Brandon Graves
More than 409 million people view over 20 billion pages created with WordPress. Every month more than 70 million new posts are created on interfaces built with the open-source platform. All these statistics point towards a single fact that WordPress is the foremost blogging tool in the world. In this post, we are presenting a list of some essential plugins for WordPress blogs. These tools will help in improving the all-round performance of your interface. With so many existing entities and new ones being launched daily, it is necessary that you take some steps to keep ahead of the competition. Each tool mentioned in this post is a high-quality product and is among the top-rated plugins in its domain. Let’s take a look at the notable features of all the items.
1. Yoast SEO
Creating a WordPress blog is easy but getting it in front of relevant audiences is a completely different ballgame. One of the most essential strategies you need to implement is search engine optimization. The first plugin on our list, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular products in the WordPress universe. It lets you optimize key on-page elements like titles and meta descriptions. You can enable its XML Sitemap functionality to give a better view of your blog to search engines. Yoast SEO can also help bloggers evaluate the readability of their content and optimizing it for relevant keywords.
2. Jetpack
Another tool that must be on the priority list of every blog owner is Jetpack. This powerful plugin is presented by Automattic, the group that manages the open-source CMS. Jetpack is a suite of tools that helps in securing and maintaining a website besides improving its performance. There are various free and premium modules that you can activate based on your requirements. The product protects an interface from malware, brute-force attacks, and other hazards. It can be used to implement secure login and 2-factor authentication on your blog. You can also use it to view analytics reports to understand your audience in a better manner.
3. Contact Form 7
Every blogger wants to encourage audience interaction and engagement. A contact form is an essential feature that helps in this purpose. Contact Form 7 is one of the simplest plugins that a website owner can use to create different types of forms. This open-source product generates forms that support Ajax-enabled submissions. You can also eliminate spam by integrating CAPTCHA features in your forms. Blog owners have to consider privacy laws while accessing visitors’ personal information. The plugin, by default, does not store users’ data in a database or any external server. This means that you can create your subscription base without the fear of violating any law.
4. WP Smush
The next product on our list of must-have plugins for WordPress blogs is WP Smush. It is a 5-star rated image compression plugin with over 1 million active installations. Today’s blogs are not limited to text-based content. They include images and pictorial representations like charts and graphs that help in explaining a topic to the audience. WP Smush helps in compressing and resizing images without compromising their quality. This helps in optimizing the files and ensuring that they do not overload your blog and make it slow. The product can be used with the Gutenberg editor and is multisite compatible.
5. Editorial Calendar
You need to post regularly in order to engage your readers. Bloggers need to plan their publishing schedule well in advance so that they can post at regular intervals. Editorial Calendar as the name clearly suggests is a plugin for creating your publishing calendar. It will give you a complete view of your posting schedule. You can change the publishing dates simply by dragging and dropping items. In case, you run an interface that posts content created by multiple authors, you can manage their schedules easily with this plugin.
6. List Category Posts
Categories help in organizing your blog’s content and improving its user experience. The List Category Posts plugin enables users to list posts by category in a post or page. The task can be done easily through a shortcode. You can specify a category by name or ID and define the number of posts that will be displayed. You can also choose to show the author name, excerpt, publishing date, and any other custom field values.
7. Social Warfare
Social media has emerged as an effective platform for bloggers to promote their posts. The Social Warfare plugin helps in adding social sharing buttons that can be used by visitors to share the content on their feeds. Unlike other tools in its domain, this product does not affect your website’s speed. It will enable you to add social sharing buttons of all top networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Users can define the location of the buttons and place them above or below a post. They can also display the tabs at both locations and create floating buttons.
Conclusion
A blog needs to be maintained properly and promoted effectively in order to become successful. All the plugins for WordPress blogs mentioned in this post will help in securing, maintaining, and promoting your interface and help you in reaping rich rewards.
Author Bio
Brando Graves is an expert WordPress theme developer at HireWPGeeks a renowned web development company. He is also a migration specialist who can convert website to WordPress theme from any format. Brandon keeps experimenting with different types of plugins and shares his findings through blogs. Follow him on Twitter to get updates about all his latest posts.
