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| 9 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your WordPress Website Posted: 19 Jan 2014 07:18 PM PST This is the first blog post on Divi Magazine. Since I was in the process of setting up this site, I though it might be a good idea to share the list of my favorite / essential WordPress plugins with you. Now these plugins may not be useful for every site you come across, but they all are pretty useful for a general WordPress website. Here’s the list of 9 must have WordPress plugins that Every Blogger Should Know About. WordPress SEOThis is the first plugin I installed on this site, as it improves the SEO of your site by giving your posts and pages unique titles and meta tags. The plugin is very easy to configure and use, you don’t have to read any guides or anything to configure the WordPress SEO plugin. Some of the features are: Meta & Link Elements, Page Elements, Breadcrumbs, RSS Optimization, Social Integration, Sitemaps, Import & Export functionality, and more. W3 Total CacheW3 Total Cache is the next must have plugin for WordPress, as it will not only help you improve search rankings, but will also help you improve the user experience. It optimizes your site using caching: browser, page, object, database, minify, and content delivery network support. Other features include – Minification of posts and pages, Non-blocking javascript, mobile support, caching of posts, and much more. AkismetWhen it comes to Anti-spam, two great plugins come into my mind – GASP and Akismet. Both are fantastic plugins, but I prefer the latter one. Akismet combined with Conditional Cpatcha plugin makes a great anti-spam solution for WordPress. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Contact Form 7I had almost forget to install this plugin. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and so on. This plugin provides everything that you need to create a nice looking form for your website. You can see it in action here. WP to BufferWP to Buffer will automatically send your latest posts to your Buffer account. You can easily automate the social media process, by using this plugin. I have been using this plugin on all my sites, including this one. There is also a Pro version available for $29, which has some fantastic features including support for custom post types, adding featured image, status tags, multiple accounts, taxonomy filtering, and post overrides. Check out How to Schedule WordPress Blog Posts with Bufferapp on WPKube for more information on configuring this plugin. Backup BuddyI am pretty sure no one wants to lose all their hard work due to a server crash, or some other WordPress / hosting mishap. Use Backup Buddy plugin to automatically backup your complete data (including theme, plugin, posts, comments, custom post types, etc). That way if something happens you can restore all your data / articles with a couple of clicks. Check out How to Backup Your WordPress Blog Using BackupBuddy Plugin on WPKube for more information on configuring this plugin. nRelate ContentnRelate plays a nice role in reducing the site’s bounce rate. It allows you to show related posts at the bottom of every post, and highly configurable. You can display up to 10 related posts, either using the plugins options or manually inserting the template tag. However I am not using nRelate plugin on this site, as it already has a built-in related box that will be visible at the end of every post. Floating Social BarThere is no easy way to get more social shares on your blog posts, you have to be active, share other people’s post, and hell lot of work. It takes a lot of effort, but there is one thing that you can do to increase your social shares and that is adding social media buttons on your site. To achieve that you can use Flare, Digg Digg, or Floating Social Bar. On this site, I am using Floating Social Bar, which is a light-weight WordPress plugin that adds a horizontal floating share bar to your blog posts, pages, and other post types. Ninja PopupsYou might have heard this phrase many times – “Money is in the list.” An email list plays a great role in generating a long term source of income. Ninja Popups uses well-designed popups to convert visitors on your blog into taking an action whether its subscribing into your newsletter, liking your page on FB, offering discount, and so on. You can use this pretty much for anything. This optin plugin is quite cheap and only costs around $18, compared to other plugins in the same segment. Although, I prefer OptinMonster, but it is quite expensive compared to ninja popups. Which WordPress plugins do you use on your site? Do you have any other WordPress plugins that you would recommend? If you find this blog post useful, then please do like it on Facebook and share it on Twitter. The post 9 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your WordPress Website appeared first on Divi Magazine. |
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