WordPress is currently the most used platform for creating online blogging websites. According to Wikipedia, WordPress is currently the world’s most popular blog publishing application and powerful content management system. It is an open source blogging software developed by PHP and MySQL. Nowadays, t is most important CMS to the bloggers.
The popularity and effectiveness of WordPress around the world is so great that giant organizations like BBC, Sony Music, MTV News, The New Yorker and even Microsoft have developed their websites with WordPress. Netcraft published and statistic that approximately 455,000 websites created by WordPress worldwide. Which is really incredible.
Not only that, WordPress is currently the top content management system that controls about 61.7% of the websites worldwide. So it is easy to guess what is the position of WordPress in terms of usage and how much more advanced this platform will be in the future.
What is WordPress plugin?
A plugin in WordPress is an extension to your website that modifies and improves WordPress’ main functionality. In general, it is a piece of code that “plugs” into your WordPress website and give you some extra feature.
Instead of modifying or editing original WordPress’ codes, using plugins is a better solution to enhance WordPress capabilities. It is easier to download and install plugins rather than customize a long set of codes. Dealing with code is a hard task after all.
Like WordPress, WordPress plugins are also rich and popular. If you want to make a ready-made website or blog look perfect, it is almost impossible without the use of certain plugins. WordPress has thousands of plugins according to your needs. From these you need to choose the most effective plugins for your site. Which you can use to increase the effectiveness of your blog.
Today in EGO, I’m going to introduce 10 simple WordPress plugins that you can use to make your website more advanced and efficient than before. Besides, there will be a detailed discussion about what a plugin does. So, let’s start.
1. WP External Links
If you create a blog site, you will need to use links to multiple websites in your written content. These links can be links to pages within your own website or links to other websites. But whenever you click on a link to another website in your blog post, it will load on your website tab.
If the link of the external website is loaded in the same tab of your website, it will create the possibility of reducing the visitors of your website. As well as not following the Do Follow and No Follow format of the link, it also has a bad effect on the ranking of your website.
You can use the WP External Links plugin to solve this problem. Activating this plugin will open all the external links in your blog post in a new tab. As a result, visitors to your website are less likely to go away.
2. Jetpack by WordPress
Jetpack is a plugin developed by WordPress itself. It’s a plugin called all in one. With this plugin you can back up all the information on your website, keep it secure and avoid various types of spamming and malware.
Jetpack has many more awesome features. If you connect your social media to Jetpack, every post you publish will automatically be shared on social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. You do not have to worry about sharing.
Also with Jetpack you can see the visitor rank of your website. You can also add share, comment and like features to your posts. This plugin currently has about 5 million active users and the number of users are increasing day by day.
3. Really Simple SSL
In many cases, the fact that our website has an SSL certificate but it does not display it in the URL bar. You can use this short plugin called Really Simple SSL to solve this problem. It automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL. Just activating it will display SSL on your website forever and it will never stop.
4. WP Table Builder
If your WordPress website is blog based, you may need to use tables a lot inside your contents. WP Table Builder is one of the many table building plugins in WordPress. You can easily add tables to your posts using the plugin. You can also customize the table as you wish.
It is a drag and drop table builder plugin for WordPress. It’s insanely easy to create responsive tables with WP Table Builder. Beside simple creating simple table, it is perfect for creating comparison tables, pricing tables, list tables and many more.
You’re able to use text, image, list, button, star rating, custom HTML and shortcode inside your table if you need. All the elements come with customization options of their own. You can also create product grids like e-commerce if needed. You can add images, links and buttons to each grid. You can change the color of the table to your liking.
5. Yoast SEO
Creating a website and publishing blogs are not the final words, you have to SEO them properly to gain expected traffic. Websites have no visitors are really valueless. So you have to give a lot of attention to catch the traffic for your website.
According to the Yoast SEO authority, “This plugin makes it easy for your site to meet the highest technical SEO standards. It also gives you the tools to bring your content to the highest standards of SEO and overall readability. Here, we’ll discuss how our plugin helps you build the best website you possibly can!”
If you activate this WordPress plugin, you will be able to enjoy some of its awesome features. The function of Yoast SEO plugin is to make your content SEO friendly in search engines. If you present your content very nicely and apply the guidelines given by Yoast SEO to each content, then the rest of the responsibility of ranking your content in search engines is Yoast SEO’s itself.
Yoast SEO automatically analyzes your content according to different tags and key-phrases and delivers it to search engines. This plugin will show you everything you have done wrong and what you have done wrong in a content. As well as what else to do, your content will get good rank, Yoast SEO will give you excellent and effective guidance. Yoast SEO also allows you to determine what your website’s shared links will look like on different social media.
6. Contact Form 7
Creating a contact page for your website is a mandatory task. Because your customers or visitors will contact you through this contact page. If the theme you choose doesn’t have a contact page, you can easily create a lovely and functional contact page using the Contact Form 7 plugin.
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. The specialty of this plugin is that by using it you can create contact pages consistent with the design of your theme. It is so popular in WordPress and this plugin has about 5 million active users.
7. WP Content Copy Protection
A content writer goes to great lengths to retrieve a lot of information and write an article. But there are many who simply copy it without permission and use it on their own website. As a result, your website suffers a lot.
You can try the WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click plugin to avoid unwanted copying of content on the blog site. If you activate it, no one will be able to right click the mouse on your website. As a result, it will not be possible for him to copy any of your posts. Before activating the plugin, you must see if it is wp-buy.
8. Pin It Button On Image Hover And Post
Pinterest is one of the most popular social media in the internet world. You can bring a lot of traffic to your website using Pinterest. Pinterest currently has about 335 million active users worldwide. Only then will you realize how important it is to promote your website on Pinterest.
If you open an account on Pinterest and link it to your website, you can control Pinterest PINs from your website. Not only that, if any visitor likes a post on your website, he can pin or save that post in his own account on Pinterest. This is a simple and small plugin called Pin It Button On Image Hover And Post.
This wonderful plugin developed by Weblizar, a button called Pin It will automatically appear when you hover over any image on your website. And if you click on this button, the rest of the process of pinning the images of your website in Pinterest will come. And for this, a user does not have to enter Pinterest.
9. bbPress
A support forum is very important for a website. Support forums play an important role in engaging your website visitors with your e-commerce or blog, whatever the type of site. Having a support forum creates a beautiful trust of the visitors towards that website.
Using the support forum, users can ask their necessary questions and anyone, including the site admin, can answer those questions. If you want to add support forums to your website, you can use the bbPress plugin. This will allow you to design excellent support forum pages for your website. Besides, you can easily control it as an admin.
This plugin is mostly used for creating support forums in WordPress. Developed by The bbPress Contributors, this plugin is currently used on more than 3000,000 websites.
10. Akismet Anti-Spam
If the contents of your website are getting spam comment, then it is very dangerous thing for your site. You must take action against spamming. Akismet is a great WordPress plugin that can help you to do this.
Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
It automatically checks all comments and filters out the if the look like spam. All of the comment has a status history. So, you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
To use this woderfull plugin, You’ll need an Akismet.com API key. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.
Conclusion
All of the plugins mentioned here can be used for free. But some plugins have some premium services that you have to spend some money to get. Although the services that are available for free in these plugins are enough. But if you want to get an advanced feature outside of free, you can upgrade to the paid version.
