When people first get WordPress, they often ask what Plugins to get.
There’s thousands to choose from and it can be hard and overwhelming at first deciding which ones might be most useful!
This post will be good for people who have WordPress as well as those considering moving over – you can see some of the great Plugins you can get to make your life so much easier!
Here are the ones I use and why I love them so much.
The Best WordPress Plugins
Broken Link Checker.
This Plugin scans your blog and lets you know if you have any broken links so you can then deal with them.
Broken links are bad for a few reason. Mainly because:
- It can be frustrating for your readers if they click on them.
- Can earn you a bad rep with Google, meaning you’ll rank lower in searchers.
Most of my broken links come from bloggers that have commented on a post leaving a link to their site, which has now been deleted.
Some can come from linking to items online in wish list posts.
You can very quickly and easily unlink and fix this problem in bulk with this tool.
Comment Reply Notification
This plugin sends an e-mail out to a commenter when you reply to a comment they left, this lets them know you’ve replied so they can come back and reply, if they wish! Great for encouraging conversation in your comments.
CommentLuv
Thus Plugin let’s a commenter leave a link to their most recent post, or one of their most recent posts. This is a great way to give back to your audience by giving them a chance to share a link and maybe get some new readers!
Digg Digg
DiggDigg is an Plugin that makes it easier for your users to share your content easily by just clicking a button! It also shows how many times an article has been shared which is great because apparently the more times an article has been shared, the more likely someone is going to want to share it. Psychology, eh?
Google AdSense
I have a Google Adsense account which means that I make some cash through adverts depending on how many views I get and how many clicks an advert gets.
The traditional way of adding an advert to your blog is putting the code into your sidebar/header/footter manually.
The Google AdSense app allows you to put adverts on your blog using a simple drag and drop feature.
Much easier!
Jetpack by WordPress.com
I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve not taken the time to explore Jetpack fully to take advantage of the dozens of features it offers.
I use Jetpack mainly as a way to view my stats – it gives a much more detailed break down of your page views and lets you view search terms, where traffic has come from, where it’s going to, top posts and more.
It also holds other features, such as related posts, social shares, protects against hackers and spammers.. just to name a few!
Related Posts
This is the 5 posts you see below my post that are classed as similar content.
If you’re lazy, then the Plugin will automatically pull up relevant posts according to the keywords in your post, post title and category.
My favourite thing about it is that you can edit them – so I often go in and select my own related posts if it doesn’t pull up the posts I want featured.
It’s a good way of getting your bounce rate and page per session up by encouraging people to delve a little further into your blog – especially first time readers!
Ultimate Nofollow
Ahh, the old Nofollow/Dofollow links!
This Plugin let’s you mark link as Nofollow at the click of a button, without having to insert the code manually!
To be honest, this is a bit of a fail on WordPress’s part why they haven’t included this into their normal settings, like Blogger!
WordPress Editorial Calendar
In my blog post: Secrets to blogging every day for a year, I spoke about how I use an Editorial Calendar to plan my content. With this Plugin, you can not only plan your content, but click into each post to edit and even drag it into different days if you want to change the day it’s posted on. It makes my life so much easier!
WP Google Fonts
This allows you to add different fonts to your themes. It’s great way to customise your blog a bit more. Especially if you use a free theme like me and want it to stand apart from the rest of the crowd!
Yoast SEO
This is a dream for those bloggers that are interested in ranking higher in search engines.
It lets you add your targeted keyword into a post and then lets you know what you need to do to make your post have a higher chance if being visible in Google.
What are your favourite plugins? Are there any here that I’ve missed?
I just manually no follow links when I need to 🙂 I have a broken link checker plugin but rarely use it (oops). My favourite is the calendar one you suggested AGES ago, soo useful! But I’ll check the few out on here I’m not using.
THANKS CORINNE. x
Touchscreens & Beautyqueens | Home and Beauty Giveaway
That is one very informative post! I have wordpress too , and I installed, (or tried to :/ ? We’ll see if it works) the first one about broken links. Thank you for bringing these to our attention!
great review! Thanks for the useful tips!!
Thanks Corinne, this was helpful. I’m still getting used to WordPress. The Broken Link Checker looks really useful and isn’t something I’d come across before. x
I would really like to change to wordpress.org I guess that’s my objective for this year.
Natalia
Nice post!
Baci,
Marina
http://www.maridress.it
Great guide Corinne.
Lizzie Dripping
Very good guide. I have to install the SEO plugin, it seems very helpful.
I have most of these however need to check the rest! Thanks for the recommendations xx
http://www.elabellaworld.com
Thank you for sharing this. I do have some of these but not all. I think I’m going to download the Broken Link Checker.
xx Izzy | Qthee
Interesting information and useful also, have a nice weekend!
My most fave wp plugins are w3 total cache, ithemes security and seo by yoast. And jetpack, though it has a bit conflict with some ithemes security feature like xmlrc, it’s still good. Can’t imagine how my blogs will perform if without this amazing plugins. Thanks for sharing, Corinne!
xoxo
Jhem | JhemSays.com
As always great tips, I am definitely moving to WordPress in the next six months so this was really useful Lucy x
This is so helpful, great work, Corinne! Will definitely have a look at the ones, I don’t have.
I use a plugin called Revive Old Post which is brilliant. It automatically posts links on Twitter, or whatever I want, to my blog and it’s very customize-able.
Tess x