most important plugins for wordpress blogs

Plugins are a very important part of the WordPress platform.

So what exactly is a plugin? A plugin is a piece of software that will extend the functionality of your blog.

There are plugins for almost everything. Some examples include:

• Backing up your blog.
• Add social media buttons to your post.
• Creating additional layers of security for your blog.
• Collecting email addresses.

The best thing about plugins is that most of them are free and they are very simple to install.

Now there are thousands upon thousands of plugins available.  It might be tempting to install many of these. However, you want to limit your plugins. If you have an excessive amount of plugins this is going to slow down your site.

You only want to install the minimum amount of plugins, especially when starting out.

These are the plugins that we recommend to start with:

UpdraftPlus – With this plugin, you can backup your entire blog. Very important if something bad were to happen to your blog.

Yoast SEO – Yoast SEO guides you on how to create SEO optimised content to improve your ranking in search results like Google. This helps bring traffic to your blog.

Social Warfare – The Social Warfare WordPress blog plugin allows you to automatically or manually add social media sharing buttons into your content.

WP Smush (Freemium) – This plugin will compress and optimise your blog images as you upload them without reducing their quality. This helps to keep your blog’s load speed fast.

W3 total cache – W3 total cache improves your blog’s performance by caching your WordPress site.

Wordfence Security (Freemium) – Wordfence Security is a reliable WordPress blogger plugin where website security is concerned. The plugin has security features including Firewall protection, malware scan, blocking, login security, live traffic monitoring and a lot more.

Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights – Google Analytics is a free plugin that enables you to understand your WordPress website traffic.

How to add a WordPress plugin

Adding a plugin is very easy.

In the menu go to ‘Plugins’ > ‘Add New’

Here you can search for Plugins. You can use keywords to find the type of plugin or specific name of the plugin that you are after.

Once you have found the plugin click ‘Install Now’.

After the plugin has installed hit ‘Activate’.

There you go. Simple as that.

To see your installed plugins and settings go to the menu and click on ‘Plugins’  > ‘Installed Plugins’.

Here you will be able to make update settings and activate, deactivate and delete plugins.