WordPress Plugins offer bloggers the opportunity to customize and expand their website and blog. The exact plugins you will use for your specific blog will be determined by the nature of your business and your overall strategy. However, there is a list of must-have WordPress plugins for bloggers that we recommend for all industries and strategies.
3 Must-Have WordPress Plugins
1. Updraft Plus
Ask any blogger and they will tell you: to be successful at blogging requires time and effort. So imagine how frustrating it would be to put in so much work and to lose it because of a mishap. Things happen all the time in cyberspace: glitches, updates, security issues, hackers. Updraft Plus is a plugin that offers bloggers the ability to backup their website content for free. The beauty of Updraft Plus is that this plugin also helps bloggers restore their data and content should the worst occur.
2. Yoast SEO
One of the major advantages blogging offers is the ability for breaking out of your warm market and make it easier for your cold market to find you simply by asking a question to Google. The snag, however, is that for Google to return your website or blog in their search results, they have to know it’s there. Yoast SEO offers bloggers a checklist style of tasks you can do to help boost your individual posts’ search engine optimization.
3. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
One of the first things you will learn when you get your blog or website set up is to start monitoring your website’s traffic, including demographic data, conversions, sales, and landing page performance. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights connects your Wordpress site to your Google Analytics account so you can view and monitor your statistics from your WordPress dashboard.
Are WordPress Plugins Necessary?
Short answer? Yes. The plugins can help you rank on Google, they can help keep your site safe from scammers and spammers. There are many different kinds of plugins that are both free and paid. So you can pick and choose which other ones you may need for your blog.
How Many Plugins is too Many?
If you have too many plugins it can cause your site to crash, or to be bogged down. It could also do the opposite of protect your site and make it easy for security breaches to happen. A good rule of thumb to live by is no more then 20 plugins for your own self hosted site. If you are using a shared or cloud hosted site you should have no more then 5 plugins on your site.
That way your site will run smoothly and increase the user experience for both you and your reader.
When you begin blogging for the first time, the sheer number of available WordPress plugins for bloggers can make you feel overwhelmed. This list of must-have WordPress plugins for bloggers are the three plugins that should be installed on your blog first.
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