How To Start A Blog on WordPress: Top 9 Best Plugins You Need

Plugins are my favorite part of WordPress. They offer so much functionality to your site. There are literally hundreds of WordPress plugins to choose from that help add dynamic and custom elements to your blog.

Plugins are pieces of software that enable or enhance a new functionality on your website. There’s a plugin for almost anything: contact forms, image galleries, backups, SEO, cache. Here are my top 9 WordPress plugins that I recommend you add to your blog:

Plugin Tip – Make sure to always update your plugins. They are a separate piece of  code and are updated on a non-standard schedule by their developers, to update bug fixes, improve security and introduce new features.

Top 9 WordPress Plugins

1. EMAIL PROVIDER PLUGIN

It’s important to connect your email subscriber list when you first set up your blog to start building your email list. Your email list is very important and something you 100% own. I use Mailchimp for my Newsletter and have added the plugin to seamless collect email addresses from my blog traffic.

2. YOAST SEO PLUGIN

Yoast SEO plugin is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search-engine-friendly as possible. Yoast SEO shows you how to optimize your blog posts and titles to help you get picked up by Search Engines like Google and Bing.

3. BACKUP WORDPRESS PLUGIN

Your backup plugin is one of your most important plugins but often overlooked. The Backup plugin backs up your files and database into the cloud services like DropBox. So this is essentially saving a copy of your website, pages, and blog posts. You want to make sure you are backing up your site regularly so you never risk losing all your work.

4. ASKISMET PLUGIN

This is a spam plugin to help protect again spam comments. This plugin checks all your comments against our constantly-growing global spam database to remove irrelevant, malicious content before it gets published. Spam can hurt your website ranking so make sure to activate your plugin.

5. WORDFENCE PLUGIN

The Wordfence WordPress protects your website from hacks and malware. This plugin also helps scan and identify when you need to updated files, plugin or if you have unusually login attempts to your account.

6. PRETTY LINK PLUGIN

Pretty Links plugin that enables you to shorten links using your own domain (instead of using bit.ly or tinyurl) so you can create branded hyperlinks for your site. The plugin can track each visit to your links and provide a detailed report of where the click came from, as well as the browser and host.

7. HEADER / FOOTERS PLUGIN

This plugin is for adding additional code and scripts to your website. This plugin is where you will place your Facebook pixels and Google Analytics script for tracking. That way you are placing your code in a safe environment and will not impact your site by placing it directly.

8. jQUERY PINTEREST PLUGIN

Pinterest is a great way to drive traffic to your blog. Add this jQuery Plugin plugin in to make it easy to pin your images and it allows you to change the branding to make it more aligned with your site.

9. CONTACT FORM

This is an easy way to set up contact forms on your blog for your readers to message you or submit a request. This plugin allows you to make multiple different forms depending on your blogs needs

That’s it! Those are my top plugins. Make sure you take the time to play with all of them. Everything I recommended has a free and paid version. Did I overlook any plugins that you would recommend?

TELL ME BELOW!

Next blog series will focus on setting up your email list and picking an email to start building your email list. Make sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss the next post!

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