In this article, I will go over some amazing WordPress plugins that might just be helpful to your site and why I recommend them.
Now that you’ve started your WordPress blog, you need some plugins on your site to help you manage your blog better and improve your experience. However, there are hundreds of plugins available for you to decide.
So which plugins should you think about using on your WordPress blog? That’s what I’ll answer in this article.
Keep in mind that, any time you want to add a plugin to your WordPress blog, follow these steps: on the left of your WordPress dashboard, click Plugins and click Add New on the top to install new plugins. In the Plugins tab, you can install and remove plugins inside your WordPress. That’s all there is to it!
And with that out of the way, let’s take a look at each of the best WordPress plugins for you to use on your WordPress blog!
Yoast SEO
Improve Your SEO
If there’s one WordPress plugin that will help manage your site’s search engine optimization (SEO), it’s Yoast SEO. This useful plugin offers a toolbox of features that you can use to work on your blog and optimize it for SEO.
It is totally free to use Yoast. However, if you purchase the premium version of Yoast, you get additional tools to help you optimize your blog for SEO.
You can also visit the Yoast website for numerous resources to help you get the most out of SEO. And, if you’d like some other ideas for an SEO plugin besides Yoast, feel free to read about my best SEO plugins for your WordPress blog.
Free Yoast Features
Yoast allows you to add proper meta titles and descriptions for your site’s pages and articles, without having to learn any code. You can find this in your post editor at the bottom of the screen.
This plugin also has an analysis tool that can determine whether your blog content is friendly to the search engines. If there are any improvements that you can make to your content, Yoast will let you know inside your post editor.
You can use Yoast to add a sitemap which helps search robots understand all the posts and pages of your blog so that it can index them and get them ranked.
You also have the ability to designate blog articles as “cornerstone content.” Articles that are cornerstone content will be seen by search engines as containing a lot of value. Longer articles are the best articles to mark as cornerstone content.
You can even connect your Yoast account to a special website called Ryte, a special online service that can track your site’s SEO progress over time.
And all of these awesome Yoast features are available to you for absolutely FREE!
Yoast Premium
As I said earlier, you get more benefits when you purchase the premium version of the Yoast plugin. Here are some of those awesome benefits:
- Yoast will alert you if your content gets too outdated
- Yoast will allow you to optimize a blog post for multiple keywords
- Yoast will check your text to see if it focuses on your target keyword
- Yoast will redirect former blog post URL’s to a page of your choice
Visit here if you would like to see Yoast Premium for yourself.
So, when it comes to SEO, this Yoast plugin has got you covered!
Jetpack
What Jetpack Can Do
With the Jetpack plugin, you get lots of extra features to your site and additional settings to your WordPress dashboard. As its name implies, Jetpack offers a boost to your WordPress site. And believe it or not, Jetpack was actually created by the WordPress team.
Jetpack’s most noteworthy feature is its ability to stop brute force attacks that attempt to log in to your WordPress dashboard. On your dashboard, you are able to see the number of attacks Jetpack was able to stop.
In addition to this, Jetpack also provides some stats on your site’s visitors, and though it is not as detailed as Google Analytics, it does record the traffic that comes to your site.
Jetpack also has background tasks that allow your site to load faster, particularly any large images your site has.
Premium Jetpack
Lastly, while Jetpack is free to download and use, an upgrade to the plugin’s premium plan gives you access to site backups and extra site protection through Akismet Anti-Spam. It is not necessary to upgrade Jetpack to enjoy its benefits, but doing so does give you an extra layer of security and enhancements.
With Jetpack, your site receives extra useful enhancements all through an all-in-one plugin.
Pretty Links
How would you like to cloak your ugly affiliate links using a simple slug to your website? (A slug is a link that is connected to your website, like webcentsblog.com/example). Well, with this plugin, you can!
Pretty Links allows you to create a slug that instantly redirects the reader through your affiliate link without them even knowing it. And, if your reader hovers over the link to check it, they’ll see it’s part of your website and be more confident to click it.
By making your links look like they’re part of your site, you can easily improve your click-through rate and, with that, get more potential customers and earn more much needed sales!
It’s free to create pretty links, but for more pretty link features like backing up your pretty link, obtaining reports of link clicks, and categorizing your links, you’re going to need to upgrade to the premium version of Pretty Links.
SeedProd
The truth is, you may not really need SeedProd. But if you’d like a cool-looking page to inform your visitors that your site is coming soon or needs some maintenance work, the SeedProd plugin is just what you need!
SeedProd is free to download and use, but some of the features I will be mentioning require a paid upgrade.
SeedProd Features
SeedProd allows you to replace your entire site with a static page and a custom message to tell your visitors your site is in the works or is in need of maintenance. You can even customize the page background, page layout, as well as font type and color.
Another cool feature included with SeedProd is the ability to collect leads for your site before it launches. This way, you will be able to get some potential traffic interested in visiting your site once it’s ready. SeedProd is able to connect with almost any email autoresponder out on the market.
SeedProd definitely makes it easy to help get your site going.
MonsterInsights
If you want to track the traffic that comes to your blog, I recommend that you use Google Analytics. In order to use it, you need to put your Analytics tracking code inside your website, so how do you do it? Using this plugin called MonsterInsights.
With this plugin, Google Analytics is set up on your blog and, even better, the plugin will prevent your own visits to your blog from being counted! Not only that, but you’ll also be able to see your analytics inside the MonsterInsights plugin without going to your Analytics account. That’s pretty awesome!
And, if you’d like more stats to take a look at inside your WordPress blog, you may want to consider the premium version of this plugin, known as MonsterInsights Plus. This version allows you to connect your Google Search Console, as well as track your affiliate links, see your analytics in real-time, add your stats on your WordPress dashboard, and more!
So, whenever you want better insights on your blog’s performance, look no further than MonsterInsights!
Google Fonts Typography
Whenever you choose WordPress themes, it can be frustrating to see your site’s font style change to something that doesn’t really resonate with you. But with the Google Fonts plugin, you can control your font style no matter the theme you choose.
Sadly, the only thing that the Google Fonts plugin allows you to change for free is the font family type for both your headings and paragraphs.
The cool thing, though, is that there are hundreds of different font families that you can choose from–absolutely for free.
Now, if you decide to upgrade the plugin, you will gain access to settings for font size, font color, line spacing, and speed optimization for your fonts.
You will find your font settings through Google Fonts over in the Customize section of your dashboard, under “Appearance.”
So, if you’re not really satisfied with the kind of fonts bundled with your WordPress theme, you can customize them to the ones of your choice with the Google Fonts plugin.
Ultimate Blocks
WordPress recently had an update where its post editor format was changed to a block-style format to help simplify the blogging experience. While WordPress blocks do have certain features that can enhance your blog, they may not be enough. That’s where Ultimate Blocks comes in.
By adding this plugin, you have more WordPress block choices. You can add elements like a table of contents, a review summary, an article grid, a stylish button, and much more! Just install the Ultimate Blocks plugin and see what surprises await for your WordPress blog.
Easy Table of Contents
This simple plugin allows you to create a table of contents for each of your blog posts. Now why do you need a table of contents?
Visitors who read your blog will get overwhelmed by all the valuable information you’re giving them. It’s as if they are lost in your words. They need a map to better navigate your long article, so that’s when a table of contents comes in handy.
Now, if you don’t normally create long blog posts, you may not need a table of contents plugin. But if you give a lot of information, be sure to install Easy Table of Contents to help people move around your blog post.
Broken Link Checker
Links are important to any website, but what if a link inside your article doesn’t work? You should have a plugin that can notify you of just that. Enter Broken Link Checker!
With this plugin, your links are checked regularly to make sure they are working and clickable. Even better, Broken Link Checker will let you know the moment it finds some broken links. That way, you can fix them before your visitors catch them.
By keeping your links healthy, not only do you make your visitors happy, but you make search engines like Google happy as well. So start fixing your broken links with Broken Link Checker.
myStickymenu
The best way to keep your visitors engaged is to provide them with other places around your site to go to. That’s what your navigation menu is for. The problem is: when people scroll down your article, they scroll away from the menu.
But, with the myStickymenu plugin, the menu stays on top of your blog!
All you need to do is go into the plugin’s settings and specify the name of your navigation menu. Then, when someone goes to your blog and starts scrolling, your menu will stay on top to allow them to move around your site.
WP Sticky Sidebar
And, just like myStickymenu, the WP Sticky Sidebar plugin serves a very similar purpose. Obviously, the difference is that your sidebar stays to the right side of the screen instead of scrolling away.
The sidebar is another great way to get readers’ attention in case they want to jump around your blog. With this plugin, the sidebar will scroll down when the reader scrolls down, but the sidebar stops if they reach the bottom of the sidebar. Likewise, it will also scroll up, but stop when the reader reaches the top of the sidebar.
What’s interesting is that both this plugin and myStickymenu were made by the same people to serve the same purpose of keeping readers engaged in your blog. So decrease your bounce rate using these sticky plugins.
WP Meta and Date Remover
The last one on the list is WP Meta and Date Remover. This is a neat and discreet plugin that will allow you to remove details from posts you put on your blog, such as author and date information, visible tags, and so on.
It’s not really necessary to remove this kind of information, but I like to keep my articles nice and clean.
I honestly don’t think that showing when an article was posted or who authored it is really that important, so I like to tidy up my articles with this one little plugin. And you don’t need to adjust any settings either.
Simply download, activate, and you’re good to go.
Conclusion
And that’s all the WordPress plugin recommendations I have for you.
I hope you will find any of them useful because I use all of these plugins right here on the WebCents Blog. I have tried and tested many different plugins since I started this blog, and I found these plugins to be very helpful in my blogging needs.
Of course, feel free to check out WordPress’ plugin directory if you would like to explore on your own and see what plugins might better fit your needs.
Finally, if you would like a full tutorial on how to use WordPress to set up your blog the right way, check out my complete WordPress guide for beginners.
Now plug into these WordPress plugins and see if they can save you some work on your WordPress blog!