The 10 WordPress Plugins Every Sucessful Blogger Uses

by

28 January 2017

Blogging

wordpress-1863504_960_720 edited

WordPress is one of the most amazing programs to grace our modern age of technology. It powers countless websites and continues to improve with every update and change. It’s the product of numerous people working on the open-source software and a true accomplishment. It’s also the best platform for bloggers.

Beyond the ease-of-use, WordPress is also great because of its plugins. These bite-sized apps give us huge flexibility and features we need to keep our sites healthy and our visitors happy. Today, I’m going to show you 10 plugins every successful blogger is using.

10 Plugins You Need For Your Blog Today

Some plugins offer additional security, some offer peace of mind, and still others improve the user experience. A careful combination of them can result in a powerhouse of a blog that runs smoothly and provides a great experience for visitors.

Let’s take a look at ten plugins I couldn’t live without (and neither should you!):

1.  W3 Total Cache

Website speed is incredibly important. According to studies, internet users today expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less, and every second that they have to wait past that tests their patience. To get your website down to this time, you need a good caching plugin.

W3 Total Cache fulfills this need handedly with their plug-and-play solution. Once you have the plugin installed and activated, you don’t need to touch it ever again if you don’t want to. Having it installed to make your pages load faster for users by caching data and making it easily accessible to browsers.

Better speed equivalates to a better experience, more conversions, and higher search engine rankings.

2.  SEO by Yoast

Speaking of search rankings, you’re going to need assistance with your search engine optimization. It isn’t something anyone can do themselves. SEO by Yoast is by far the most well-reviewed tool for this purpose.

Having a higher search engine ranking for your new website will do wonders for visibility and potential conversions. That’s why a tool like this is so important to have.

It’s most common use is for evaluating a page’s content. This tool will track instances of your main keyword, and how it’s been used throughout the post. You’ll also have the option to customize things like the permalink, title tag, and meta description.

This tool goes beyond that for those who have technical knowledge of SEO as well. Things like XML sitemaps can be generated easily with this plugin. It’s by far the best tool for managing and improving optimization across your site.

3.  Login Lockdown

By default, WordPress does not limit the number of times you can attempt to log in. This leaves you vulnerable because it gives hackers an unlimited number of chances to guess your login. With this plugin, if the number of attempts is passed, then it blocks the I.P address itself to ensure the would-be hacker can’t use another method to keep trying.

The default setting is a 1-hour lock after 3 failed attempts, but you can modify this using the administration settings of the plugin.

4. OptinMonster

This is one of the most trusted options for conversion rate optimization. You can trigger an email subscription when people are leaving your site and utilize a number of different tactics beyond this to capture more email subscribers than you ever could in the past.

Email marketing continues to be an extremely valid way of boosting your engagement and conversions, and this plugin is the #1 choice for doing so.

5. BackupBuddy

You may feel like your blog or website is invincible, but there’s always the chance that something could go wrong. The last thing you want is to lose hundreds or thousands of hours of work because you didn’t have backups in place.

This plugin is a simple and easy tool you can use to ensure your website is backed up in the event of a hack or a server issue.

6. MaxCDN

In the interest of website speed and performance, a CDN or Content Delivery Network is a must. These networks deliver content to web browsers based on the location of users that are accessing it. This geographical delivery ensures that speed is maximized for your visitors.

This plugin is a great way to get started with a CDN so you can see how it improves your website’s performance.

7. WPForms

Forms are going to come up as part of developing a website, so a form builder is a must. Whether it’s for contacting you or finalizing a sale, plugins like this are absolutely needed. This option is a great beginner-friendly option.

Drag-and-drop functionality means that you’ll be able to create forms, email subscriptions, payments, and anything else you need information for, with ease.

8. Wordfence

Security in today’s world is more important than ever. You need a good plugin to ensure your information and your site is safe. Wordfence handles these tasks with a great plugin that protects you on multiple fronts.

Things like bots that try to brute force their way into your site will be blocked automatically by this plugin. You can also get customized email alerts if anything suspicious happens.

9. WP Optimize

Keeping your databases optimized can go a long way towards maintaining your site’s health and performance. That being said, it can be extremely daunting or downright dangerous to your site if you don’t know what you’re doing.

This plugin will keep things in check automatically, and leave the rest of the daily tasks in your capable hands.

10 Google Analytics Dashboard

Google Analytics is a must-have tool and a huge value, seeing as how it’s free. This plugin will give you the opportunity to see your analytics in your dashboard on WordPress, which is convenient since you would have to otherwise leave and go to your dashboard to see them.

Final ThoughtsHaving the proper plugins can elevate a site from good to great. Do you utilize any of these plugins on your blog? Let us know in the comments!

Read also: 

  1. Top Torrent Sites For Games Download
  2. 4 WordPress Plugins To Make Your Blog More Powerful
  3. Best SEO Tools For Ranking The Website
  4. WordPress Developer: Job Profile And Key Responsibilities

Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

View all posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

All Comments

Very well presented. Every quote was awesome and thanks for sharing the content. Keep sharing and keep motivating others.

There is definately a lot to find out about this subject. I like all the points you made

Nice post. I learn something totally new and challenging on websites

Looking forward to your next post. Keep up the good work!

This blog post hit all the right notes!

You’re so awesome! I don’t believe I have read a single thing like that before. So great to find someone with some original thoughts on this topic. Really.. thank you for starting this up. This website is something that is needed on the internet, someone with a little originality!

Related

Start Blog

How To Start A Blog Without Breaking A Bank?

Who knew that setting up a blog is fast, easy and much cheaper than you think? Having a successful blog is the best way to extend your network. It's one of the most efficient ways to get noticed and promote your brand. Just follow these simple steps to set up your new blog today. Where Do I Start? You need to identify a web host to store your files, content, and images. You also need a domain name that is unique to you. The domain name is crucial. It should be short, memorable and easy to say and type. Web hosting services are legion, and so you might want to do some research to identify the best one. Finally, you should have a blog platform such as WordPress, which provides templates to create your blog and other support services to help manage it. How Do I Choose a Web Hosting Service? As you can see from this review on Mangomatter good web hosting brings many benefits, but it comes at a price. There are often multiple options with the same web hosting company, and so it pays to think carefully about your likely requirements and pick the plan that suits your purposes best. How Much Does It Cost? The short answer is that you can blog for free, but serious bloggers pay for a monthly hosting plan costing from around $3 to around $15. The cheapest option is great for sharing images and swapping ideas with your friends and family. If your website is linked to a business, however, you should choose a more expensive plan with extras such as additional websites, multiple emails, more bandwidth, and good support tools. Themes and Tools : Once you have signed up with WordPress, you have a host of themes and tools at your fingertips. Identify a niche theme to suit your chosen specialty. Don’t worry, you can always change it further down the line if your first choice doesn’t quite hit the mark. It is best to think of something quite sleek and simple so that loading your blog is fast, and search engines will easily find it. Too much clutter in the theme dilutes your message. Use the tools provided to schedule the release of posts and draft or edit new material. How do I Structure the Content? It is very easy to structure your blog using the ready-made format that is provided. You just enter the title of your blog in the relevant box and then add text, video, audio and links as you wish. When you are happy with the result, you press “Publish”, and your blog will go live. You can always go back and edit later. What About Creating Traffic? Keywords, headlines and “slugs” (post titles) should be optimized for SEO. Frequent links to social media and relevant online publications will generate new readers. Visit other sites and enter comments or posts that link back to your blog. So just do it! If you have great ideas for content, starting a blog is easy. Just follow these steps, and that’s all there is to it! Read Also : How To Choose The Best Affiliate Programs To Promote On Your WordPress Blog Blogging To Live Better: 10 Benefits Of Blogging 5 Blogging Tips For Beauty And Fashion Bloggers In 2018

READ MOREDetails
Affiliate Marketing Types

Top Affiliate Marketing Types Explained

There’s no doubt affiliate marketing has gained a lot of attention lately. However, many people out there still don’t know how affiliate marketing really works and what types of it there are. Basically, it’s a relationship between the advertiser who sells product or service, the publisher who promotes that product or service in exchange for a commission and the consumer who buys it. Still, there are quite a few different affiliate marketing types and if you want to learn more about them, make sure you read on. Bloggers: Blogging is constantly gaining more attention and it’s not a surprise bloggers have become a part of affiliate marketing. In essence, bloggers write a review of a product or service, thus encouraging their followers to buy it. The reason why this type of affiliate marketing works so well is that the audience a blogger has to trust their opinion and is quite likely to try products or services they’re reading about. Just one blogger writing about an advertiser’s product or service can do wonders both for their traffic and number of conversions. Search affiliates: There are plenty of companies out there that try to generate ROI for themselves by spending their own money on promoting other company’s products or services. So, in this case, the affiliate pays for clicks and makes a profit on their commissions. This type of affiliates is usually very entrepreneurial and business minded. They do the same amount of research the retailer does in order to reach their audience. This includes building keyword campaigns and optimizing bid budgets. Coupon sites: People are always looking for new ways to spend less money when shopping. This is exactly why there are coupon sites that offer products or services from various merchants at discount prices. There are more and more coupon sites out there as the number of people using digital coupons keeps increasing. Just take a look at it this way, in 2017, 131.6 million Americans have used digital coupons and this number is expected to grow to 145.3 million by 2021. Advertisers can benefit from coupon sites as they’re coupons can help them increase both traffic and revenue. Review sites: Another extremely popular way of affiliate marketing is review sites. What these sites do is review a number of different advertisers are a particular niche and earn a commission when a web user buys something from an advertiser they opted for because of the reviews they on the review site. A great example of this is a website called AskGamblers that reviews casino sites and provides relevant information about their services. Some of the reasons why this review site is doing so well are because of its 0-24 customer support and live chat that’s opened 24/7. Partnerships: There’s no need to say that we saw more and more new small businesses in the market. This creates more room for starting partnerships that could help both advertiser and publisher. Let’s say you’re running a business and you’re looking for more affiliates that’ll promote your products or services. You can simply reach out to other businesses out there and have them promote your products or services in exchange for a commission. Of course, targeting small businesses in the same or similar niche is recommended. Phone calls: This is one of those less known affiliate marketing types but it sure had to find its place on this list. The reason why phone calls aren’t often considered affiliate marketing is because most call centers get paid per call and not per sale. However, there are call centers who do it on a strictly per sale basis and partnering up with a company like this can do wonders for an advertiser. There’s absolutely no reason why a company shouldn’t give this type of affiliate marketing a go when trying to sell their products or services. Retailers in the US are expected to spend up to $6.8 billion on affiliate marketing by 2020. This means right now may be the perfect time to enter the industry. Read Also: Six Low-Investment Business Ideas You Can Start Today How To Choose The Best Affiliate Programs To Promote On Your WordPress Blog Image credit: Shutterstock

READ MOREDetails
Blogger

Doing It The Right Way: Common Mistakes Every New Blogger Commits

Many people thought that when you choose a blog for a living, you are just only making money while sitting. But when you let them write their first couple of posts, it hits them like: I never thought that this job would be tough, and like any other person, they mess things up. Messing things up in the beginning and making mistakes along the way is normal. So to help beginner bloggers get started accordingly, here are some of the most common lapses every new blogger should avoid. Mistake #1: Absence of your Niche What’s the core of your blog? Do you write about anything every day? Or are you stuck with an ordinary subject matter that you like? If you write an article about food one day and fashion on the next and then wonder why no one is commenting, chances are people don’t have a clue about what your real blog is. Don’t underestimate the power of focus because a clear and straightforward blog can more likely niche to develop a somewhat focus, valuable, efficient and passionate content.  Mistake #2: Missing your real audiences  Gathering hundreds (even thousands) of reader online can be astonishing, but when you don’t know who your real viewers are, the problem enters. When writing a new blog, why not create an article as if having a conversation with your friend or a family member instead of addressing it to a crowd? Being specific to your topics will instantly make your blog more engaging and personal making your blog site more interesting and gather more readers. Mistake #3: Quantity Vs. Quality One common mistake of every blogger is the constant publishing of new articles every single day. Well technically, posting a lot to your blog is not a bad thing but if your posts are crappy and invaluable why update regularly? Read also: Some Powerful Attributes That A Website Must Have In Its Content Instead of wasting the time of your readers with your irrelevant blogs, you can create a real and profound blog post that requires time to analyze, write, and edit to encourage reliability and credibility. Mistake #4: Negligence of editing  Are you one of the writers who can write flawless posts in a flash of the eye? Oops! Stop right there and consider editing your blogs, because there’s no such thing as a perfect blog. But if you still want a close to perfection article, there are possible things that you can do: Make sure that every spelling is correct and always watch out for grammatical errors. Polish everything. In proper editing, you can cross out unnecessary words, replace jargons with simpler terms and split two long sentences with short information. Evaluate your post properly. Make sure that each paragraph is cohesive with the paragraph before it. Read also: Improve Your Local SEO Via Content Marketing Mistake #5: Never consider plagiarism as a choice  Most of the rookies in the world of blogging do ‘copy and pasting’. And they think that they can escape it. You can’t. Plagiarism doesn’t work at all because readers and editors can easily tell whether an article was made initially or plagiarized. If you copy the thought of another blog, your voice will not sound like you, and it will destroy your reputation. Plus, if you will be caught stealing the ideas of others, your site will be punished by Google that will cause an adverse impact on your blog and will affect its growth. If you ever read through the list of mistakes and is now thinking that you committed them, just remember that every neophyte learns many things and those mistakes are common. Every blogger has probably done one or more mistakes in his or her lifetime. Takeaway With the mistakes listed above, you will have a clearer path to excel in your writing. The period of your writing doesn’t matter because everyone at some point makes common mistakes in their life. Instead of being discouraged by your mistakes, use it as a fuel to power up your experiences that will keep your blogging business continuously growing and healthy. Read also:  Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO  

READ MOREDetails