Plugins Help Online Blogging
There are so many plugins available today for online blogging. There are over 42,000 plugins in the WordPress directory today. What can plugins do for you and your blog?
Plugins can add extras features and functionality for your wordpress blog. It makes it easy for those that do not know how to write code. It's a quick few clicks and a plugin can do all kinds of wonders for your wordpress site. These plugins can make your website look better, run faster and drive more traffic to your site
These plugins that help online blogging can also hinder it. You must be very careful of which plugins you choose to use today.
What Do You Look For In A Plugin Today?
- Check the update's date. Be sure it's not a very outdated plugin. Most plugins have updates every couple of months. (Be sure to update them when they do!)
- Read how many others have installed the plugin. If many are using it with success it must be doing something right!
- Look for recommendations of others that you trust. People who have been using the WordPress platform for years have probably tried and tested many plugins.
- Always be sure a plugin offers some sort of support, either through chat or email.You want to be able to count on help if something does go wrong.
- Be sure the plugins help online blogging for you today. If it will not be a helfpul to you why use it? You don't want too many plugins if you can help it. They can slow down your website.
Not all plugins will work with your WordPress theme. If you remember I loved Shareaholic for quite a few years but when I updated this site back in the beginning of 2017 it did not work with this theme. Since then they have made some updates to Shareaholic and it may work for you well now.
Learn How These 6 Plugins Can Help You With Your Blogging Online Today!
You will love these plugins below!Under Construction Page
This is a fairly new plugin (since 2016) with over 80,000 users already. It's a beginner friendly plugin that is easy to install. They offer 2 new designs each month. This plugin offers support for most caching plugins - no need to manually purge (nice!). They have over 400 5-star reviews and offer email support.
Under Construction creates a maintenance/under construction/coming soon page and puts the site in the maintenance mode in just one click so that people don't see a broken site while you're working on it. You know how awful those broken sites are to land on! There are more than 20 themes you can use. You can add Google Analytics to it, set an end date, and even add social icons.You can check out their video below to learn more about this awesome plugin:
Be sure to check out Under Construction today for your blog today to promote your coming soon pages and keep people coming back with an under construction fun page. After I read Erik Emanuelli's review of Under Construction's review on their site I was sold on it's awesome features.
Social Warfare Pro
This is one of latest plugins I have installed and love! I loved it so much I became an affiliate for the Social Warfare plugin. Not only does it show your share counts for each social network but it gives you a total at the end of the share button. (You can view mine here at the end of this post.) If you have a small number of shares it hides them until the shares increase.
These share counts are great for showing social proof to your readers. People love interacting when they see you have a lot of shares going on at a blog post.
Social Warfare also includes a great click to tweet feature where you can choose from various styles of tweets. This is how Plugins help online blogging today. I love this click to tweet feature and the choices if offers.
In addition there is a Pinterest image area where you can add in a larger image for pinning. Pinterest images are vertical and must be a certain size to gain attention there. I've noticed an increase of Pinterest shares since using this plugin. Try out Social Warfare today!
Yoast SEO Premium
I've used the free version of Yoast for years and I recently wanted to kick things up a notch here so I went premium. I love how it helps you craft posts with SEO in mind and offers suggestions for internal linking. It saves me a lot of time! I no longer have to count headlines or paragraphs. Yoast SEO does it all for me. (I reviewed Yoast a few months ago when I first when Pro with their services.)
Yoast premium saves me a lot of precious time! Click To Tweet
WP Smush
Images today are key in content. People love images. You have to be careful that your images are seen well on mobile too. WP Smush handles it for you. Automatically too!
Those Large image files may be slowing down your website without you even knowing it.WP Smush uses WPMU DEV's super servers to quickly smush every single one of your images and cuts all the unnecessary data without slowing down your site. They do also offer a pro version of this plugin for you.
It will provide a faster auto-smush.It helps photographers keep EXIF data - image information data attached. It's great for anyone who uses images on their blog posts and websites.
Revive Old Post - Twitter
This is a great plugin to share your old blog posts via Twitter. You can choose how often to tweet them out from this plugin. You just set it up and exclude some topics or dates. You are then ready to go.
A great way to do a little automation along the way. You can even add hashtags to certain topics automatically.
Broken Link Checker
This plugin helps scan your website and lets you know what links and/or images are broken so you can easily fix them. You can monitor the progress and tweak various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.
You can have notifications sent to you via email or when you log into your dashboard to see your broken links. I see many broken today from bloggers that have quit. Having no broken links will make your blog better when readers come to your site.
Most of the time when I have broken links I unlink those old links. If other broken links go a active main website but a page was moved I will correct in the URL. This broken link plugin makes it all very easy! You could do via your Google webmaster tools but it takes longer to do there.
And of course Google will love your blog for having links that work!And of course Google will love your blog for having links that work! Click To Tweet
Plugins Help Online Blogging Easier When Used Correctly
Plugins help online blogging today easier for bloggers to work with their own self-hosted WordPress sites. Not everyone can spend a lot of time coding their own websites today. Just be careful which ones you use.
Be sure to update your plugins regularly. When you update your WordPress site be sure to deactivate all the plugins first and then activate them one by an one and check for any issues. This is the best way to prevent a plugin from causing your website any harm.
How many plugins do you use? Which plugins help you the most? I'd love to know about your favorite plugins today!
