Table of Contents
Must Have Plugins To Make Blogging Easy & User-Friendly
Topics covered
- What Are Plugins
- Why Do we need Plugins
- Basic plugins that every blogger should use
What are Plugins
Plugins are add-ins or add-ons which are software components that add a specific feature to your blog just like extensions.
when added to blogs/website it allows customizations as per our wish
It reduces your work & enhances viewers experience
Why Do we need Plugins
Plug-ins are extensions that not only work towards making the experience of your user easy & comfy but there are also tons of plug-ins that can make blogger’s life super easy
Being a blogger we got to handle so many things on our site but what if there are plug-ins to do those things for you?
These plug-ins will not only make blogging super easy & less stressful but at the same time it will spare you a lot of time that you can spare it in some other important stuff
Basic plugins that every blogger should use
There are tons of plug-ins out there to do an n-number of tasks
Every plug-in carries a specific feature that you could make use off but today lets just discuss the basic set of plug-ins that are a Must for a successful blog
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a part of Google Web Tools that help you to monitor your site & gain all the insights
Google Analytics Dashboard Plug-in enables you to track your site using GA Tracking code
& allows you to view GA stats in your WordPress dashboard
It will give you all the insights & stats of your site-
how many users came to your site, their locations, traffic source, time spent on the site & so on
it will make monitoring your site so dam easy
All though there are many GA plug-ins but this is the one I use & recommend
Back-Up Plug-ins
Back up plug-ins are one of the most important plug-ins that you got to have on your blog
These extensions are lifesavers when some unexpected technical errors occur like a server going down or worst server shutting, rare but it does happen sometimes they have to reinstall which will lead into you losing your content & important data
Taking the regular back up is one of the important things that you got to do to keep your site safe
so that even if unexpected errors occur
you can always use the backup to get your site back, up & running
These plugins are way too easy to handle, just configure them once & they’ll do their work in the background without affecting you
In fact, it will make your life lot easier by taking a load off you
Just configure them on how- when – at what time you want the plugin to take backup & that’s it
It will take care of the rest & also you can store the backup on n-number of platforms
There are many options like G-cloud, G-drive, your device, Dropbox, Email/Gmail, FTP etc
These are either available in basic plug-in or you can get them as add-ons
There are many plug-ins with both free as well as premium plans
So choose the one you feel comfortable but please do install one
Some of the backup plugins are Updraftplus, WordPress Backup & Migrate, WP Time Capsule, BackWpUp
Sitemap
Sitemap creates a page that will have links to all the pages present on your website & that page should be submitted to search engines
This will make it easier for your site to be found & crawled by search engines
it is also part of basic SEO of for your blog.
the sitemap should be easy to discover so that search engines can crawl & list your sites so this is very important for your site
there are many plug-ins that can create sitemap but I personally love XML Sitemap & Google News
AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages
This is really an important feature that you need to adapt to make your site user-friendly
you might wonder what does amp mean or do right?
As we know the majority of people surf the net on phone & tab so when they land on your site
if your site is not mobile friendly, if they have to zoom in/zoom out to read & move around then chances are very high that they might just skip your site
people are having very less patience so when they don’t find your site easy to operate they might just leave it
even though if your site contains good content that might interest them
so in all, you might lose a potential traffic just because your site was not easy to read on mobile or tab
That is why it is very important to have a plug-in that will make sure to display your site compatible with various devices
when this plug-in is activated it will display your site as per the device of the user making it user-friendly
although there are many responsive themes that cover amp too, still I would recommend you to have amp plug-in too
This will lead to more engagement
There are many plug-ins like AMP, AMP for WP
Image Compressor
Image compressor, some people may overlook this feature but being one of those bloggers who always use graphics in the post
I would certainly recommend you to use it
this plug-in automatically compresses the images that you include in the posts making the page/image load time really less & increases the speed.
Also, it compresses to the exact resolution making it visually appealing to the viewers & also with great graphics, chances are good that you’ll rank higher in search engines
There are many plugins but Smush is the one that I have been using & by far no complaints
AntiSpam Plugins
Akismet Anti-Spam is a pre-installed plugin that almost all WordPress installation has.
you can continue using the same or you can option for other one but make sure you have one installed on your site
As you site/blog starts getting the traffic you will notice an increase in the comments, it might make you happy but in reality, many of them are spam comments
Every time monitoring comments & rejecting the spam comments is not a big task but it might take some time & also when you have provision to lessen your work then why not?
These anti-spam plug-ins do this work for you
AS soon as someone comments on your blog, these plugins check the comments to see whether they are spam or not
Discarding these spam comments will save a lot of disk space of your site
All though these are not all the plugins you might need still, these are definitely the basics of what you will need
there are tons of others that you can use & will be super useful for you
also, I would recommend you to have an email subscription plug-in
To collect subscribes which will help you a lot in building your email list
So this is it for now
Have lots of things to share will be back soon & from now on every Tuesday I’ll be posting something new
So stick around
Also if you have any doubt feel free to contact me I’ll be more than happy to help
Until then
Take care & Keep Blogging
Pooja S B
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