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WordPress is a popular blog used for personal and business reasons. The popular WordPress plugins described in this article are designed to assist you in optimizing, customizing, and enhancing your readers’ experience.
This article will introduce and review my top 18 WordPress plugins.
All in One SEO Pack
We all know how important SEO is. Without SEO, your site will never be found unless you plan on dumping several wheelbarrows full of cash into Pay-Per-Click.
If you properly optimize your site, you can expect to rank better in search engines, bringing you free traffic while you sleep! The All in One SEO Pack makes WordPress more SEO-friendly by letting you define custom META titles, descriptions, and keywords for each page and post.
You can also use tools like Semrush and Similarweb to rank higher on search engines. Here is an in-depth comparison of both the tools – Semrush vs Similarweb
Fancy box
Everything’s better when it’s fancy. Fancybox is a fancy little plugin that allows your images to appear in an animated frame behind a shaded screen, instead of just popping up in a new window, which is always obnoxious.
The program allows for several customization options, such as animation behaviors, frame appearance, and uninstall…which you will never want to do.
Google XML Sitemaps
Since Google is the supreme ruler of the galaxy, you must make them aware of all of your site pages lest they smite you right out of the SERPs.
Google XML Sitemaps makes this easy by automatically generating a new sitemap every time you update your site by adding a new post or page. It will also submit it to Google for you!
Contact Form 7
Socialize
Like everyone else who can spell “Facebook,” I am a social media expert, so trust me when I say that you need to install the Socialize plugin.
This plugin automatically adds a share button to your blogs and pages so users can share your article without hassle. It includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and many other social media sites that no one will remember in five years (MySpace). Just click and share!
NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery makes it simple to upload images and then build galleries out of them. You can create as many galleries as your hosting account’s storage system can stomach and then drop them into posts and pages with just a click of a cute little icon in the WYSIWYG editor.
Akismet
This plugin is so awesome that it comes WITH WordPress! You can’t get a better reference than that! Akismet is a spam filtering plugin that does a good job of detecting spam comments when they are submitted to your posts.
Never again will you visit your blog and see an eloquent comment on one of your posts, such as “This post is good, I like it. It is so important I will visit again for a happy time!” by someone named Get Rich Viagra Lottery.
Revision Diet
If you are like me, then this plugin is essential! I will write a post, save it, read it, save it again, and so on.
If I am not careful, I can rapidly fill my database with dozens of versions of each post. This post eliminates all of those extra versions of the post you don’t need.
WordPress.com Popular Posts
I do not like just linking to recent posts on my side navigation; I prefer to link to the most popular posts. These are posts that people read more than others and are more likely to be interesting to other readers.
WordPress.com Stats
It is needed to run WordPress.com Popular Posts, but it also collects important traffic data and displays it in real time. Even if you use Google Analytics, it is a good idea to have a second tracking tool for when the traffic stats look funny (plus, it can exclude your views!).
You can also use an external tool like Semrush to get an overview of your and your competitors’ traffic. Here is how to activate the Semrush free trial.
WordPress Database Backup
Every blog must be backed up, and this does the job. What would happen if you accidentally deleted something or found that your blog had been hacked and had to rebuild it? This tool emails you a backup at whatever frequency you want it to.
WP Captcha Free
Akismet is great, but it still requires you to check that the spam comments are spam and the real comments are real. Well, this plugin eliminates comment spam on my blogs by timestamping the form when it is first collected.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
It is another excellent traffic plugin and is simple to install. If a reader has made it to the bottom of the post and probably taken it all in, give them some similar posts to read next. This makes your site ‘stickier.’
Feedsmith
This is an excellent plugin for your blog, allowing you to easily track feeds for your blog and receive accurate and helpful reports.
This can help you determine which access points are most beneficial to you and which are not working and allow you to take action. Feedsmith will automatically redirect people to your feed no matter how they initially access it.
WP Smush
Most of the time, the images you upload to your blog can be optimized further for the web.
However, it is tedious to do this every time you upload a new image. WP Smush will automatically optimize the images you upload, and you also get an option to optimize all the previously uploaded images.
This plugin will decrease the size of your images substantially while still maintaining the quality.
WP Review
If you are into writing reviews and creating product review sites, you will especially love this plugin. It is our very own easy-to-use Review plugin that can turn any theme or website into a full-fledged review site.
Cube Points
There’s something about accumulating points that make us feel useful, needed, important, or whatever value we ascribe to it.
Cube points let your members earn points for completing certain actions, such as logging in daily, commenting on posts, contributing content, or being active on a forum (this last one takes a bit of work but can be done).
What do they do with the points? That’s all up to you. Allowing members to purchase different modules of your membership site or upgrade to a higher level for that month is a great way to keep them inside.
You can even let members exchange them for products outside the membership or coaching time. Either way, you expose them to more of your content and get used to buying from you, whether with cash or not.
Customize Your Community
Many plugins claim to let you customize your WordPress login screen, but Customize Your Community, or CYC for short, doesn’t just change the WordPress logo and colors on the login screen.
It uses your theme. Best of all, it does the same thing with members’ profile screens.
Conclusion
Of course, there are hundreds of more plugins available for WordPress. That’s one of the things that makes it a great blogging platform. Many of these plugins are very useful for specific needs.
Don’t overload your website with too many plugins. Only have those that will be helpful to you. Excessive plugins can negatively impact your website and slow it down massively.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: I am Shubham Chopra, founder of Marketing Savior and an exuberant content creator who loves providing insightful reviews about digital products that will help startups and SMEs easily penetrate the online world.