As a blogger, there are a ton of WordPress plugins that are available (for free!) to make your life a little easier. From increasing your web traffic to helping your site get found in Google to creating easy and printable recipes to monetizing your blog – there’s a plugin for that!
I’ve been blogging for quite a few years now, and I have found some pretty incredible plugins that really helped me take my little blog to the next level along the way. I thought I would take some time to share them with you today! Hopefully these plugins will help you as much as they have helped me.
Yoast SEO
Yoast is the most popular plugin when it comes to increasing your SEO (search engine optimization, aka how your blog gets found by Google). You can use the tool to assign keywords to your posts, pages and more to maximize your blog’s ranking. There is both a free and paid version of the plugin, depending on how advanced you want to get.
Recipe Card
Food and lifestyle bloggers: if you ever share recipes on your blog, you need to get the Recipe Card plugin stat! It allows to create custom styled recipe cards that can easily be printed, saved or shared. It also helps to optimize your recipes for search engines and generates nutritional facts.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
This plugin pulls your website’s Google Analytics straight into your WordPress dashboard, making it easy for you to see your real-time visitors, acquisition channels, traffic sources/referrals, search keywords, demographics and more.
Skimlinks Affiliate Marketing Tool
The Skimlinks plugin is going to become your best friend if you are looking to monetize your blog. It takes away all the work on your end when it comes to creating links for affiliate marketing by automatically converting your links to affiliate links. All you need to do is download and install the plug-in then create a Skimlinks account. Don’t forget to include a disclosure statement in your posts!
JQuery Pin It! Button for Images
This plug-in automatically creates a pin it button on hover for all of the images on your blog. It also allows you to upload your very own stylish button to match your blog’s design, so that you don’t have to use the default one by Pinterest.
Editorial Calendar
If you are someone who schedules a lot of blog posts in advanced, you are going to find this plugin particularly useful! Editorial Calendar automatically populates a calendar in your WordPress dashboard (under posts) with all of your scheduled content so that you can see what’s coming up at a glance.
WP Widget Shortcode
Have you ever wanted a widget to appear within the body of your content on a certain page? Well, this plugin allows you to do that! It generates a shortcode for every widget that you can copy and paste into the body of any page or post. (For example, I use the popular post widget in the body of my “about” page.)
Disqus Comment System
Disqus is a tool that transforms your blog commenting system. It makes commenting much easier and interactive by allowing users to comment by email or with disqus or social media account. The unique thing about this plugin is that it actually make comments indexable by search engines, which means it helps your blog to be discovered. It allows for threaded comments/replies, subscription options, spam filtering and helps to create a larger discussion community through increased exposure and readership. You can also close comments or threads.
WP Optimize by xTraffic
If you are not very tech-savvy and are looking to optimize your images, speed, traffic (aka keeping people on your blog) and links, you will love this plugin – it does all of this automatically!
Contact Form 7
This plugin helps you to create beautiful and powerful contact forms for your blog. You can include on any page or post by simply copy and pasting a short code! It is similar to Gravity Forms, but 100% free.
Honourable mentions: Opt-in Forms, Regenerate Thumbs, and WP Hide a Post
What are some of your favourite plugins?
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I totally agree with this selection apart from Disqus. It’s like WordPress.com. If someone wants to comment they have to have an account. It adds another step into the process, which is a pain since you remove the spontaneity of commenting. Sometimes, you’re just happy to share, but just the fact that to comment you have to login with an account to do so is a repeller. (And, it’s another place where you create an account with a login and password to remember….)
You can log in with Facebook, Twitter or Google+ also or post as a guest!
It lets you post as a guest now! But I know a lot of sites go out of their way to disable guest comments. You can also log in with several other social networks too, which makes it a bit easier for remembering log-ins. But with that said I know it’s still not for everyone! What commenting system do you like to use then instead? Would love to know 🙂
Dear Kait, yes I can see that some sites allow you to post as guests but others don’t. And to me, unless it’s on purpose that you don’t want any feedback, what’s the point of not allowing comments? As far as social networks are concerned, you are totally right as well. Thing is, most of my friends bloggers, do not have the same social networks for their personal accounts and their blog(s) accounts. So you are constantly switching from one account to another one. Last but not least, to me, disqus or wordpress.com, or any other commennt systems ads a layer between the blogger and its audience. And we perfectly know that the reader is lazy, hence the fact that for instance, we all try to make our landing page as attractive as possible to generate further reading on other pages. Commenting is the same: if you have to click to much, enter too much info, than I have the feeling that we lose what’s nice about blogging: the sharing. So in the end, I’m all for the good old system where you just have to enter name, email and url of your blog. No matter the blog and the system it uses. 😉
Great point about how some people have different accounts for blog vs personal use!! You are so right about blogging and social media being all about sharing and having conversations at the end of the day. Thanks so much for your thoughtful response! I love hearing other people’s opinion on this type of stuff, it’s really interesting to me 🙂
Thanks a lot for this post Kait Souch. Every item on this list was useful and it has saved me a lot of time in setting up my blog. Keep writing more 🙂
Thanks for sharing.
I am using Blog Designer Pro WordPress plugin for my blogging site. It is a perfect plugin to design any blogging site.It gives you 33+ different and unique blog template options to make your blog page more attractive. I’m sure that it covers all kind of features what you usually see in any blogging plugins.
Hi! If I want to add pluggin to I need to have the Business plan ?
Thanks for your help 🙂