WordPress Plugins Archives - 99signals

15 Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers

99signals Editorial — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:36:49 +0000

WordPress plugins can give your blog an extra edge.

The only problem? It’s often a tough task to pick the best WordPress plugins amongst so many that are available.

Having the right set of plugins for your WordPress blog is important to take your site from good to great.

In this article, we have hand-picked 15 best WordPress plugins that every blogger needs to install.

Top 15 WordPress Plugins for Bloggers

1. ThirstyAffiliates

If affiliate marketing is the primary source of income for your blog, then you need to install ThirstyAffiliates.

ThirstyAffiliates allows you to manage your affiliate links inside WordPress, cloak those ugly-looking affiliate links, and easily add them to your posts.

Price: Free

2. Inline Related Posts

Want your readers to stay engaged with the content on your blog? Then you need this plugin!

Inline Related Posts shows links to related posts within your articles. This is particularly useful for 1000-2000 word articles as users are already engaged with your content and more likely to check out similar content on your blog.

Price: Free

3. Yoast SEO

You need a reliable SEO plugin to increase search traffic on your blog. While there are tons of SEO plugins on WordPress, Yoast SEO is the most popular, with tons of great features to improve on-page SEO elements of your content.

Price: Free

4. Google XML Sitemaps

Having an XML sitemap is crucial in helping search engines better index your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps will automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site. It supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs.

Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Price: Free

5. Insert Headers and Footers

While managing your WordPress blog, you may sometimes need to add code snippets to your site’s header or footer. Examples of this include Google Analytics code or Facebook Pixel code.

Adding code snippets to your site means you will have to edit the theme files which could end up breaking your WordPress site, if you’re not much of a coder.

Insert Headers and Footers allows you to easily add code snippets to your WordPress site without editing your theme files.

Price: Free

6. All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets are special markup that you can add to your posts to give useful summary of your content to search engines.

All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets provides you an easy user interface to generate that markup and use it in your WordPress posts and pages.

The plugin supports the following content types: review, event, people, product, recipe, software application, video, and articles.

Read our detailed guide on Featured Snippets to learn more.

Price: Free

7. BackupBuddy

Backing up your site can save you from a lot of future grief.

BackupBuddy allows you to quickly setup automatic backup schedule for your site. It’s one of the most beginner friendly WordPress backup plugin in the market.

Price: Starts at $80/year

8. OptinMonster

List building is essential to running a successful blog. OptinMonster helps you turn your website visitors into subscribers.

From Sidebar to Welcome Gate Pop-ups, OptinMonster helps you to design elegant opt-in forms that prompt users to subscribe to your blog.

Price: Starts at $9/month

9. Display Widgets

Sometimes you need to display or hide a widget on certain pages.

Display Widgets allows you to easily show or hide widgets on selected pages and posts.

Price: Free

10. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins on WordPress.

When it comes to search engine rankings, your site speed is a major factor. To put it simply, WP Super Cache speeds up your website.

Price: Free

11. Revive Old Post

Too often new users create a blog post, share it once, and then leave it to die in their archive pages. But there is an easy way to optimize your old blog posts.

Revive Old Post keeps your old posts alive by sharing them frequently on your social profiles. It allows you to automatically share your old posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at regular intervals.

Price: Free

12. Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet allows you to add a click to tweet box within your WordPress posts. You can strategically place click to tweet boxes by bring more users from Twitter to blog.

Price: Free

13. Google AMP Plugin

One of the easiest ways to speed up your website is by embracing Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, an open source initiative that aims to provide mobile optimized content that can load instantly everywhere. And for WordPress users, activating AMP on the blog is as simple as installing any other plugin.

Google AMP plugin adds support for the AMP Project. With the plugin active, all posts on your site will have dynamically generated AMP-compatible versions, accessible by appending /amp/ to the end your post URLs.

Price: Free

14. Broken Link Checker

As you create more content for your blog, you’ll notice some of your older posts having broken links.

Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin identifies any broken links that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects. It also notifies you via email when it finds broken links on your website.

Price: Free

Side note: Check out our short tutorial video on how to use Broken Link Checker to find and fix broken links on your site.

15. TablePress

If you need to insert tables in WordPress, then you would need to install TablePress plugin.

TablePress allows you to easily create tables with in WordPress, add them to your posts, pages, and even widgets. No coding required.

You can also import tables from Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON formats.

Price: Free

Conclusion

So these are the 15 WordPress plugins we recommend to all bloggers out there. For more tools, plugins, and resources for blogging, check out our comprehensive guide here.

If you liked this article, please share it on Twitter using the link below.

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7 Essential WordPress Plugins That Will Get You More Traffic Instantly

99signals Editorial — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 07:03:32 +0000

WordPress powers 25% of all websites in the world. Its immense popularity is not just because it’s so easy to use, but because it offers a plethora of useful plugins which allow you to add complex scripts to your site with the click of a button.

With so many plugins to choose from, selecting the right plugins for your site can be an overwhelming task.

Download Now: The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit – 75+ Tools to Grow Your Blog [Free eBook]

In this article, we will show you 7 essential WordPress plugins that will help you generate more traffic instantly.

7 Must-Have WordPress Plugins That Will Get You Instant Traffic

1) Click To Tweet

Want to generate an insane level of traffic to your blog from Twitter? Then you need to use Click to Tweet WordPress plugin.

Click to Tweet allows you to embed Twitter share boxes within your content in a non-intrusive way and makes it easier for users to share snippets of content within your blog posts.

2) Yoast SEO

Driving search traffic to your blog is critical to your blog’s success. One way to optimize your posts for search engines is by using an SEO plugin. While there are tons of SEO plugins on WordPress, Yoast SEO is by far the most reliable one out there.

Yoast allows you to optimize on-page SEO elements of your post (title tag, meta description, keyword density, etc.) and also provides technical SEO support. It’s one of the first plugins you should install on your new WordPress site.

Related: 19 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

3) OptinMonster

An effective method to drive traffic to your blog is through email marketing. So one of your top priorities should be turning your visitors into email subscribers. That’s where OptinMonster comes in.

OptinMonster’s powerful drag & drop builder allows you to create visually stunning optin forms that are optimized for the highest conversion rates. From Sidebar to Welcome Gate Pop-ups, OptinMonster helps you to design elegant opt-in forms that prompt users to subscribe to your blog.

One of the best features on OptinMonster is that it allows you to track user’s behavior and show them a targeted message at the precise moment they are about to leave (called exit intent popup), so you can convert them into email subscribers. In addition to this, there are tons of other features which make this the best WordPress list-building plugin on the market.

4) Sumo Social Share Plugin

You may have engaging content on your site, but if it’s not easily shareable, then you’ll lose out on a lot of potential traffic.

Social shares play a chief role in driving traffic to your site. The more social shares your article has, the more likely it is to be shared on social media. According to research by Backlinko, social shares may also be one of Google’s 200 ranking signals to gauge content quality and relevance.

Although there are several social share plugins, Share by Sumo is the best, both in terms of design and functionality. It’s a part of the SumoMe plugin suite and the free version of this tool allows you to feature all the major social media channels on your social share bar.

5) Inline Related Posts

Inline Related Posts shows links to related posts inside your articles. This is effective for 1000-2000 word articles as users are already engaged with your content and more likely to check out similar content on your site. This also increases your page views and time spent on site by the user.

6) Comment Redirect Plugin

Yet another highly useful plugin created by Team Yoast, Comment Redirect allows you to engage with people who comment on your blog by redirecting them to a page of your choice.

Comment Redirect Plugin is an easier way to build your email list.

7) Revive Old Post (Former Tweet Old Post)

Revive Old Post WordPress plugin does exactly what its name suggests – it revives your old blog posts which are dying a slow death in the archive pages.

This plugin makes your old blog posts work for you by automatically sharing them on Twitter and Facebook at regular intervals.

In Summary

The above plugins can help you generate massive traffic, but keep in mind that you need to create and promote content on a consistent basis.

Blogging is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Growing your subscriber base and building credibility takes time time and effort. Having said that, the plugins featured in this article can make your task easier and ensure that your efforts are moving your blog in the right direction.

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