WordPress Plugins are the most talked-about blog posts about WordPress blogs. There are probably thousands of them that a blogger can choose from, but should we? Can a WordPress plugin be like a magic wand for our websites or blogs?
Plugins are quickly and easily installable via WordPress. In just a few steps and seconds a new plugin can give your blog a new function or useful options without any complicated coding.
However, WordPress plugins may also slow down your website’s speed or conflict with other ones already installed or with your theme. They cause havoc or even take down your blog altogether. (Always be sure to test one at a time.)
Table of Contents
What Is A Plugin?
It is s a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. When a program supports plugins, it enables customization.
Without these, you would have to code everything on the backend of your website.
What Can Plugins Do For Your Blog?
Some of these can make your images smaller. Others can provide speed to your website. And then they are those that help show off your related blog posts at the bottom of each post. Some WordPress themes come with preset plugin functions so you don’t need as many of them.
If you use too many of them, they can slow down the speed of your website or blog.
7 Review Posts Around The Blogosphere
Create and Go published the best plugins for blogs. This list helps with the design, site speed, traffic, monetization, and more.
Hongkiat has a list of recommended plugins for the enhancement of your blog posts. These tools will help with your productivity.
Shout Out Loud has a wonderful list of these for your business blog on WordPress.
Blogging Wizard reviewed 10 different plugins that will share your blog posts on social media.
Bloggers Passion wrote about the plugins you can use for guest blogging on your own blog.
My Best WordPress Plugins
Yoast had been one of my all-time favorite plugins with the premium version. I loved being able to find my orphan content quickly. Yoast includes on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps, and much more.
Not only that but knowing what is SEO friendly for each blog post helps me to write them quicker. However, today I also use the RankMath plugin on several other blogs and I’m loving it.
Click to Tweet is another one of my favorites as may you haven often seen them on Inspire To Thrives blog posts. It is the best, easiest, and simplest way to promote and advertise your blog, website, business, and stuff on X Twitter.
However today in 2024 I’m testing the speed of the posts without the plugin. And many users now use browser extensions to share content. Stay tuned!
Another favorite of mine is Contact Form 7. This plugin 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. I’ve been using it since day one here on the blog. You can see it on my contact page.
Bonus Plugin Tip
The broken link checker makes finding broken links on your site quick and easy. I like to look at mine almost daily though there are other plugins where it can be fixed automatically.
I like to see which bloggers are no longer blogging as their websites are taken down by them. You can learn a lot by checking on your broken links. This helps you to build your blog with new relevant links to and from your blog.
What Should You Do Before Updating Your WordPress Blog?
Another tip, before updating to any new WordPress version be sure to disable all your plugins first after backing up your site. Then enable each one to be sure they work with the newest version of WordPress.
Otherwise, you could have a plugin take down your blog. It happened to me almost a decade ago and I never forgot the days of aggravation it caused.
Over to You:
Now, over to you – Do you believe these WordPress plugins can be magical or not? Which are your favorite among these and which could you live without?
How many do you have on your blog today? Please leave a comment so we can discuss the plugins here.