I love writing blogging tips posts and this ultimate WordPress plugins guide is going to be another long one – I can feel it coming. I’ve been using plugins since I first started using WordPress and I love what they can do for your blog.
I did write a post 2 years ago now on my favourite plugins for WordPress but as with all things in blogging, things change and I felt it was time to update and share all the tips I can and that includes the plugins I adore.
For more blogging tips and tricks I highly recommend checking out the Exciting Emails site too. I recently wrote a post for the site which is my Ultimate Guide to WordPress and if you want all my WordPress tips then check it out.
iThemes Security
When I first moved to WordPress my site was hacked and links to American medication sites added to my posts without my knowledge. This was because I basically had no security on my blog but this plugin now solves all my problems. When installing the plugin you get the option to use default settings such as limiting login attempts from unknown IP addresses which means I know that my site is secure. I also use it to create a specific login URL for my blog to make sure that it’s harder for hackers to get into my blog and cause me the same problems.
GDPR Cookie Consent
This is pretty important one to have on your blog so that you’re GDPR compliant. What I love about this cookie banner is that I can change the colour to match by blog, when you click accept it actually goes away and you have the option to link to your own privacy page. It has all the settings you need for GDPR automatically installed and you only need to pop the odd tick in a box to get it set up.
Easy Table of Contents
I’ve written a few blog posts recently (a bit like this one and my 10 ways to utilise Canva for your blog) and as a result of that, they’ve needed their own table of contents at the top. I swear that’s the student in me coming out. I’ve set it to only automatically appear when I use 10 subheadings but on some
Public Post Preview
If you do a lot of work with PR’s that like to approve your posts or you just like to share the drafts of posts before you hit publish then this is the plugin for you. You can create a link that expires after 24 hours and gives someone read only access to a particular post. I love it for when I want a second opinion on a blog post if it’s something I’m unsure about posting.
Quick Featured Images
This is an absolute lifesaver of a plugin for me. I can’t always remember which picture I’ve added as a featured image for a blog post so this adds an extra column to the posts page with a thumbnail of the image. Means you can keep an eye on your posts at a glance and not need to go into each post to double check if you have a featured image added or not.
Really Simple SSL
I have a free SSL certificate with my hosting and this is the plugin they recommend to activate it on my site. The plugin literally does all the work after you hit install which is the perfect plugin if you ask me.
Redirection
If you’ve moved to WordPress as part of re-brand or you were on Blogger then this is the plugin you need. I changed how my URL’s are made up for SEO purposes but this meant that all my URL’s didn’t work. This plugin helps me create 301 redirects for the old URL to the new one and so that if readers have URL’s saved then they can still access my posts.
WordPress Editorial Calendar
Do you struggle with knowing which posts you’re working on and when they are going to be posted? If the answer is yes then this is the plugin for you. You can drag and drop your drafts onto different days which I find handy to make sure I keep different topics separate. I don’t like posting too many blog posts of the same category one after the other. The only thing you need to beware of is if you don’t post on the day it is on the calendar then when you do publish it defaults to that date but you can change this when you do end up publishing the post.
Resize Image After Upload
I’ve been using Lightroom a lot recently which means my images are a larger pixel size than I prefer for my blog. Thankfully, using this plugin it re-sizes the images to 1200 x 1200 which is a better size and means they don’t take as long to load when my site loads. This also means they take up less space with my hosting too.
Yoast SEO
I have potentially left the most important (or at least the biggest) plugin till last. If you want to make sure your SEO is perfect on every post and know that you’ve got everything you can run in the background then Yoast is the plugin you need. As well as a traffic light system when you’re writing blog posts you can also set what happens when you share your blog link on Twitter and Facebook along with a default image (like the one below). There are lots of options to get you optimised and as far as I can tell all the issues that meant it wasn’t compatible with the new Gutenberg editor seem to have been ironed out as I haven’t noticed any
Well there you have it, my ultimate WordPress Plugins guide. Do you have any plugins you would like to recommend to me?
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