Are you planning to make your own blog? create with WordPress, some must have WordPress plugins will make your website a paradise.
The Internet is a great place where people can create their own online business and career it in a meaningful way. When it comes to creating websites online, 9 out of 10 people use WordPress. But WordPress does not pack with all features which you would want to implement on your site.
So after Installing WordPress make sure you don’t miss some essential WordPress plugins.
Cool WordPress Plugins are used to provide extra features and functions for your WordPress Site. The best part about plugins are that there are thousands of them, and most important WordPress plugins are free.
Plugins on WordPress help me save a lot of time and money which I might spend on a Web Developer otherwise. Most people are unaware about most of the great plugins.
13 Must have WordPress Plugins
1. Pretty Link Lite
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/pretty-link/
Pretty Link is one of a must have WordPress plugins for any blogger who deals with multiple affiliate products. It is used to cloak affiliate links.
It is a plugin which helps you to shorten links using your domain URL similar to what you do on bit.ly or on goo.gl.
Most of the affiliate links are not clean which can be a big let down for your blog. Pretty Link helps you not to clean your affiliate links but also helps you track the clicks. It can also help you to add a no-follow attribute to your affiliate link.
Pretty Links also provide you with a detailed report on the number of hits each URL receives each day. It can also be used strategically for tracking links used in your email campaign. There is also a pro version of the Pretty Links, which provide you with some extra features like cloak links and auto-tweet links.
2. WP Review
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-review/
If you write a lot of reviews, then WP Review is a must have WordPress plugins. The plugin helps you add review posts to your site with some extra features.
You can choose to use from adding Star, points and percentage ratings. The nice part you can do all this without adding extra load on your website.
Wp Review provides you with rich Google snippets which help you to better your conversion rate and rankings. You will be amazed to know that it was earlier a premium plugin so it doesn’t compromise on quality.
The creators of the plugin wanted to support the WordPress Community with their efforts hence making the plugin free.
Grab the plugin now before it becomes premium again ?
3. UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/
You never know when your WordPress might get hacked. Most of the blogger ignore this fact. Your WordPress backups have the same worth as your WordPress backups. To be safe, you need to backup your WordPress site to be safe.
UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration simplifies your backup and restoration efforts. Using this plugin, you can easily backup your site to any Cloud Storage sites like Google Drive and Dropbox.
Storing backups on a different server or offline is essential. If your website gets hacked, then you might not have access to the files on the site. There are some plugins online, but UpdraftPlus is the highest-ranking backup plugin on wordpress.org, with over 800,000 active installs.
4. SumoMe
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/sumome/
SumoMe is the best WordPress plugins 2016. It provides you with multiple tools to help you increase your shares and email subscribers as well.
Some tools are mentioned below.
List Builder– This tool helps you create attractive looking lightbox for an email subscription. You connect with services like MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and others.
Share– This tool will make insanely easy for your readers to share your content on both Mobile and Desktop. It covers most of the Social Platforms.
Welcome, Mat– It helps you display a full-screen Call to Action Page when visitors lands on your website.
Smart Bar – It is essentially a floating bar which you can modify to capture emails, promote a page or a product. You can either set it to display on the top or bottom.
Some other features include Highlighter, Image Sharer, and Heat Maps. Overall it is a plugin for all the serious bloggers to increase conversions and traffic.
5. Sitestillup
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/sitewarranty-verified-seal-trust-seal/
Monitoring your site if it remains up and running always. Sitestillup is a plugin which monitors your site 24×7 for any downtime.
If your site is down or faces any issue, you instantly notified. You can either get notified on your email or by an SMS.
Reliable uptime is a crucial part of owning a website. Most hosting companies assure you with 99% uptime, but there is no assurance.
You should monitor your site every minute to be really sure that your website is functionaly as you wanted it to be. Downtime can happen at any time like when you’re asleep or on a vacation. This helps you to be updated with your site status so you don’t miss your valuable leads and visitors.
Using this plugin, you need not worry about your site status.
6. Contact Form Clean and Simple
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/clean-and-simple-contact-form-by-meg-nicholas/
This Contact Form Plugin helps you add more features to your current contact form. It provides you with a clean script to minimise the chances of incompatibility, has Akismet spam filter integration along with reCAPTCHA.
It uses Twitter Bootstrap to make sure your forms are responsive across all devices.
The only downside of this plugin is that you can not edit the fields. It means that it won’t be possible to take need any other data apart from Name, Email and Message from your users. But its a great option if your needs are simple.
The main advantage is using reCAPTCHA to filter out spam.
7. Editorial Calendar
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/editorial-calendar/
Managing your work is essential if you want to excel in what you do. This editorial calendar plugin provides you with an easy drag and drops interface to help you manage and view scheduled posts.
You can also view the status of the post and even the author who is handling it. Infinite Scrolling is provided on the calendar so you can easily schedule post as far as possible.
This way you can easily see what posts needs to be written and which are ready to be published. It helps you save a ton of time which you would otherwise check each post individually. It is a very popular plugin, and it’s not difficult to see why.
8. Click To Tweet
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/click-to-tweet-by-todaymade/
You can drive a ton of traffic using Twitter. Most bloggers do not still know the hidden power of Twitter. Just as the name of the plugin suggests, it helps you create easily create tweetable content for your readers. It makes it very easy for your readers to tweet your content to help you drive you free traffic.
The plugin is created by CoSchedule. It has been featured on tons of blogs including QuickSprout, content.SPI and may more.
9. OnePress Social Locker
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-locker/
OnePress Social Locker lets you lock a portion of your content.These content can be unlocked by your reader only when shares your content on his social profile. These can be likes, shares, +1s or tweets your page. It helps to improve social performance of your website, get more likes/shares, build quality readers and attract more traffic from various social networks.
People don’t worry about your sites traffic or social outreach. But when you give something valuable they are ready to unlock by paying a like, tweet or +1s. You should give people a reason why they need to click your social buttons. The plugin has over 10,000+ active installs. The plugin also has a pro version which provides you with some extra functionalities.
You may love to read
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10. Yoast SEO
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
On Page SEO plays a very crucial role in the success of your website. Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin with over 1 Million active installs. It was created by Joost de Valk and his team. It has an in-depth page analysis which helps you check simple things which you can easily neglect.
For example, if your images do not contain an alt tag it will show you an appropriate message. Similarly, a message appears when you miss your keyword in the title of your post.
It also helps you tweak your meta description. It evens checks the readability of your post. It even helps you to generate a sitemap and also helps you tweak your permalinks. By using the built-in file editor, you can make changes to your WordPress blogs .htaccess and robots.txt file. This gives you direct access to the two most powerful files, from an SEO perspective, in your WordPress install.
You will love to read – How to Set Up Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
11. SEO Friendly Images
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-image/
Most people ignore image optimisation. Image Optimization is still very crucial when on page SEO is considered. SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress plugin which automatically updates all image file with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for proper On-Page SEO.
For example, your image does not have an alt tag set, but your title is set the plugin accordingly make changes according to the title. An ALT attribute is a very important part of Search Engine Optimisation.
It helps the search engines to understand properly about your image. This can help you attract visitors from Google Image Search.
You will love to read – 10 Must Know Image Optimization Tips – Image SEO
12. Akismet
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/
Are you fed up of clearing spammy comments? Akismet helps you check your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they are similar to spam ones or not and lets you review the spam comments it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
It automatically monitors all the comments placed on your blog. URLs are shown in the comment body so that you can filter as good ones or the spam ones. Moderators can also see the number of approved comments for a specific user.
It also has a very special discard feature which blocks the worst comments. This helps you to save storage space and also helps in speeding your site.
You’ll need an Akismet.com API key to activate your plugin. Don’t worry keys are free for personal blogs.
13. WP Super Cache
Link- https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
Site speed is one of the many ranking factors on Google. Wp Super Cache is a fast caching engine for WordPress. This plugin helps you generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress site.
After an HTML file is generated on your web server it will serve this file to the user rather than process the heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
It claims to provide 99% of your users with the HTML files. The only downside is that many hosting companies do not support this plugin for example GoDaddy. If you’re new to caching use PHP caching don’t worry it’s easy to set up and is very fast.
Did I missed any most important WordPress Plugins?
After using WordPress for quite sometimes I found these plugins are essential WordPress Plugins every blogger must use. I hope you found the above plugins useful.
What are your favourite plugins?
I would love to know them. Please mention them below in the comments box.