Why Bloggers Love These 5 WordPress Plugins

I’ve been blogging for over 5 years so have literally tried hundreds of WordPress plugins.

All of my blogs have run on WordPress. I’ve been amazed by the developments with this tool.  Wordpress has truly established a publishing platform for people to quickly and easily access to become authors.

Since I started my blog there have been 5 wordpress plugins that have exceeded my expectations. These plugins have delivered consistent value to me and thousands of other bloggers, so I thought I would share them with you. Whether you’re starting a blog or curating new content to extend your blog, these may be useful to you too.

#1: Yoast SEO

YoastSEO helps you understand and improve all aspects of your site’s SEO. The plugin conducts an analysis of the content of your posts and pages, and recommends areas where you can optimise this content for SEO. I personally find the traffic light system (shown below) incredibly useful, so that I can quickly prioritise what is needed to improve my site’s performance. As well as an auditing tool for SEO friendliness, the plugin provides a feedback loop to you while you create content, which influences the content you write so you can achieve better SEO results.

#2 Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security by ELI

This plugin automatically removes threats and back-doors from your site. With any publishing platform that is plugin based, there is always the risk for the platform or plugins to become outdated. When WordPress plugins are outdated they can be at risk of a malware attack. Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security will scan your site for known threats, automatically correct issues where your site may be compromised, and also quarantine any threats so they’re out of harms way. At the time of writing this plugin had over 100,000 downloads and a rating of 4.9 stars. It is well supported by its developer and, from my use over an extended period, receives regular updates..

#3: Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is free and open source software. The plugin will scan your site and compare the source code of your wordpress installation with official files, to see if any code has been maliciously changed. Wordfence Security also scans files, comments and posts for any URLs that may be listed in Google’s Safe Browsing list. The plugin will also monitor live traffic of your site, block specific IPs, and (very important) lock out IPs from attempting to login to your site. The plugin will even email you to notify you of important events relating to your sites security (eg. when it blocks an IP or a plugin is outdated).

#4: Jetpack by WordPress.com

Jetpack is created by Automatic and is a staple of many wordpress blogs. It integrates both with WordPress.com and can also be used on standalone, self-hosted sites (as I use it presently). The plugin has many customization, traffic, content, and performance features that make it very valuable. For example, it’s Photon tool will optimise the archival and delivery of images, to increase the performance of your site. Publicize will provide useful ‘share buttons’ to increase the likelihood for your posts to be shared. If you’re not using an analytics package (such as Google Analytics), Jetpack also comes with Site Stats, which will give you great analytics without the fuss of having to integrate code with your pages or verify your site.

#5 of WordPress Plugins: W3 Total Cache

One of the important measures for Search Engines these days is the speed of your site. According to the plugin’s creators, W3 Total Cache can improve site performance by up to 10x. That’s a pretty dramatic uplift for anyone viewing your blog posts! At the time of writing the plugin had over 1 million downloads, which reflects the popularity and trust the wordpress community place in this plugin to improve performance.

I hope these WordPress plugins are useful to you.  If you have enjoyed this post or have your own learnings to share, I invite you to leave a comment below.