Have you just started a new blog using WordPress CMS? You are not new, many people start new blogs and expect too high, early on only to fail and then give up. WordPress is the best platform available for serious bloggers, who want to create a brand out of their blogs. So if you are serious about blogging, and want to create a name for yourself and your blog, you have to keep some basic things in mind such as doing SEO, speeding up the blog, fighting spam in comments etc.
Also Read: Top 10 Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts and Win
[Tweet “Plugins are the main reason that WordPress is so great and popular. “]
Plugins help you increase the functionality of your blog and make it more faster, more efficient spam free and reader friendly. Here are ten plugins you must use as a new blogger to increase efficiency of your blog while marketing and presenting it to the users.
-
Yoast SEO
The best plugin for all your On Page SEO Optimization. Everything you want in your blog, custom titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags to control duplicacy, no index tags, breadcrumbs, sitemap and social media meta tags. This plugin takes care of every on page optimization you need for search engines and social media platforms.
-
Jetpack
From sharing buttons to related posts and loading of your images from its CDN and more, just in one plugin. Jetpack is the best plugin to supercharge your blog.
-
WP Super Cache
Creating cache of your blog to load it more faster to the users. It’s must for increasing the loading speed of your blog, and that’s all the more important as site loading speed is one of the influencing factors in Search Engine rankings.
-
WP Smush
An image can say a thousand words but images are much heavier than 1000 words when it comes to KBs so you need to optimize them to reduce size without much loss in visual quality. And this plugin does a great job automatically doing that when you upload the images.
-
Broken Link Checker
With updates in the server and theme updates and even due to crashing of plugins and similar problems and even manual errors, many files (images and other resource files) can get misplaced over time causing links in your blog break. Broken links mean missing resources, implying that things would not necessarily be the way they are expected to be. (Image/resource not found and other such errors). Search engines see this as a negative sign and users don’t like broken links either. To identify these broken links, it is the must use plugin. Using this plugin is a smart approach to easily finding and fixing broken links.
[Tweet “Nothing is as important as search engine reputation, and nothing more useful than the right tools.”]
-
Akismet
If you want to reduce spam in comment this plugin is your answer. It is the best option available for bloggers using WordPress native commenting platform. Auto filtering of spammy comments to make the comments section more useful and improve the experience of your readers.
-
WP-Optimize
Must use plugin to clean up your database and optimize it from WordPress dashboard with just one click.
-
Click To Tweet
Ever heard of the thing called inline tweeting? This plugin allows you to place a ‘Tweet Box’ inline with your content to get you more tweets. With the use of this plugin your readers can tweet your punchlines with just one click.
-
Google Analytics by Yoast
To track what’s happening in your blog, you need to install the Google analytics code to your blog and this plugin make it easy to do that.
Must Read: Top 10 Cool Reasons to Use Android Device Manager
-
Redirection
After finding a lot of internal broken links, we need to fix them to transfer authority to relevant pages on our blog. This plugin helps you find 404 internal links and fix them by providing 301 permanent redirection to other relevant pages and maintain the user experience and also maintain the Search Engine Authority of concerned ‘Broken Links’.
[Tweet “Using the right plugins means less efforts, less time and more results, all at the same time.”]
There are thousands of plugins available to use but few of them are worth the time and effort that it takes to install them. Here we have mentioned the most useful plugins that you can use. So that you don’t have to go and install every other plugin available online only to find out later that you don’t need them, some plugins even slow your blog down to crawl. It’s better to use only few plugins that make your blog faster, search engine friendly, easily shareable, and have good readability. Thus making your blog more user-friendly.