Plugins make your blogging life so much easier! Used effectively, they can help you blog more productively, share your posts everywhere with one click and take your operation to the next level! There are tonnes of recommendations out there, but we’ve researched some and compiled a list that we think Bloggers’ Lounge readers would find the most useful.
- Yoast
I’ve already written a post about writing effectively for SEO where I’ve mentioned this plug-in – so it must be good! Yoast is a complete tool for ensuring that everything you write is optimised, so that your blog can be seen in search engines – a really user-friendly introduction to SEO!
- Pin It button
If you’re an avid Pinterest-er you’ll more than likely already know about this one, but this little plug-in will give you a ‘Pin it’ button when you hover over the images on your site. Visitors to your blog always love this one, and you can change the settings so that it appears over specific images too.
- Click to Tweet
This handy plug-in helps you create perfect little sound bites of information from your blog post. Got a nice quote or snapshot in your post or article that perfectly crystalises what you want to say? By entering your snippet into the box, the tool transforms it into a call-out with a button, that when pressed will tweet your snippet from your reader’s Twitter account.
- Jetpack
This is another great tool that also comes with built-in analytics to help you understand your blog a little better! It’s free and built by WordPress too. This plug-in helps you customise your blog, and also helps to increase your visitor engagement with suggested or related posts and contact forms.
- Smush.it
This is a great plug-in for those of you who have blogs that feature a lot of images. A tonne of images can slow your blog down quite considerably, which won’t make Google or your readers like you very much. This tool strips a lot of the unnecessary meta data from your JPEGs, and also does this automatically when you upload images through WordPress, so you don’t need to do anything different.
- Scroll Triggered box
If you want your blog readers to take some sort of action, then this is a really neat little tool for capturing emails, Facebook likes or Twitter follows. You specify a reader event, such as scrolling halfway down the page, and this will trigger the box to appear. Fully customisable, it will fit in with your blog’s tone of voice; and is less evasive than other methods of capturing reader attention because it confirms that the reader is engaging with the site before the box is presented.
- Relevanssi
If your blog has been going for a long time and holds a lot of content, an updated site search might be a better choice over the default offered by WordPress. This plug-in allows for fuzzy searching, or misspelled words and phrases, as well as better displayed search results and comment searches.
Have we missed out any WordPress plug-ins that you absolutely can’t live without? Let us know in the comments!
I am new at this and want to promote my business hopefully I am blogging correctly
Yoast is always my first plugin to install when I have set up blogs for people and the best thing about it, is that can be used “straight from the box”, also Click to Tweet is great for adding tweetable quotes. As I do reviews I also use a plugin called “Rich Snippets” which is great for adding those star ratings etc that appear in Googles search results.
Thanks for this list. Have to admit Yoast is new to me.
Don’t forget you’ll also need the relevant stats plugin – either Google Analytics or Statcounter (your preference). I actually have both installed but tend to lean towards Statcounter as I’ve had that the longest.
If you’re a blogger like me who has a bucket list then there is a plugin for that too. I’m just experimenting with it at the moment – I’ll let you know what I think!
Zoe at Splodz Blogz
Im curious if anyone has come across a nice Map plugin. I want to use it to illustrate places we have been or are going to. Something customizable would be ideal as the ones on offer feel very bland. Suggestions?
Hi, Yoast is definitely my favourite to date. I am going to try smush.it now as my blog has a lot of pictures and site speed is an important factor for me. Thanks for sharing a nice list.
For all new bloggers (newbies) and people keen to grow their blog in WordPress, my strong suggestion would be to go for quality plugins which are well coded. Number of plugins don’t matter as long as they are well coded.
So it is worth investing some time in finding a good plugin based on reviews and self experience.