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Planning to start a WordPress blog and still confused with the kind of plugins you must have?
Well, we’ll make the decision simpler for you.
Beginners find it extremely difficult to choose the best plugins when starting a blog on WordPress. The default functions included in the WordPress engine do not help much in increasing the blog efficiency to be honest.
WordPress plugins are literally the lifeblood of any WordPress blogging site. They are used for extending the features and functionality of the blogging site. These plugins consist of added features that are essential for powering the performance of your blog.
Type of plugins available online are outnumbering, but we will help you in choosing some important and effective ones which can take your blog to the next level of optimization. Usually, selecting an appropriate plugin from the list of thousands of plugins available on the internet is quite consuming and requires a hell of a lot of research.
Therefore, this exclusive list of plugins mentioned below will help you in picking up the right ones. It will also save your quality time which you may use in building your WordPress blogging site. So, let’s check out the list of top WordPress plugins that you must consider installing to enhance your blogging experience.
1. Download Akismet Plugin
Frankly, the first plugin that you MUST install on your new blog is Akismet!
Yes, you read that right. Akismet leads the list of top wordpress plugins that you should install.
So, when you start up your blog on wordpress and come across some interesting-to-look-at comments like “I love your writing style” or “Wow! This is so informative”, do not get excited. I repeat DO NOT get excited.
Such remarks are usually not genuine. You can easily identify the spam content by checking the URL of these comments and if it leads you to a spammy affiliate site, you know that it’s a spam comment.
Almost all the new blogs are filled up by spammers. Such comments are something that you will face from day one. Spammers target the blog sites by posting such comments. They just want to popularize their websites and do not have any intention to join the discussion on blog niche. Akismet helps you in preventing such spam comments on your blog site. It automatically removes the spam comments and send them into the trash bin.
Therefore, it’s a must-must-have on your startup blog!
2. Download Jetpack Plugin
It is an official plugin provided by wordpress.
This one is an all-in-one plugin tool with major features in it. It lets you monitor your blogging site in an effective way while enjoying some added wordpress services that you otherwise get on a self-hosted blog.
Jetpack offers a variety of useful widgets like site statistics, proof-reading, buddypress, subscription management services, contact forms and similar options. It also gives you the feature to make your blog social by adding the ‘social share button’ and recent tweets in the sidebar of your blog page.
However, the best part of using this plugin is that it provides great analytics and insight into your blog’s traffic. And in case, you’re thinking to include a forum page, you wouldn’t want to miss the buddypress widget, which you get with this plugin.
In order to activate it, you need to create a wordpress ID and then download Jetpack from the list of top wordpress plugins mentioned there.
3. Download Social Warfare Plugin
This is the best plugin that lets you add social sharing buttons at the right places on your blog. When readers come across these social buttons at the right time, they instantly share the article they like. This in turn, increases the traffic on your blogging site.
Social bookmarking has become an important ranking factor for SEO. Social Warfare plugin helps you to share your blog on popular social media platforms eye-catchy and mobile ready share buttons. This plugin works on both desktop and mobile sites.
It supports sharing on all major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Gmail, Google+ and many more social channels.
Social warfare is one of the top wordpress plugins that you should have on your startup blog.
4. Download Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is yet another one in the list of top wordpress plugins. It is better than the ‘All in one SEO’ plugin as it inherits all its features and also provides you with additional features. The main features of this plugin are meta robotics widget, RSS footer by Yoast, XML sitemap and other related widgets.
It offers way more features than any other free SEO plugin on wordpress!
This plugin also has an upgraded version that costs money. However, the free one is adequate for most of the bloggers out there.
SEO Yoast also lets you noindex the not-so-useful pages on your blog, which helps in increasing the rank of your blogging site and adds more value to it. The XML sitemap that is generated with this plugin can be used as an alternative to the google sitemaps. You can adjust its settings from the configuration section. You can also choose the frequency (daily, monthly or weekly) from the options given there.
It is useful for an efficient optimization of your startup blog. It makes your life easier by adding keywords, descriptions, titles on your post. Bloggers are strongly recommended to install this one plugin for driving traffic to their website.
No traffic, no success. Therefore, this plugin is essential for building up your new blogging site.
5. Download Cloudflare Plugin
There are other plugins, but this is the one that you would definitely want without considering any alternative to it. It helps in boosting your website speed by removing the threats and vulnerabilities slowing down the speed of your page.
Cloudflare also helps you with analytics such as keeping a track of total visitors on your site, the bandwidth saved and threats that are blocked on your site. This plugin provides you with a global delivery network for your blog.
And guess what?
You can even change the appearance of your blog using this plugin. Yes, you can change settings for cache purge, security level, image optimization and many more things.
With so many benefits, Cloudflare has to be mentioned in the list of top wordpress plugins that you should consider for your startup blog.
6. Download Contact Form 7 Plugin
You can instantly build and publish your forms on wordpress through Contact Form 7.
It gives you easy and quick form-building widgets that can be helpful to get reviews for your startup blog. Therefore, Contact Form 7 Plugin is one of the top wordpress plugins.
This plugin can manage multiple contact forms at the same time and you can flexibly customize the form and mail content according to your requirements. The content customizations are usually done using a simple markup. It also lets you provide a feedback form for a web-page or post that you have shared online.
And this is not all.
The added advantage of this plugin is that it supports Ajax-powered form submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering feature and so on.
You can understand the functioning of widgets that come with this plugin through the picture given above. First arrow shows that you need to click on the ‘contacts’ options in the menu given on your wordpress page. Second arrow displays the section from where you can start creating your forms. Third arrow is giving the short-code for that form.
7. Vaultpress Plugin
What if a malware or program malfunction happens on your website and you end up losing all your blog data?
It is scary to even think about any such mis-happening. But there are plugins that can help you in taking precautions for any such event. Vaultpress is the best plugin that provides wordpress backup service.
This plugin offers subscription based security and backup services for your blogging site. You can back-up all your blogging data easily using this one tool. It’s useful, effective and keeps your content safe. You do not have to worry about the security of your blog site once you install this one of the top wordpress plugins.
8. Download Broken Link Checker Plugin
This is an extremely important plugin to have from the list of top wordpress plugins.
It keeps a check on any 404 or dead links on the website which is very bad for SEO. Once it comes across such broken links on the website, it gives you suggestive options for fixing those links.
Better the SEO for a blogging site, better is its rank on the search engines. Therefore, this plugin is a must-have.
The wordpress directory is full of plugins and you can find unlimited plugins out there. However, for a faster and better experience, you MUST have the useful ones mentioned above. The list of powerful plugins given above are useful to enhance the functioning of your blogging site, but DO NOT overuse them as it might harm your site.
Now, go ahead and improve your blogging experience with these top wordpress plugins!
