The 5 Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Content Sites
Launching a new blog?
Then you’ll want to go “shopping” for some awesome new plugins.
In this article, you’ll find a concise but highly recommended list of blog plugins that will help you monitor your traffic, increase your search engine rankings, plan your content calendar, and more.
By the end, you’ll have a way more functional and optimized WordPress blog.
WordPress plugins for bloggers
In my mind, these are all essential plugins for a serious WordPress blogger, and I use all five of them daily on this site.
Here are my top picks for the best WordPress plugins for blogs.
1. Independent Analytics
If you want to grow your blog, you need to know what’s working and what’s not, and to figure that out, you need analytics.
Independent Analytics is an analytics plugin made exclusively for WordPress. Unlike complex solutions, like Google Analytics, it takes seconds to install and includes a dashboard right inside your WordPress admin menu.
With Independent Analytics, you can quickly find your top posts and pages, see which other sites are sending you traffic, and find the geolocations of all your visitors.
It’s also GDPR-friendly because it doesn’t use cookies and stores all data on your server without any outside communication.
Independent Analytics includes a Pro version, but the base plugin is entirely free to use forever. Give it a try if you’re looking for a new alternative to Google Analytics.
2. Strive Content Calendar
Running a blog requires organization, and for WordPress bloggers, there’s no better solution than the Strive Content Calendar plugin.
Strive adds a drag-and-drop calendar into the WP dashboard where you can see all your upcoming posts and their editorial status. This way, you can tell at a glance whether your next post needs editing or if the following week’s content is written.
Strive also includes a handful of extra features, such as post revisions, checklists, and an innovative “pipeline” view of your content.
Once you get used to blogging with Strive, it’s hard to imagine how you ever managed without it.
3. Rank Math
There’s no getting around it; if you’re running a blog, then your top traffic source will be Google. In fact, most successful content businesses receive about 90% of their traffic from Big G. Knowing that, you can understand how important SEO is for your blog.
When it comes to SEO, there are lots of technical optimizations required to set your site up for success, and these are things Rank Math SEO can help with.
The Rank Math SEO plugin includes over a dozen modules for optimizing your site. It can optimize your title tags, create a sitemap, optimize your site for local SEO, and much more.
These configurations would require custom development if implemented on your own, so it’s very helpful to have this plugin handle everything automatically for you.
In the end, you’d be crazy not to install an SEO plugin, and Rank Math stands out as the best option available.
4. FileBird
The Media Library in WordPress works just fine on its own, but FileBird can make it way better.
With FileBird, you can create folders inside the Media Library and drag and drop images into them.
When you’re just getting started, you may not see the need for it, but eventually, you’ll have thousands of images, and managing them becomes a mess without any categories.
FileBird keeps your Media Library neat and tidy, so you always know where to find images to reuse them in the future. This prevents you from reuploading the same images repeatedly and unnecessarily increasing the disk storage required by your site.
5. Novashare
One last plugin worth checking out is Novashare. It’s a premium social share button plugin, and it’s way faster and easier to use than most alternatives.
With Novashare, you can rapidly enable share buttons above and below your content. There’s also a floating bar you can place on the left or right side of the screen, and it can fix to the bottom of the screen on mobile devices. In fact, you can see it on this page right now!
Another reason to choose Novashare instead of another option is that it’s very fast. Most share button plugins slow down your site, so Novashare was built as a more optimized alternative.
If you want a fast and easy-to-use social button plugin, Novashare is the best on the market.
Which blog plugin is best for you?
The good news is that you don’t have to pick just one plugin here; you can install all five!
With the tools listed here, you’ll be able to build a much more successful blog, thanks to the analytics, content calendar, SEO optimizations, media management, and social sharing buttons added to your site.
If you want to work your way down the list, you can get started with Independent Analytics now:
It’s generally a good idea to install analytics right away so you can begin capturing data from the start.
Thanks for reading this collection of the best blog plugins for WordPress. You can leave a comment below if you have any questions or feedback.
Originally published at https://independentwp.com/blog/wordpress-blog-plugins/ on April 19, 2023.
