According to WordPress own data, 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog posts every month on its platform. It clearly shows how popular WordPress really is as a blogging platform and as a content management system. In fact, it powers around 30% websites on the web, making it the most popular content management system in the world.
There are more than 55,000 WordPress plugins out there and most of them help you extend the functionality of your website. Unfortunately, the right ones from such a huge collection can be tough especially if you are a new blogger who doesn’t know much about the pros and cons of each WordPress plugin. Don’t worry, because Branex has solved this problem for you by creating a list of plugins that every new blogger must use.
In this article, you will learn about the top ten WordPress plugins every new blogger must use in 2020.
Yoast SEO
You have just started blogging and no one knows about your blog. Your blog is getting little to no traffic. How can you fix this? By optimizing your blog for search engines. That is exactly what Yoast SEO plugin can help you do. It gives you instructions on how you can optimize your content and get more eyeballs on your content. It will also help you with keyword optimization and check the readability of your content with Flesch Reading Ease score.
Everest Forms
There are instances when your blog reader has a question or want to get in touch with you. That is where contact forms come into play. If you want to add a form to your WordPress blog, then Everest Form plugin is for you. Its user-friendly interface and simple drag and drop operation makes adding and tweaking forms a breeze. That is not all, forms created by using these plugins are responsive and translation ready. It also supports Google ReCaptcha to keep spammers at bay.
Constant Contact
As a new blogger, you want your readers to sign up for your newsletter by giving their emails. For this, you need a tool that can help you build your email list and send eye-catching newsletters that deliver value to your audience. Constant Contact fits the bill perfectly.
OptinMonster
Your blog is getting a lot of traffic but no conversion. Most users land on your blog and bounce off it within a few seconds. You can turn those visitors into email subscribers, leads and eventually into customers with OptinMonster. It is basically a conversion rate optimization plugin that comes preloaded with features like display targeting, high converting opt-in forms and lets you recover abandoned cart sales.
Sucuri
Security has always been a major concern for WordPress users. Sucuri is a WordPress security plugin that also has a web application firewall. This can come in handy when it comes to protecting your website from DDoS attack, XSS attack, brute force attack and malware infections. If you don’t have a firewall protecting your website, you should install this plugin immediately.
UpdraftPlus
Taking regular backup of your website can be a daunting task but it is also important to ensure business continuity. UpdraftPlus takes the hassle out of the process by automating backups. This plugin saves all your backups in remote locations such as Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, S3, Rackspace etc so you can easily restore it in case of a disaster. If you want better support and more features, there is also a premium version which gives you access to both. This allows you to choose according to your business needs.
WP Rocket
Page load times and website performance can make or break your website. If your website is slow to load and does not respond to user inputs, users will abandon your website. Sadly, it requires some technical skills to improve these user metrics and not everyone has these skills. Thankfully, there are WordPress plugins like WP Rocket which can help you enhance your website speed and performance. It turns on the recommended caching settings such as cache preloading and gzip compression automatically. Moreover, it also turns on DNS prefetching, lazy loading images and minification, which would minimize your website’s page load time.
RafflePress
People love contests and giveaways and participate in those activities frequently. As a new blogger, you can harness the power of contests and giveaways and increase your website traffic, gain social media followers and email subscribers. RafflePress is a giveaway building plugin that gives you access to giveaway templates. It’s simple drag and drop interface makes it super easy to create giveaways and grab the attention of your blog readers. As a result, you can not only attract more new prospects but also keep them engaged.
SeedProd
Everyone hates downtime whether you are a website owner or a website visitor. SeedProd is a WordPress plugin that makes downtime less taxing and more fun for website visitors by showing them “Coming Soon” landing pages and let businesses collect emails, leads and grow your followers even when your website is down for maintenance or update. It can also integrate seamlessly with your email service provider and social media channels and help you manage everything from one place.
MonsterInsights
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that lets you unearth useful insights about your blog readers. Ever wished there was a Google Analytics for WordPress? Well, there is, and it is called MonsterInsights. It brings all the important stats and shows everything in your WordPress dashboard. It is free but there is also a paid version which offers all the features you need to dig deeper into how users are interacting with your website. You can try the free version first and if you like it and want more features you can go for the premium version as well.
Which WordPress plugins do you use for your blog and why? Which WordPress plugins are your favorite? Let us know in the comments section below.
