With a new blog starting in every 7 seconds, the competition is fierce for each and every author.
Most of the bloggers emphasis on producing quality content to get more leads to their small business, but forget about building social presence and making their business blog search engine friendly.
Yet, with this article I want to share 12 Essential WordPress Plugins that can give you huge boost of traffic and make your blog more search engine friendly.
#1. Digg Digg
Digg digg is a very cool plugin that allows you to add float social media buttons in your articles. It’s an all in one social media solution for a WordPress blog.
With the recent BrightEdge research, it has proven that placing social media buttons on your blog can drive more traffic.
- It allows you to display all the popular social media buttons on your blog. They recently added the Pinterest & Buffer app button to their list of social sharing buttons
- It has great customization options. You can choose a floating bar like here or add sharing buttons at the top or bottom of the post like we have here.
- Lazy loading to increase the performance of the blog.
- Digg Digg has all the social media button that one would ever need, but doesn’t allow to add your own social media buttons unlike other social sharing plugins.
#2. The Slide
Simplereach will help you get more eyeballs on your articles. The Slide recommends related posts from within your site on a widget that “slides” in at the bottom of the page.
You have seen a similar content recommendation widget on sites like Mashable, and now SimpleReach is allowing anybody to take advantage of this awesome plugin for free.
One of the best thing of this plugin is, it don’t just suggest anything. It uses a new algorithm to pick the most relevant article for your readers.
- Increased sharing on Twitter and Facebook via embedded social buttons
- Access to full analytics in ‘Reports’ at SimpleReach.com
- Customize The Slide’s style and functionality
- It works smoothly with all the WordPress themes and doesn’t effect the speed of your site
#3. FooBar
A very powerful plugin that every blogger needs to know about is FooBar. It simply lets you add a sticky message at the top of your blog. It can be something that you want to promote or may be a blog post.
I’ve been using it for most of my business sites to promote affiliates, new products and blog posts. It works great and gives fantastic results. It’s very similar to the HelloBar plugin.
- The plugin literally takes less than a minute to set up everything.
- Customize colors, fonts and even textures with the Hello Bar editor.
- You can embed the foobar on almost any type of sites.
#4 W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is the most complete Website performance solution for WordPress. It improves the user experience of your site by tweaking the performance of your servers and caching the every element of your site.
With the help of this free plugin, you can increase the speed up to 10 times and get more traffic by the search engine giant, Google.
- Improved web server performance; sustain high traffic periods Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds
- Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
- Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag) with “cache-busting”
#5 WordPress SEO by Yoast
There are many free and paid SEO plugins available out there. Before WordPress SEO plugin, All in one SEO used to be go to plugin when it comes to doing SEO for WordPress.
The plugin comes with some great set of features like a snippet review, page content, meta titles and much more.
- It analysis your page / post for simple things that you’re bound to forget. For Instance, if you have images in your post and whether they have an alt tag containing the focus keyword for that post.
- Easily allows you to control the correct canonical on each page, including the homepage, tags and categories.
- Meta & Link Elements – The SEO pluginWith the WordPress SEO plugin you can control which pages Google shows in its search results and which pages it doesn’t show.
- Multi-Site Compatible – The plugin has the multi site compatible functionality.
- Import & Export – One of the most amazing feature of this plugin i like is, it easily lets you import or export the SEO settings to thesis or genesis or any other framework out there with the support of SEO Data Transporter plugin.
#6 GASP Anti-spam Plugin
Growmap Anti spam plugin is a fantastic Anti-spam plugin that uses a simple algorithm to stop the spammers & spam bots. The plugin adds a client side generated checkbox to your comment form asking users to confirm that they are not a spammer. It’s way better than Akismet plugin.
A check is made that the checkbox has been checked before the comment is submitted so there’s no chance that a comment will be lost if it’s being submitted by legitimate human user.
#7 Backup Buddy
What if one day you wake up to find out that all the work you’ve done on your blog was gone? Wouldn’t that be your worst nightmare.
Backup Buddy is the plugin that I’ve been using for all my blogs. It’s a must have plugin for WordPress. It’s a premium plugin.
You can even backup your blog manually or with a free plugin.
But, it’s important that you understand the importance of having a backup of your blog. Most of the free plugins only back up the pages, posts & comments, whereas Backup Buddy back all the data – content, comments, users, settings, themes, plugins, etc within few minutes.
If you still don’t understand the importance of using a Backup buddy as a backup solution, I’d defiantly recommend you to go with the free option.
#8 Editorial Calender
The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog. I’ve recently started using it and love the simplicity to manage & schedule the posts. With the Editorial calender, you can set drafts or schedule posts and view them live on a calendar within WordPress.
The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.
Get the Editorial Calender Plugin
#9 Smush.it
WP Smush.it is a simple plugin that reduces the image file sizes and improve performance using its API within WordPress.
It offers an API that performs these optimizations automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress.
- The plugin is very light weight and works perfectly with WordPress. I’ve been using it from an year and half and never had any issue.
- Stripping meta data from JPEGs and un-used colors from indexed images
- Optimizing JPEG compression
- Converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
#10 Optin Skin
Who don’t want more leads, more subscribers, etc. I do and every one who wants to make money looks for getting more leads. With the help of optin skin plugin, you can get more leads / subscribers without putting any extra effort.
The plugin comes with 18 beautiful designed forms to choose form. Many bloggers in the industry has already started using this little plugin. It costs $47 and you can run the plugin on unlimited sites.
- It easily lets you test all the elements of your opt-in form.
- Customize every single element of your form with their “Simple Editor”.
- Allows you to add social media buttons with few clicks.
- Works perfectly with all the email service providers – Aweber, Mailchimp, mailchimp, iContact and Feedburner.
#11 Thirsty Affiliates
I never liked those ugly affiliate links and that’s why I’ve been using Thirsty Affiliates plugin for all my business blogs.
Thirsty Affiliates is a premium plugin that helps you cloak the ugly affiliate links. Here’s how a non cloaked aff. link looks like
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=346198&u=416513&m=28169&urllink=&afftrack=
And after cloaking it with the Thirsty Affiliates plugin, it would became
http://www.wpkube.com/go/studiopress
If you don’t want to spend money on this plugin, Pretty link is a good alternative.
Get the Thirsty Affiliates Plugin
#12 WP Touch
As more and more people accessing sites or blogs from their smartphones / tablets, it’s very important to have your site optimized for mobile devices.
If you haven’t optimized your site, you’re missing a big opportunity to spread your content in a new way. Fortunately, optimizing a WordPress site is very easy. All you have to do is to install the WPtouch plugin.
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from the most popular web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices.
The plugin allows the ability for visitors to switch between WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.
The WPTouch PRO version comes with a slew of new features like more style, color and branding customizations, themes, 10 languages, more advertising options and Web-Application mode.
Over To You
Which WordPress plugins do you use on your site? Do you have any other WordPress plugins that you would highly recommend?
If you find this blog useful please do like it on Facebook and share it on Twitter.
Thank you so much for this information. I am a novice as far as blogging and information like this is dynamite to me.
Regards
Richie
Hi Richie,
Your welcome and thanks for stopping by. I hope this information has helped you.
If you need any help regarding blogging or WordPress, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
-Dev
Nice collection of essential plugins
thanks for sharing this list.
A few of these I had already known about. The W3 Total Cache and WP Touch plug-ins I installed immediately after reading this post, and I look forward to the immediate improvement!
Thanks Ana and Devesh!
That’s fantastic to hear, Jeff.
Both of these plugins will definitely going to improve your blog performance.
Thanks for the nice comment and have a great day.
-Dev
So I decided to give the the Slide plugin a shot. I’ve submitted my application to be accepted into the beta, but am still waiting to hear back after 2 days. Any idea how long this actually takes?
Hi Jeff,
I’m so glad to hear that you’re trying the slide plugin. It usually takes 2-3 days to get the application accepted.
For the meantime, you can use this plugin – http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/upprev-nytimes-style-next-post-jquery-animated-fly-in-button/
What’s your take on The Slide vs Link Within? Obviously you prefer The Slide, but what do you like about it over say a plugin that offers multiple suggestions at the bottom of a post?
Hi Jeff,
Both are two different plugins.
The Slide shows only one related post through the slide out widget, while Link Within shows multiple posts at the bottom of the page. I think having both the plugins would be a good fit.
Btw. – I’d still suggest you to go with The Slide plugin, which has better functions. Alternatively, you can use upPrev plugin, as the The slide plugin is currently in beta.
Thanks for stopping by, Jeff. Have a great time.
-Dev
This is a GREAT post! Thanks so much for sharing this.
Great content is one thing, but the techy stuff like this really helps bloggers get the most out of their blog, and get the word out there.
Much appreciated.
kx
Hi Kiki,
That’s great to hear, ki. Great content is must, but one can’t ignore the techy stuff.
Thanks for the nice comment, ki. Have a great weekend.
-Dev
Thanks for sharing this list, Dev. There are some that I haven’t heard of and am going to check out!
Stacy
Hi Stacy,
Glad to see you, here.
You’re always welcome, my friend. Thanks for stopping by.
-Dev
Currently i am using W3TC, Sumsh It its really awesome plugin for speed up your WordPress Blog. I never heard about #2, #3, #6 I would like to give it a try. Thanks Davesh for sharing the list.
Thanks.
Hi Amit,
So glad I could able to help you. W3 Total Cache and smush it plays a great role in increasing the site speed.
Thanks for the nice comment, Amit. Have a nice day.
Great list. Smushit really increased my load speed. Still going for less than 2 seconds. I found some widgets like Klout were slowing it down.
I just switched from akismet to GSAP last night. I’m getting more spam comments today but that is my own fault for listing my site on the do follow directory.
Also Yoast stated that his Google analytics does not play well with Thesis so I have not installed it on my site that runs on Thesis.
Good list referred to me by Ana.
Thanks,
@ClayFranklin
That’s fantastic to hear, Clay. How’s GASP is doing for you?
Ana is a fantastic blogger and I must thank her for referring this list.
Thanks for the nice comment, Franklin. Have a great weekend.
-Dev
Cheers for the article – learned some things! I have a question regarding the cache. I have heard W3 Total is one of the best, but since I’m not totally competent at managing its features, Quick Cache is much simpler to handle. Do you feel one is better than the other regarding performance?
Hi Scott,
Quick Cache is a great option for not so techie users as it work out of the box with the default setting and do a perfect job. I know using W3 Total Cache might cause difficulties for the non-techie users but still it’s most powerful caching plugin out there.
If you’re having a difficulty or issue with W3 Total Cache, than I would strongly suggest you to go with Quick cache.
Thanks for stopping by, Scott.
-Dev
Great list Dev
Checking out Simple Reach now. It is very stylish 
Will give it ago! How’s their CTR comparing to normal yet another post?
Cheers,
Ming
Hi Ming,
That’s nice to hear. You would love the Simple Reach plugin. It’s converting very well because of the algorithm it uses to slide out the post at the bottom of the page.
The Related posts doesn’t do well, because it looks simple and every other WordPress blog uses it. I’d prefer to go with Simple Reach over YARP or Related post plugin.
Thanks for the comment, Ming. Have a great weekend.
-Dev
I have used some of the plugins listed above and indeed they all works like charm. This Foobar and Smush It seems to be promising. I think its worth a try
Thanks for this one Dev
Hi Herbert,
You’d love the Foobar & Smush-it as both the plugins do a very well job in improving the blog.
Thanks for stopping by.
-Dev
I will definitely try it out Dev,
Thanks again
Thank you Devesh for this great list. I used it while I was reading to install 2 plugins that I had heard about but had not implemented yet. I was so glad to see the Digg Digg had integrated pinterest into their lineup. A little thing maybe, but I was looking for an easy way to get all my social widgets lined up on one line. Very cool. Thank you.
And I love the idea of the editorial calendar, already have been using that this morning.
Hi Michael,
Your welcome. I’m glad you found this list useful.
Digg Digg is a great social media plugin and has all the social media buttons & features that one would need to add the social media buttons.
Thanks for the comment, Michael. Have a great weekend.
-Dev
hey man , could you let us all know what are the plugins you use in your own blog ?
Hi Vijay,
I’m using all the plugins listed above except GASP & WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Thanks for stopping by.
Hi,
Thank you for your nice article. It will help me.
Thanks
Your welcome, David and thanks for stopping by.
Wow really good selection of plugins and a nice mix too. I particularly like the SimpleReach slide, been seeing it on sites but couldnt figure out what it was or how it worked, until now! Thanks for that. The only thing missing is a security/protection plugin, how to beef up the security of your WP site. Maybe that can be your next blog post?
Hi Matt,
Glad you found this list useful and thanks for stopping by.
Here’s the list of security plugins & hacks –
http://www.wpkube.com/wordpress-security-tips-hacks-and-plugins/
Have a great time, Matt.
i have install the digg digg plugin on my blog… its awesome…..
now i need a good security plugin….
my Google search engine leads are getting redirected…. i don’t know why it is happening !
Hi Sunil,
Glad you like the digg digg plugin.
Your search engine links are redirecting because there’s a virus or may be Trojan. The best option would be contacting your hosting provider to scan your website.
Here’s the list of security plugins, hacks & tips – http://www.wpkube.com/wordpress-security-tips-hacks-and-plugins/
If you still need help, please contact me through the contact form.
Thanks for stopping by.
-Dev
i changed my hosting…. now i guess i am good to go
thanks for your help
Whenever I initially left a comment I clicked on the Notify me when new comments are added checkbox and currently each and every time a comment is added I get four email messages with the identical comment.
Thanks for letting me know about this. I’ll look into it.
This helps me a lot! I have started a blog 7 days ago. I don’t have much plug ins. Now I have got idea what plug in I should install. Thanks!
That’s great to hear, Arjun.
Thanks for the comment. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need help with anything related to WordPress.
Hey Dev,
Really cool list of resources man.
Just one quick question though, do you use a plug-in for your upper right part (the social media widgets) or is that manually coded into your theme?
Thanks in advance,
Sergio
Hey Sergio,
Glad you found this post useful.
It’s WP Mash Social plugin – http://www.wpkube.com/wp-mashsocial-the-best-social-media-sidebar-plugin-for-wordpress/
Your welcome and thanks for stopping by.
Hello,
Anyone know why ? the Digg Digg bar doesn’t show up? It is supposed to work with every theme correct?
If anyone knows why it may not show up please let me know.
Thanks!
Hey Anson,
Digg Digg works with every theme that follows the best WordPress Practices.
I just checked your site and it seems Digg digg is working fine. You would need to increase the right margin.
Another great alternative of Digg Digg is – Share Bar Floating plugin.
Thanks for stopping by.
I have used most of the plugins you listed down, but I haven’t tried yet the editorial
calendar. It is very timely, this is one I am looking for. We are holding classes/events for
insurance adjuster and I would like to post events through calendar. Currently I use event calendar plugin but found to be buggy. I will try this new plugin.
Thanks for taking time listing down these plugins..
Hi Jeni,
I’m so glad I could able to help you in your insurance project. Thanks for stopping by and leaving a nice comment.
Have a great weekend.
There’s a good mix of reliable old Plug-Ins as well as some great new plug-ins I haven’t heard of. Great post.
Glad you liked the post, Robin. Thanks for stopping by.
Hope to see you around.
Gr8 Post, help me lot, few of them started using. thanks for the guidance
Hi Dev,
You Always Post Great Info, this one also inspired me! great List, thanks for the List, and want to Ask You that How Should I start with Building Email List, What Things will I need for it, what do you say about WP-AutoResponder! Thanks
Regards,
Mairaj Pirzada
I must say W3 Total cache is best in the list…
I always love descriptions of the best wordpress plugins. I’m using at least half of these. The slidebar plugin looks interesting; I may have to give it a go. Can you tell me how Thirsty Affiliates differs from Pretty Link Lite?
Thanks for this article. I wasn’t even aware of the first three.
I recently started using Sucuri Security to harden any directories and scan the site for malware.
Another silly but essential one is Duplicate Post. Not sure why it’s not built in to WP.
Thanks again.
A very well compiled list Devash. Keep it up.
Hi Devash,
Good article it helps me more, it is useful for poor bloggers,
waiting for more information.
keep sharing.