WordPress is an incredibly powerful tool for website owners, because of its ease of use and customizability. From blogs to e-commerce sites, there’s a plugin to help enhance and improve your offering for your audience. One of the things that make WordPress such a great tool is that it is open source, online and written in PHP. Open source means that it is not closed off to developers who want to create plugins and themes to build upon the platform. It is also incredibly simple to use, making it one of the most powerful content management systems (CMS) and blogging tools.
There are currently 76.5 million WordPress sites. That’s 26% of all websites globally. 2.5 billion posts have been created, and 3 billion comments left – that’s a lot of WordPress activity. There are 45,421 WordPress plugins available, which have been downloaded 1.3 billion times in total. So there are certainly lots of people using WordPress and thousands of plugins to choose from – where do you start? If you have a WordPress site and you want to enhance it with plugins, you have to approach the selection depending on your needs.
The Best Plugins For Blogs
Blogging is big, in fact, there are 409 million people viewing about 22.2 billion pages each and every month! For some, it’s simply a hobby, space for them to share their thoughts and opinions. For many, however, blogging has become a means of making an income. Some traditional “blogs” now work far harder for their content creators, becoming more like a full website.
If you’re a blogger who wants to build their engagement with their audience, beyond posting and receiving comments, you may want to think about collecting emails and building on your email database. Email marketing is still a great way of connecting with potential customers by offering them deals and offers, or simply letting them know what is happening with your blog. Also, it has been reported that you are 6 times more likely to receive a visit to your website from an email campaign then you are a tweet. One of our favorite email capture tools is Scroll Triggered Box, which is a capture box that slides from the bottom right of your blog. This will only happen when a visitor has scrolled 60% of the page if they close the box they won’t see it again for 30 days. It’s non-intrusive, and you can sync it with MailChimp.
It is also very important to consider your specific blog type, niche topic, and audience when searching for selecting your plugins. For fashion bloggers, you can try something like Alpine Photo For Pinterest. It allows you to add a photo grid of your most recent pins, it encourages people to go to your Pinterest and adds some great visuals to your blog. Food bloggers can use something like Easy Recipe, which allows you to easily add recipes, making them look far more attractive. And even bloggers who are talking about niche subjects can find a plugin to use, as the plugins directory is vast and interesting.
If you are a gamer who tends to the gaming crowd, you’ll probably want to show your audience your personal records and achievements on your blog. There is a plugin which will display your score on popular online poker site PokerStars, showing what your VIP status is. For people who play a lot on Steam, the Advanced Steam Widget will ensure your profile, a list of games or even recently played games are shared with the world.The key here is, think about the topic of your blog, what your audience would appreciate, and there’s sure to be a plugin for that!
The Best Plugins For Websites
Like blogs, websites can cover a limitless amount of topics, themes, means and outcomes. However, there are some really useful plugins which can help you understand what is happening on your site, to help you target the content, design, and usability.
Most web owners – about 50 million of them – now use Google Analytics to measure performance. However, to a non-specialist, this set of tools can be a daunting set of figures and graphs that don’t mean much. Also, adding the tracking code can be confusing for non-developers. The Google Analytics plugin by MonsterInsights allows easy means of adding the tracking code and brings all the information you need to your WordPress dashboard.
If you’re using your WordPress website to sell your products, then you’re going to want a great e-commerce plugin. There are much out there, but the most popular (and probably the easiest to use) is WooCommerce. The power of this plugin is that there are hundreds of extensions and themes so you have flexibility on your design and layout and can easily add new features. It supports digital and physical sales, you have complete inventory management, it has built in support for many payment tools, you can sell affiliate products and also supports many more features.
The Best Plugins for SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, can seem like a daunting and scary topic for many webmasters. People are constantly telling you that you need to be number one for every search term, and the means of getting there is often confusing and ever-changing. Lucky for you, there are many plugins out there to help you! One such handy tool is the Hummingbird plugin. The average user will spend less than eight seconds waiting for your site to load. Google recommends just two seconds. If you have a slow load time, you will be penalized in search results. Hummingbird helps you speed your site up, it analyses the speed and suggests fixes. It also takes care of your caching and saves a fast-loading version of your site.
The bread and butter of SEO are ensuring that the content on your page is targeted for your keywords. This mean ensuring that each page has a keyword focus and that that keyword appears in your page titles, descriptions, headings, and content. Website optimization brand Yoast has released a very easy to use the plugin which you can add to your website that helps you with all of this, add your keyword focus and it will tell you where and how you can make improvements. It will even stop you from making costly SEO mistakes with handy tips.
The Best Plugins For Social Media
If you’re going to the effort of running social media accounts to push your blog or website, why not take it one step further by adding social media integration to the pages themselves? This way, visitors are able to share content that they like to their social accounts, follow you or your official page and more. Also, it’s important to note that social signals are now important for SEO purposes. Making sure your content is shared socially is only going to help improve your position.
A good plugin to look at is Digg Digg. It was built by the Buffer team, who certainly knows a thing or two about social media. What is really great about this social plugin is the flexibility you have in where the share buttons can be placed. Like the best plugins, it is non-intrusive and doesn’t affect the user experience.
Research suggests that content with good images can get 94% more views than content without images – so if your site is very visual, then you may want to take advantage of this. Image Sharer is a plugin which allows you to add buttons to your images, creating more social shares and bringing more traffic to your site. It’s easy to set up and you can choose which share buttons to use.
With so many great WordPress plugins, this article could go on for days! Essentially, if you are a blogger or a website owner, there is definitely a WordPress plugin out there for your needs. Our advice would be to consider what you want to achieve, the problems you want to solve, the wants of your audience and find targeting plugins to suit them. Do not just download plugins for the sake of it. Use them to enhance, not hinder.
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