Are you in blogging? You need to check this best free WordPress Plugins for Blogging 2017. This list of best WordPress plugin makes your blogging work easy and safe.
WordPress is the name that comes to everyone’s mind when they hear the word blogging. It has evolved as one of the best among the Content Management Systems out there. It has many advantages over other CMSs such as Joomla, Drupal etc. WordPress currently has over 100 million sites running on it and is loved by its users. It is free, fast, highly customizable and has tons of features. What makes WordPress famous is the plethora of plugins and themes available for free. There are plugins to do almost anything on WordPress, and most of them are free to be used. That is the essence of this post, to explain about some of the best WordPress plugins for blogging.
Best WordPress Plugins for Blogging 2017
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Yoast SEO
SEO or search engine optimization is an integral part of blogging. If the SEO is perfect, the site will get ranked on the top and get traffic and ultimately make money. This free plugin called Yoast SEO helps you to manage the on-page SEO of your website. On-page SEO is related to the content of a specific page, how the data is organized and how many times the keyword appears.
Once installed, the plugin analyses and gives tips to make the On page SEO of a website better. It will tell you when the keyword density is too low or too less. Based on the different On-page factors it will give a score to each post along with a color code ranging from Red (Poor On-page) to Green (Best On-page).
Yoast will also help you create sitemaps for search engines and deindex parts of the blog such as categories. This free plugin thus tops our list of the best free plugins for SEO.
WP-Quads – WordPress AdSense Plugin for Blogging
The primary earning source of most blogs is advertisements. Advertising agencies such as Google Adsense pays the publishers per click or per action. Even if your blog is an affiliate niche blog, you will need to insert the affiliate banners on your blog. Manually editing the theme files to add adverts using PHP is not an easy task. Most bloggers will not have the technical skills to do that. This is why we are introducing you to a plugin that will make adding advertisements an easy task.
Once you install the plugin, you can add your ad codes to the given text boxes in the plugin menu. Then you can switch over to the ad placements tab and decide on which parts of the blog you want your ads to be seen. You can experiment with the placements and ad types until you can achieve the best CTR. Also check this top torrent sites
UpdraftPlus
One mistake that amateur bloggers make is that they never care about taking backups of their blogs. A blog is actually really fragile and is prone to several faults. Hosting issues, hacked plugins, bad themes are only some of the things that can cause your blog go dead. You will face a huge loss if this happens to you one fine day.
This is why frequent backups are of utmost importance. UpdraftPlus is a free and simple tool that can make the process simple and automatic. The plugin can backup and restore everything on your site, including the uploaded files, database, plugins, themes etc.
Once setup correctly, the plugin can automatically make backups based on a cycle. By default, the backups get saved to your hosting. But that will be of no use if the site gets down because of hosting issues. This is why you should also configure the plugin to take backup to secondary cloud storages such as Google Drive, DropBox etc.
Akismet
Spam is a big part of the internet now. Spam commenting is a term you will hear in the blogging world. This basically means commenting in various blogs to get Backlinks easily. A lot of websites give dofollow comment links for free as comments and people are always on the lookout to comment there.
Getting natural comments are actually a good thing and are a sign of user engagement. But what if people open your pages just to spam and get links? No one has the time to read and moderate each and every comment.
This is where Akismet comes in.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
ShortPixel image optimization WordPress plugin smoothly solves all your image compression problems. It processes images when you upload them to your Media Library, but it also can bulk optimize your existing images. You don’t have to edit each image, all image processing is automated. There are some other plugins which could do that, but ShortPixel is known to do the job just fine, and it’s coming with a lot of goodies.
Beside the most popular image formats – JPEG, PNG and GIF, ShortPixel can compress PDF files too. Just think how big these files usually are, and how you will speed your site and reduce your hosting costs by stretching their sizes with a bunch of kilobytes.
If you have images stored outside Media Library or you publish your images via a WordPress gallery plugin, you’re still covered, ShortPixel compresses them too. If you’re a photographer, ShortPixel has a special feature for you, a softer lossy compression called Glossy which treats your images with delicacy. Do you have more than one site? You can use an API key for as many domains you wish. If you need WebP images, Shortpixel will convert your images to this new format created by Google for FREE.
This useful plugin analyses each individual comment against their database of flagged comments and approves or deletes the comments accordingly. Their database is updated daily and is able to block most spammers. This free plugin is a must have.
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