There are over 59,000+ plugins available in the WordPress directory. As a beginner, how
can you even choose? In this video I'll show you: 1. The 3 must-have WordPress plugins for bloggers
2. 5 Nice -to-have Plugins that will help you get more traffic to your blog and save you time.
3. What you should consider when choosing a new plugin for your blog.
Intro Music
Hi! I'm Anastasia and I share a lot of tips on blogging, Pinterest and online
business. Subscribe and click on the Bell button to get my future videos in your feed and let's get
started…with the must-have plugin #3! #3 - SEO Plugin
When you start a WordPress site or blog, your goal is to get some visitors to it, right?
One of the biggest traffic generators for most of the sites is SEO - search engine optimization.
To help you optimize your site for Google, Bing and other search engines,
you can use one of the best SEO plugins.
Over the years, the most known was Yoast SEO and it still is great. But in the last few years,
a new competitor emerged that offers even more amazing features in the free plan.
It's Rank Math. Even with the free version, Rank Math lets you analyze up to five focus keywords
at a time. Also, Rank Math added AI content credits that help you optimize your posts,
while Yoast still doesn't have any AI features. And if you decide to go with the paid version of
either one or the other plugin, Rank Math currently costs
$59/year for unlimited sites. Yoast SEO is . But I just wanted to give you my honest opinion,
if you have a blog for many years, changing your SEO plugin can be a real trouble
and it's not worth switching from Yoast in your situation. However, if your site is new,
it might be worth using Rank Math or migrating to it from your previous SEO plugin.
Must-have plugin #2 is an Image Optimization plugin
Images on your site are the biggest contributor to slowing it down. A slow site has lower chances
to rank well in search results. So you have to do your best to reduce your image size
without losing the quality too much. When you take photos with your phone or camera,
they come out in a high resolution and the image file can be too large.
Of course even before you upload your images to the WordPress media library,
you should do your best to reduce their size in any of your image editing tools.
But oftentimes, even that is not enough, especially for sites that include a lot of images.
To optimize your images to the max and in an automated way,
you should install an image optimization plugin.
The best option I can recommend to you is ShortPixel. I use it for my own blogs but
if you are uploading more than 100 images a month, you'll need to use Shortpixel's
paid version. It's not very expensive and you can purchase a pack of 30,000 images in advance
for just $20 and it will optimize your new images as you upload them.
But I understand that as a beginner, you might prefer to use a free plugin.
Imagify is my second-best option. You will be able to optimize about 200 images per
month for free here and then you'd still have to use their paid plan.
Must-have plugin #1 is for Website Backup
As a beginner, you will make so many mistakes while you are building your site. You will
likely try different WordPress themes, you will test different plugins. Sometimes you'll
just make mistakes as you learn and your site might crash in the process.
But imagine, you did so much work on your website, maybe wrote your first 10 blog
posts already and you accidentally do something that causes your site to crash in the process!
So you must have a plugin that allows you to do a backup of your site. And every time
you are about to save some significant changes like a new WP theme or activate a new plugin,
you should do a backup. If things go wrong, you can easily recover your site as it was
right before the update. The same applies to situations when your site gets hacked
and you need to restore it. Let's hope this doesn't ever happen to you,
but if there is even a 1% chance, would you be willing to lose all of your work?
The most popular plugin for backups is UpdraftPlus and you can do pretty much
everything with their free version without ever needing to upgrade.
The second best plugin in this category is called ManageWP Worker,
you can install and use it for free as well.
These were my top 3 must-have plugins you should install this year. But I also wanted
to show you the other 5 important plugins you might need to use depending on your preferences.
And also, if your blog or business requires this functionality at all.
I like to call them the NICE-TO HAVE PLUGINS
Let's start with the plugin #5 - WP Rocket for
side speed. This is a premium plugin that can dramatically improve your site speed.
And this is really important for your blog's SEO performance.
WP Rocket is a cache plugin, which means it speeds up the loading of your WordPress pages.
But this plugin only has a paid version which might not be affordable for beginners. So I put it
on the list of the nice-to-have plugins which you likely will need to use only when your site
is big enough and has a large traffic volume. Use my link https://anastasiablogger.com/wprocket
to sign up for this plugin, install it on your site and test how it improves your site speed.
It has a 14-day guarantee period, so you can really give it a try.
#4 on my list of the nice-to-have plugins is Grow by Mediavine.
This one is a plugin for social sharing buttons.
Actually you can find other similar plugins but the biggest competitor Social Warfare
was used in a wide-spread hacking attack on Wordpress
sites a few years ago. And that's when I switched from that plugin.
Grow Social has a free version that offers you basic social share buttons, with limited
options and does not include any advanced settings specifically for Pinterest buttons.
That's why I personally use the paid version of Grow. It's not that expensive anyway, it's
$34 one-time free. But because you use a paid version, you can ask Mediavine support for help
if you have any questions or issues integrating the plugin into your site.
You know that I share a lot on this channel about my Pinterest marketing strategy.
And I have to tell you honestly, a big part of your success on Pinterest is covered by this
small but mighty plugin that has very advanced settings specifically for Pinterest buttons.
Using the right settings, especially for users on mobile devices,
you can increase the number of shares from your site on Pinterest like a lot!
If you want to learn more about growing traffic from Pinterest, I will give you
a link to my free Pinterest masterclass click up there and in the description below.
Plugin #3 on this list of important plugins is Akismet which will help
you filter the comments on your blog to reduce the amount of spam. For example,
it will filter out the comments that have nothing to do with the topic of your page.
Akismet used to be free for all users, and it's even pre-installed on all Wordpress websites.
But in the future, it will have a paid version for commercial blogs and websites.
Plugin #2 is Elementor. This one is one of the most famous page builders for WordPress
sites. But depending on your Wordpress theme, especially if you use one of the premium themes,
some of them have their own page builders and in that case you definitely don't need Elementor.
But if it's not your case, you might benefit from Elementor because it helps you build your pages
using the easy drag and drop interface. So you first need to find out whether
or not your theme already has its own page builder and then if it doesn't,
Elementor should be the best most popular option in the ecosystem.
And the next plugin to look at is Gravity Forms to grow your email list.
Again, this plugin is not necessary for all the sites. As a beginner, you might not even
want yet to build an email list. But when you are ready to do it, Gravity Forms is a great option.
This is a paid plugin and I need to remind you that the main reason
I often even prefer to use a paid plugin is because that always comes with support
and well-organized documentation. So if anything goes wrong or I can't figure something out when
setting up the forms, I can contact their support. The best part about Gravity Forms is that they
have a wide range of add-ons and external integrations. You will find easy integration
with MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, Dropbox, PayPal, Stripe, and many other platforms.
Now, I promised to show you in this video the most important plugins you should install on
your WordPress site. But of course, depending on your needs you might need to choose other
plugins and it's really not that easy to decide which plugin is the best in each category.
So How Can You Choose WordPress Plugins?
Let me help you a bit with this! I'll tell you what are the main factors you should be looking at
when you choose the best plugins. First, you will likely do
a search in the WordPress directory looking for the functionality you need.
Let's say, you are looking for a plugin to help you "remove category URL".
This is if you want to remove the word category from your URLs that WordPress adds
by default. So in my case, all my posts about personal finance would be found in on the page
anastasiablogger.com/category/money. I used a plugin to make it anastasiablogger.com/money.
We'll type in the search bar the keyword "remove category
UR" and see the plugins that show up first.
Once you open the plugin page, you should look at these factors:
The number of active installations. In most cases, if the plugin has the highest number here, it's a
sign that people like it and it works properly. Last update. The next thing you should check
is how long ago was this plugin updated. This factor is very important. Sometimes
you could find a plugin that has a high number of installations that happened in the past years. But
the latest version of the plugin is too old and hasn't been tested with the last few WordPress
updates. See in our case, the very first plugin that shows up hasn't been tested with
the latest 3 major WordPress releases. It was last updated more than 2 years ago. This is a bad sign.
Most likely the developer of the plugin doesn't work on it actively. When the plugin was tested
a long time ago, it can even crash your site if it doesn't work with the new WordPress version,
or it can be more vulnerable when it comes to hacking attacks. So be careful with this factor.
Check user reviews. There is no special advice on this factor.
The more positive reviews obviously the better. Customer support. You can see even in the
WordPress directory under the rating if there were any support questions answered by the plugin team.
If you open a support forum for this particular plugin, you can even read through the threads
and see whether or not the team that created this plugin is helpful.
On a side note, if you found a free plugin outside of the official WordPress directory, be careful
with it as it could be harmful for your site. Now let me know in the comments below which
one you consider to be your must-have WordPress plugin and check out my video on which blogging
niches are the most profitable this year. Thank you for watching and see you in the next one!