Starting a blog is more than just writing great posts. It is also important to think about things like SEO or loading speed for your site. You may be wondering how you can control such things. Luckily there are some fantastic wordpress plugins to make this job easier.
For this post, I have narrowed the list down to the top ten plugins that I highly recommend for your blog to perform at it’s best.
1. WordPress SEO Plugin
Good search engine optimization will get your blog seen in the Google search results. The aim is to appear at the beginning of the first page! There are many factors that go into optimizing a blog and a plugin will help to make sure that you are not missing the key issues. There are several good SEO plugins to choose from so finding one that is compatible with your blog should not be a problem.
I recommend Yoast SEO. The plugin will give you a readability and seo score as you are writing your post with recommendations for improvement. Once you get the green light in both readability and seo, your post should be well optimized.
2. Cache WordPress Plugin
Once readers find your site, they don’t want to wait…..at all……for your page to load. One way to combat this problem is to use a caching plugin. Normally, when a wordpress page or post is being brought up, there is a path of queries to go through to bring up the page. Caching simply makes a static copy of a page to serve instead. This decreases load time and makes everyone happy!
WP Super Cache is the plugin I recommend. The plugin does not require configuration but any changes are easy to do in settings.
3. Security Plugin
When you go through all of the work of creating a nice blog, the last thing that you want to happen is to have it hacked. Getting some extra security is imperative. I like Wordfence Security which provides a dashboard for viewing blocking and security activity.
It features a firewall, blocking, login security and scanning which will give you some extra peace of mind. And, whenever a plugin needs updating, wordfence will send you an email notification!
4. Anti Spam Plugin
It’s so disappointing when you finally start receiving post comments but then realize that they are only spam. Anti-Spam by Cleantalk plugin works incredibly well. This cloud anti-spam system doesn’t require captcha for your real visitors.
5. Broken Link Checker Plugin
Broken links are bad for SEO. It would be almost impossible to manually check all of the links on your blog. And, you wouldn’t be able to do it just once. It would have to be a continual monitoring process. No one has the time for that! Broken Link Checker will do the job for you. Quietly running in the background, it will continually check for broken links and notify you when they are found.
The vast majority of the apps here provide one-size-fits-all suggestions… The Yoast interface never really did it for me. It always dings me for “mistakes” that are irrelevant! Right now I’m starting to work with Ink for all