My Favorite WordPress Plugin
WordPress is the world’s most widely use blogging platform content management system (CMS). One of the benefits using WordPress is that you can easily extend its functionality by installing a plugin. There are over 10,000 plugins online you can choose from and today I will share with you my favorite WordPress plugin.
By the way, a plugin is a piece of software written to add new functions and features to your WordPress websites. They are many types of plugin. Some help you improve your blog content SEO. Some help you to improve social media engagement to your website.
However, installing too many plugins will slow down your website. Therefore, you should carefully choose and install the plugin you really need only. You should balance between features and speed.
Personally, I am using the following 8 WordPress plugins and I am happy with the performance.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is an all in one WordPress SEO plugin that helps you with your website optimization. Besides helping you on the technical optimization aspect, it also gives you readability advice to help you write content visitors like to read.
Basically, Yoast SEO plugin will help you in 2 aspects on your content writing:
- Content readability analysis
- Keyword optimization analysis
Of course, there are many more other features but theses 2 are the key features.
I have been using Yoast SEO for many years and I am very happy with it. You may visit Yoast’s website to learn more about the plugin or you may visit WordPress website to download the plugin now.
Akismet Anti-Spam
Blog post comments and contact form are the 2 ways for your visitors to engage with you. There are also good ways for you to build relationship with your visitors.
However, not all comments are good. Some comments were sent to you intentionally to promote products or services that you don’t need. We call this spam comments. These spam comments are not good to your website and it will hurt your SEO ranking on search engines.
In this case, Akismet Anti-Spam comes very handy to you. It helps you to filter suspicious comments by checking all your comments submission against their global database of spam. This will prevent your website from publishing malicious content.
You will need an API key to Akismet Anti-Spam plugin. The Key is free for personal blogs and you can get the key from Akismet.com. You can visit WordPress site to download the plugin.
WP Super Cache
Your website speed is one of the key factors that determine whether you get good ranking in Google. So, what is that mean to you if you have a slow website? It means that Google will be slower in crawling pages from your website because your website speed is slow. Thus, it might take longer to index your new content.
Moreover, you will give a much better user experience to your visitors if your website is fast. There are tools you can use the check your site speed and below are 3 tools you can use.
Caching plugin for WordPress will make your site faster and I use WP Super Cache. Basically, WP Super Cache generates static html files from your WordPress website and cache it.
The generated static html files will be used to serve your visitors. A static html file will load faster than dynamic file. You can download WP Super Cache from WordPress website.
WP Smush
I like to use a lot of images in my blog post. I just love to make my website visually attractive to my visitors. Canva is great tools to create and edit graphics for free. It is a good tool to use if you don’t have access to Photoshop or have limited design skills.
However, the problem with nice images are the file size. Nice images are usually big in file size and this will cause your website load slower.
I use WP Smush WordPress plugin to resolve this problem. It helps to resize, optimize and compress all your images and it is very easy to use. You can visit to WP Smush download page to learn more about this plugin.
Redirection
Redirection is a popular redirect manager for WordPress. Whenever I move a blog post from one URL to another, I will make sure I do a 301 redirect. I can easily manage 301 redirection using Redirection WordPress plugin.
If you don’t know what 301 redirect is, it is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. 301 redirects send your site visitors and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally typed into their browser or selected from a search engine results page.
I usually use Google Search Console to check if there is any missing page errors Google found on my website. Then I use Redirection to do a 301 redirect to fix the error. You can download Redirection here.
Pretty Links
If you are into affiliate marketing, you need to add affiliate link into your website to promote the link. However, affiliate link is usually long and ugly. See the example affiliate link below.
http://www.yourdomainname.com/training/level-1/getting-rolling/a_aid/d0a74ed4
In this case, you can use Pretty Links WordPress plugin to shorten your affiliate link. Besides to create short link, Pretty Links can also track the number of unique click to your short link.
Download Pretty Links today and give it a try.
AddToAny Share Button
When you write a good content, I am sure you want to share it on social media to get more engagement. You will need a sharing WordPress plugin to help you to do that.
AddToAny Share Buttons is a sharing WordPress plugin that help you to share your posts and pages to social media. This include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and over 100 more sharing and social media sites & apps.
Download AddToAny Share Button here.
Contact Form 7
A contact form on your website is an essential tool for you to keep in touch and build relationship with your reader. It is also a medium for your reader to give comments and opinions about your blog posts.
Contact Form 7 is the WordPress plugin I used to add a contact form in my website. It is very simple to use.
You can create multiple contact forms with Contact Form 7, and you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup.
Download Contact Form 7 here.
Closing Words
Thank you for reading my sharing on my favorite WordPress plugin and I hope you found it useful. Feel free to drop me a comment below if you have any question about the plugin.
To Your Success,
Kwah Choon Hiong
