Blogging 101: Best WordPress Plugins

One of the best things about WordPress is the sheer amount of Plugins available to customise your website to look and function how you want it to. Whether a plugin is visible to the reader or it’s purely a back end help for you, they’re so useful and honestly I don’t think I could live without mine.

So I decided to sit down and look through my own plugins, think about the ones I’ve used in the past and talk through some of the best plugins in my opinion.

Blog Design

Social Slider Widget

The social slider widget is how I have my Instagram posts at the bottom of my site! It’s a nice visual addition to my design, that I love. You don’t have to have it at the bottom either, so you can alter it to fit what you want.

Tabby Responsive Tabs

If you’ve seen my beauty reviews, you’ll have seen I have multiple pieces of info in a tab area at the top. This is because I wanted all this info, without taking up too much space on my page. This is where Tabby Responsive Tabs comes in! It works perfectly for what I needed it for.

Simple Social Icons

Instead of spending loads of time making the perfectly coloured social media icons to match the rest of my theme, I use the Simple Social Icons plugin. Just input your key links and select which ones you want on your site through the widget.

Community

Comments not Replied to

A key thing for me is to reply to every single comment I get on my blog. I can easily do this with the plugin, Comments not Replied to. This adds a section in my comments tab to see which comments I still need to reply to.

SEO

Yoast

Yoast SEO is a great tool to help guide you when writing posts. It uses a traffic light system to tell you how well written a post is for SEO purposes.

Rank Math SEO

Rank Math is another SEO tool that can be used instead of Yoast and also uses a traffic light system. The bonus of Rank Math is that it has much more advanced features on top of post SEO like a whole site analysis tool.

Ads.txt

If you’re using Google ads or any other company that places ads on your website, you will need and Ads.txt file. This runs similar to a Robots.txt file which tells search engines which pages to include/not include in search – where an Ads.txt file says which companies can add an ad unit to your site. I use a plugin as I find it much easier than trying to find the file or find out where I need to place the file in my websites folders.

All Meta Tags

Meta tags are invisible pieces of code which provides data about your website to search engines, and so is pretty important for SEO. You can manually code these tags in, however I use the All Meta Tags plugin as I find it easier.

Smush

Smush optimises all images on my website, to make them better for page loading speeds and therefore SEO. It works on both old and new images and saves a lot of space.

Metrics

Google Analytics by MonsterInsights

I love being able to see quick insights on my stats for the month so I user Monster Insights Google Analytics plugin. This let’s me quickly see a stats dashboard everytime I log into my website, without needing to go across to Google Analytics.

Others

Akismet

Akismet is a plugin that I feel like most people have or have heard of. It works to protect your blog from spam comments, and it works really well. I’ve rarely found fault with spam getting through its filters.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Accelerated Mobile Pages is an easy plugin which creates AMP pages for you. This means it’s creating pages which are built for mobile which is increasingly important. The pages are a lot more lightweight, often removing design elements and unnecessary areas which slows down the loading speed.

Did I miss any WordPress plugins you find useful?