s there.
Occasionally, I review blocked comments, but I find it to be so good at its job that I do it more out of curiosity than necessity.

Tip: Akismet is included in Jetpack Security, so if you’re a WordPress.com user on any plan, Akismet is already installed on your site.
If your site allows comments or form submissions, spam is inevitable.
Akismet handles it in the background, so you don’t have to manually filter through junk — or worse, let it pile up and make your site look neglected.

Page Optimize speeds up your website by removing unnecessary site code to reduce processing time.
It also optimizes which elements of your site are processed first, so users never see a blank screen.
My years of working with web developers taught me that not all code is created equal. There are many routes to the same destination, but some are more efficient than others.
With third-party themes and plugins adding extra weight, Page Optimize helps keep things clean on the backend.
Page Optimize removes unnecessary code and optimizes script timing so your pages load faster — and since it’s built into WordPress.com, there’s no setup or configuration required.
Site speed matters more than most people realize: visitors bounce when pages take too long, and search engines factor load time into rankings.
A faster site means better engagement, lower bounce rates, and more visibility in search results.

Crowdsignal Forms is a WordPress plugin that lets you add custom polls to individual pages or as pop-ups on your website.
Polls are one of the easiest ways to boost engagement — readers can respond to your content with a single click and see how others voted.
They’re also great for collecting feedback. Unlike emails or comment boxes (where you mostly hear from unhappy people), quick polls have low friction, which means higher response rates.
For example, a recipe website could create pop-ups with simple questions like “What’s your favorite meal?” to gain real insight into its audience.

Crowdsignal Forms helps boost user engagement, which is a vital element of successful websites.
This plugin is a low-lift way to make your site visitors feel like their opinions are valued.
It can also provide critical information about visitors that might not be available through traditional analytics tools.

WooCommerce lets you turn your WordPress site into a full online store — product pages, a shopping cart, checkout, and other essentials.
And unlike selling on marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon, you don’t pay a built-in marketplace commission on each sale — though standard payment processing fees still apply.
The setup walks you through the basics, and there’s a massive ecosystem of extensions if you need extras like subscriptions, bookings, or gift cards.

If you want to sell online with WordPress, WooCommerce is the standard. It’s open-source, so you own your store and data — and with thousands of extensions available, you can add pretty much any feature you need as your business grows.

Gravatar Enhanced humanizes WordPress writers and commenters with customizable and clickable profiles.
If you write for a larger blog with multiple authors (like I do here at WordPress), your Gravatar will show up alongside your posts.
Gravatars are also used for commenting in forums and on your blog posts in the WordPress reader.
Gravatar Enhanced puts a face and bio behind every comment and post, which helps build trust and a sense of community on your site.

Yoast SEO optimizes your website’s content and structure to improve search engine rankings.
Some of this happens automatically — like generating XML sitemaps and adding schema markup so that search engines understand your content.
Other features work in real time as you write: Yoast flags missing meta descriptions, analyzes keyword usage, checks readability, and suggests improvements before you hit publish.

If you’re new to SEO, it’s a practical way to learn about what matters without getting lost in technical details.
Tip: If you don’t want a separate SEO plugin, WordPress.com includes built-in SEO features powered by Jetpack — including SEO titles and descriptions, sitemaps, social previews, and AI writing assistance.
Search is still one of the main ways people discover new websites. If your content isn’t optimized, you’re missing out on traffic.
Yoast gives you clear, actionable feedback on every page — so you can improve your rankings without needing to become an SEO expert.

Google Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google that brings multiple Google tools into one dashboard.
Instead of logging into separate accounts for Analytics, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and AdSense, you can see everything in one place — right inside WordPress.
You can track how people find your site through Google Search, which pages get the most traffic, how fast your pages load, and how much you’re earning from ads.
If you’re not a data person, don’t worry — the dashboards focus on the metrics that actually matter without overwhelming you with charts you’ll never use.
Understanding your audience and site performance is critical for growing your website. Without this data, it’s hard to know what’s working and what isn’t.
Tip: If you don’t need the full Google toolkit, WordPress.com includes Jetpack Stats on all plans — a simpler way to track visitors, top content, and traffic sources without connecting external accounts.

WPForms Lite is a beginner-friendly form builder that lets you add professional-looking forms to your site in minutes.
Forms are useful when you need specific information from visitors, like contact details from potential customers, project specs from partners, or applications for review.
Instead of messy back-and-forth emails, you get structured submissions with the fields you need — and since forms send to your inbox without exposing your email address, you avoid spam and scraping.

Every website needs a way for visitors to get in touch. Forms let you control that process — you decide what information to collect, and submissions arrive organized and ready to act on.

MailPoet is an email marketing platform built into WordPress. You can send newsletters, one-off campaigns, or automated emails — all without leaving your dashboard.
Because it lives inside WordPress, there’s no need to sync contacts or set up integrations with external tools. Your subscriber data and site activity are already connected.
This WordPress plugin also includes signup forms, pop-ups, subscription blocks, and automated workflows that are all drag-and-drop, with no code required.

Email is still one of the most direct ways to reach your audience. Regular newsletters keep your site top of mind and bring readers back, turning one-time visitors into loyal followers.

Imagify automatically compresses and optimizes images, dramatically reducing page load times. High-resolution images can significantly slow down your site, but Imagify works in the background to shrink file sizes while keeping images sharp.
I especially appreciate that it can retroactively bulk optimize existing images — you don’t need to manually compress or re-upload every photo you’ve already added to your site library.

Oversized images are one of the main culprits for slow sites and one of the easiest things to fix. Imagify handles it automatically.

All-In-One WP Migration creates complete site backups that you can export and import with a single click, making it simple to move your entire WordPress site between hosts or keep a backup on hand.
I’ve used this plugin multiple times to move my personal website and client
Andrew Adetitun runs The King’s Monologue, a media network teaching African history to over 160,000 followers across different channels.
He noticed that African history wasn’t just underrepresented — it was actively obscured. Achievements credited to the wrong civilizations. Truth buried in books most people would never read.
So he started making content. First on TikTok. Then YouTube. One video went viral — a few million views in days. The audience grew from there.
What started as a few videos turned into something much bigger:

Andrew is a qualified teacher by training. He spent years teaching high school.
But his real passion was history — specifically, making African history accessible to people who’d never pick up a niche textbook.

There’s a lot of truth hidden in books. But most people aren’t book enthusiasts — they come across things in their day-to-day life. YouTube is probably the most powerful medium for reaching them.
YouTube became his classroom. Documentaries became his lesson plans. And the community that formed around The King’s Monologue became his students.
Social platforms are borrowed land. Andrew knew that.
When you’re on social networks, there’s always that thing in the back of your mind — if they one day close or cancel your channel, where is everyone going to go?
He wanted a home base. A place he actually owned. Somewhere to:
A Linktree wouldn’t cut it. He wanted control.
Here’s the twist: Andrew used to be a WordPress developer. He knows how to build sites from scratch — find hosting, install WordPress, customize themes, write code.
But he didn’t have time for any of that.
Even just thinking about it was giving me a headache. Finding hosting, installing WordPress, going through all that rigmarole.
So he went the simpler route. He signed up for WordPress.com, saw the AI website builder, and gave it a try.
Use our AI website builder for free today.

The structure of his new website came together in minutes. No code. No theme hunting. Just prompts and tweaks:

It was like working with a theme and being able to customize it on the fly without knowing any code.
He kept the design simple — limited colors, consistent thumbnails — and let the builder do the rest.
The website builder did most of the work. I just stuck to a strict theme for fonts and thumbnails, and it gave the whole site a professional look without me doing much at all.

At the end of last year, Andrew launched a Kickstarter for his book on African history. The website was the launchpad.
I had a page set up — tkmedu.com/book-launch — and a lot of traffic came through that link, which then took people to the Kickstarter.

The campaign was successfully funded.
The website was a big part of that. It’s done its job so far.
Besides, the site is an educational resource, which includes:

From here, Andrew wants to expand. He already hired a website admin to help populate content — transcribing his videos and livestreams, editing, and posting.
Next, he plans to attract contributing authors — vetted and edited — filling the site with hundreds, eventually thousands of articles.
A searchable archive of African history that ranks in Google and serves researchers, students, and curious minds.
Andrew is a former WordPress developer who chose not to build his site the hard way.
WordPress.com gave him a faster path. The AI website builder got the structure up in minutes. Managed WordPress hosting also means he’s not dealing with updates, security, or server maintenance.
He focuses on the mission. The platform handles the rest.
Andrew’s story started on TikTok. It grew on YouTube. But his website is the place he actually owns — and the launchpad for everything that comes next.
Yours can be too.
Use our AI website builder for free today.

WordPress.com has launched an official connector for Claude — the first of its kind for a WordPress host.
This means that you can now safely connect Claude to your site and know that the integration is officially supported by both Anthropic and WordPress.com.
A few months ago, we introduced MCP access to let AI agents work with real WordPress.com site context — something most standalone AI tools don’t have.
With our recent addition of OAuth 2.1 support, those integrations became both more secure and easier to authorize using the agents you already rely on.
This partnership builds on that foundation by bringing WordPress.com into Claude’s connectors directory — a curated set of trusted tools with clearly defined permissions.
For WordPress.com users, this removes the setup hassle. You can connect Claude to your site in a few clicks and always see what it can access.

Ready to use the WordPress.com Claude Connector? Here’s how to get set up:

This connection gives Claude read-only access to your site content, meaning it won’t be able to create, delete, or update content. You can also revoke Claude’s access at any time by removing it from your connected apps in Claude or disabling MCP access on WordPress.com.
Once set up, Claude can answer questions using your real WordPress.com site data, not estimates or generic guidance.
For example:
These prompts are grounded in the same data and tools you already use in WordPress.com — they’re now all easily surfaced through the Claude interface.
For more ideas, explore the set of example prompts in our documentation.

We’re thrilled to share this partnership with you, and we encourage you to connect Claude to your WordPress.com sites today for easier site analysis and site-specific insights.
And because this connector is built and supported in partnership, it’s designed to evolve alongside both platforms.
You can connect Claude to your WordPress.com site now, explore the documentation to get started, or share feedback with us as we continue building deeper AI integrations into WordPress.com.
Use our AI website builder for free today.

Finding your next favorite blog shouldn’t feel like scrolling through an endless feed, hoping something good appears. And for creators, getting discovered shouldn’t require figuring out an algorithm.
Back in 2009, WordPress.com launched Freshly Pressed, a curated collection of posts that entertained, enlightened, and inspired. It was our way of saying “we like you, we really like you” to creators, and amplifying their great work for others to find.
We paused Freshly Pressed a few years back, but the idea never really went away. And the case for human-curated discovery is stronger than ever.
It’s time to bring Freshly Pressed back.
Freshly Pressed is where we highlight standout content in the WordPress.com Reader. Unlike algorithmic feeds that reward engagement metrics, Freshly Pressed features posts because they’re genuinely good. Thoughtful, well-crafted, and worth your time.
You’ll find a blogger sharing travel stories next to a hobbyist breaking down sourdough science next to a poet who just hit publish for the first time.


Freshly Pressed lives in the WordPress.com Reader, where your post reaches readers who are actively looking for new voices to follow. When you get featured, you’ll see it — in traffic, in new subscribers, and in comments from people genuinely interested in what you have to say.

Want to get featured? Just keep publishing. There’s no application, no special settings to enable. If you’re on WordPress.com or use the Jetpack plugin on your WordPress site, you’re already in the running.
We’re drawn to posts that surprise us. If it made you excited to hit publish, we want to read it.
We look for posts that:
When your post gets featured, you’ll receive a notification and a boost of traffic and subscribers from readers actively looking for quality content.
Not publishing on WordPress.com yet? Get started for free and your next post could be the one we feature.
There’s no engagement score. No trending algorithm to chase. Freshly Pressed is a slower, more deliberate kind of discovery — one that rewards the writing itself. We think that’s worth protecting.
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