Top WordPress Plugins to Optimize the Content of Your Blog
by Josh Gilbert
A blog can be a lot of work. There is the writing itself, the comment managing, the promoting and SEO of course. If you had to do all that on your own it would nearly impossible. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone (even if you don’t have anybody to help you!). Instead, there are plenty of plugins to make it that little bit easier.
Here we’re going to look at some of the best plugins out there to help you get through the whole process a bit faster and to even boost your game.
MonsterInsight
Google Analytics on its own is already a gold mine. But if you really want it to shine, you’ve got to also install MonsterInsight. This allows you to up the power and really make the most of the statistics your site offers.
In this way, you’ll know that much more about your customers. And that, in turn, you can translate into having articles and content that are directly pertinent to what they what and what they’re interested in. And that is vital if you want to create an engaged audience who keeps coming back for more.
There is a free version that you can try to see if you like it and of course there is also a paid version.
Sucuri
The last thing you want when you’ve spent all that effort building a successful blog is have some hacker come along and take it all away from you (or just down your site when you’re getting some serious traffic). For that reason, you want to have the right security installed.
One of the best plugins for that reason out there has to be Sucuri. It will block DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, and nearly everything else they can come up with. And that means you’ve got your house in order for when the bad men come.
Yoast SEO
You need to have Yoast SEO. There is no two ways about it. Why? Because Yoast does two things exceedingly well. It boosts your readability and it helps you set up your articles for SEO purposes.
The way it does both of these things is by giving you a checklist at the end of each article you write pointing out things that you can change in your article in order to boost its accessibility and likelihood to get picked up by Google for the keywords you’ve selected.
Then you just have to go through and alter your article in little ways here and there to rank better in terms of these attempts. And before you know it, you’ll be cruising!
Oh yes, and it’s free.
Do note, though the readability tool is useful it is not a replacement for writing high quality texts. So you’ll still want to take steps towards getting that sorted.
W3 Total Cache
Normally, every time your visitors come to your site the pages have to be rebuilt from their individual elements. This takes time. And as people don’t like waiting, this can cost you a lot of visitors.
As that is a bad reason to lose visitors, you want to speed up the loading process. And one of the best ways to do that is by installing a cache program. These programs will save the version of page in their entirety and send that over to the next person that comes to the site. In this way, things will go a lot faster and yet another reason people will drop off has gone up in a puff of smoke.
And if you’re going to use a Cache program you might as well use one of the best, which happens to be W3 Total Cache.
Jetpack
Jetpack is a one of the top WordPress plugins as it offers many services in one package. For example, it will give you social media buttons, a related post function, search engine optimization tools and a heck of a lot more.
That’s really useful, as it means you only have to install one plugin to get a whole lot of functionality. And that matters, as sometimes the more plugins you install the greater the likelihood they won’t play well together today or somewhere in the future when you update all of them.
For that reason, for many sites Jetpack is a must have.
Envira Gallery
Sure, WordPress has its own gallery system. But the truth is that it’s about as aesthetically pleasing as a sloth on stilts. And there just are way better choices out there. For example, Envira Gallery lets you create differently-sized galleries so that it looks like your galleries have some real artistic merit.
You’ll definitely want to check it out if you’re going to use images on your blog – and as that really is something that you have to do nowadays as an imageless blog is about as effective as an audioless telephone, that means you’re going to want to check it out.
Beaver Builder
Often, WordPress templates have their bits fixed in place. That makes it hard to move bits around like menus and pictures. That’s not a problem if you’ve picked the right template and are happy to keep going with it for now and forever. For those who are a bit more experimental but don’t know how to code, however, that can be a real straight jacket.
That’s where Beaver Builder comes in. It allows you to move things around without needing to learn some computer programming language. You just need to drag and drop. And in that way it frees you right back up again. Nice right?
Last words
So there you have it, a whole bunch of plugins that you can start using almost immediately. Many of them are free and even those that aren’t have a trial period so you can try it out. Do you balk at paying for your blog? Just think of the time you’re saving and how much money that’s worth to you and you’ll probably think differently.
For ultimately, that means more free time, more time for writing, or more time to do other things that will pay off down the line. And one of those reasons is why you started your blog in the first place, I bet.
Author bio:
Josh Gilbert, chief editorial writer at Get Good Grade, pro writer, IT enthusiast, and the man who found happiness.
Host blogger’s comments:
Readers, please share, so people who aren’t familiar with these plugins become exposed to their value for their websites.
I look forward to your answers in the comments section: Are there any other top WordPress plugins you’d recommend that Josh didn’t mention?
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