My Favorite WordPress Plugins for Bloggers
One of the reasons I absolutely adore WordPress as my blogs content management system is because I get complete control over the way my website looks and functions through the use of plugins! Seriously, nearly every website or blog customization you can think of is most definitely a WordPress plugin. Everything from sidebar widgets to social media integration- WordPress plugins are the single reason that WordPress is the most customizable website building platform online. And guess what? Most WordPress plugins are actually 100% FREE to use, including the five plugins I am sharing with you today that you need to download and start using on your WordPress blog or website immediately!
Akismet
Spam comments are THE WORST and having to manage them can be filed under the highly annoying part of being a blogger, but thanks to a free plugin called Akismet, I thankfully avoid dealing with the thousands upon thousands of fake and fishing comments my blog receives on a regular basis. If you have comments enabled on your blog or website, make sure to install Akismet to deal with the spam for you, and then all you have to do is regularly take out the digital trash every once in a while.
Google Analytics
I’ve expounded on my love for Google Analytics as a platform in the past many times, but it begs repeating that you should really have a great analytics tool installed on your blog to keep track of your key stats. I have used many analytics tools in the past but Google Analytics is by far the best, most reliable and industry recommended tool available. Even if you don’t plan on doing heavy analysis of your site every week or month, its great to have this tool installed collecting data that can be used later on. Trust me, I regretting not downloading this tool sooner, so do yourself a favor and get it installed on your site asap!
Lazy Load
One of the essential parts of a great blog is photography and as someone who does tend to use lots of images in there blog posts, I can tell you that the one downside of images is that page load times tend to lag when there are lots of images on a blog. Usually when a blog or any website loads, the website tries to load everything on the page, every word, every image, everything from the top to bottom of the webpage, even if the viewer never scrolls down to the bottom of the page! This ends up taking a long time if you have a lot of images on your site. To combat this, I use the plugin Lazy Load which essentially manages my page load speeds on my blog by loading text first and loading images into the page as the viewer scrolls through it. Thankfully, this plugin has greatly reduced my page load times which helps with the SEO of my blog!
Yoast SEO
Speaking of SEO, if you are looking for a way to maximize your SEO, Yoast is the plugin for you! Yoast adds a special SEO panel to the bottom of your new blog post window, so that after you write your posts, you can go in and optimize for search! It helps you add meta data, check for keywords and readability- all the essential criteria for SEO ranking is in this one plugin that is constantly being updated along with Google’s ever changing standards for search. It’s very reliable and another industry standard plugin that you should be using if you have WordPress!
LinkWithin
Ever notice that at the end of my blog posts there is an option for other related posts you might be interested in? Well, that is a handy little plugin called LinkWithin and not only is it incredibly handy and helpful for readers of my blog who want to find related content to a post they just enjoyed, but the use of a related posts plugin has been proven to increase page views on blogs across the board! Again, this is just another one of those great, best practice plugins you want and NEED to be using as a blogger if you are serious about growing your audience and your influence online!
If you’re using WordPress to run your blog or website, you are well on your way to a gorgeous, fully customized website! Just make sure to add these plugins to your site to optimize everything from loading to SEO to page views! Have any other plugins for WordPress that I MUST know about? Tell me about them in the comments!
xoxo,
Thank you for this! I am still in the process of setting my site up and have been having trouble figuring out the plugins!
Sorry, Alexis, I’m going to disagree on Akismet. I have to delete on average 50 spam comments a day, and Akismet will message me something to the effect of “We caught 4 spam messages today for you.” To me, this isn’t a great plugin. Just my opinion though.
Make sure you have the plugin set up or configured properly. I had a similar issue when I first started using it and I realized I hadn’t set it up fully. I get something like 1k spam messages a week and the plugin usually catches all but maybe a handful that are crafted purposely to evade plugins like this.
Great post! I am going to check out lazy load & link within right now!
Wonderful Article.
I have used Blog Designer plugin. This plugin is very helpful to modify the blog layout and helps you to create your blog more attractive.