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List of Must have WordPress Plugins for Beginners

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List of Must have WordPress Plugins – Must Have

WordPress powers the highest number of websites on the world wide web. WordPress is a wonderful publishing framework which runs highest number of websites on the world wide web. There are tons of reasons why people use WordPress to create blogs and build websites which can be a simple blog or a web applications accepting payments to anything that you want. Before we get into the list of must have WordPress plugins, we should note that WordPress should be given the biggest credit to create so many bloggers around the world.

Suggested Reading – How to Start a Blog and make money – From the Scratch

What are WordPress Plugins / addons?

You can customise a WordPress website without modifying any of the core files by using plugins. WordPress plugins are the right way to customise WordPress installations. You can add new features, customise existing features or even remove some of the features that you do not want by using a great feature called hooks in WordPress.

Plugins at the WordPress Plugins Directory are free

You can find tons of plugins inside your Dashboard itself. Search for what you need, you will get at-least a few listed according to the rating. Every plugin found at the WordPress Plugin directory is free and open source. There may be plugins with pro features or pro version which you will have to buy from the vendor.

Downloading, Activating and Configuring a Plugin

You do not have to worry about anything technical to use a WordPress Plugin, these are installed, activated and configured without writing a single line of code. Anyone having some knowledge of using a content management can do it.

Installing a plugin which is not listed in the WordPress Plugins Directory

You would need to use the upload plugin feature to upload a plugin and activate it.

Official Site of Free WordPress Plugins

Done with the basics of plugin, now to the list of must have wordpress plugins

Must Have WordPress Plugins for every blog – Beginners

Akismet

Akismet would take care of your blog security. Protect from spammers and hackers to a limit blocking bad comments. You would need a WordPress API key, just register with WordPress for an account and get the API key. There are some paid packages too.

Yoast SEO – must have wordpress plugins for SEO

You don’t need too many plugins for SEO, Yoast is the best

Search Engine Optimisation is important or every website. WordPress needs to be customised search engine point of view and the customisation would depend on different factors. Yoast SEO is the most used SEO plugin on WordPress. If you are ready to spend for the pro version, then that would be good or the free version is good enough.

Pro version has additional features like

  1. Yoast Internal Linking
  2. Multiple Keywords targeting
  3. Content Insights
  4. Redirect your pages
  5. Focus Keywords
Yoast multiple keywords
You can target more than one keyword
Yoast Content Insights
Yoast Content Insights Helps to know if your article is focused

Jetpack – WordPress.com Plugin

This is a great plugin on all my blogs. This is developed and maintained by WordPress itself. You have multiple features which can be enabled or disabled according to your need. I use the below features

  1. Social Sharing options,
  2. Stats and other data
  3. Subscribers to comments
  4. Email Subscriptions
  5. Likes, Comment (Login with WordPress.Com Account)
  6. Contact Form (Feedback)
  7. Vaultpress backups
  8. Related Posts

You get connected to WordPress.Com features and services, common login

WordPress.com Desktop App uses the WordPress.Com account and Jetpack features

SEO Smart Link – Best auto linking plugin

The best free plugin for auto linking keywords. This is a very simple version of Thirsty Affiliates. You do not have to worry much about complicated settings. All you need is to define your keywords and links. You can have multiple keywords for one link and multiple links as well. You can even have redirect URL defined for the target pages.

The plugin is free and it was a paid version. I have never used the paid version, but this free version is awesome.

Only issue I see is the developer is not updating the plugin, as the last update was about 3 years back. You do not have to worry, as of now it is working well with WordPress 4.8.

What should you have this plugin?

This plugin can do great work SEO point of view. On a long run, this plugin will connect all you pages with the right keywords or you will have to do manually.

smart linking plugin
SEO smart Links – Auto insert links for keywords

We consider this page which is all about “must have plugins” or “list of basic plugins”. I add these

Download Link

My Favourite Plugins other than those mentioned above

Amazon Associate Link Builder

If you are an amazon associate and using your blog to sell products on your website or blog, this is a very hand plugin from Amazon itself.

list of must have wordpress plugins

You should initially configure your amazon affiliate account with the keys and then you are ready to go. Customize the templates if needed. Inside the WordPress post editor, you have the option to add Amazon products in different formats like panel, carousels, links, etc

Check out the plugin

Thirsty Affiliates – Affiliate link management plugin

Affiliate marketing is incomplete if you have lots of contents, good traffic from search engines. Convert keywords to your affiliate links automatically. Get reports, track performance, cloak links and more.

There are many modules in the Pro Version of Thirsty Affiliates

  1. Amazon Integration
  2. Redirect using htaccess
  3. Geotagging
  4. URL Shortening
  5. Automatic Keyword Linking

Get Thirsty Affiliates Plugin

WP Forms – Create Online form drag and drop

Create unlimited online forms as per your need by just dragging and dropping the fields and labels. You can set condition for validation of data.

You do not have to be a programmer to create complex forms for your business to get user data.

Check this plugin

Table of Contents Plugin Plus

If you are having a WordPress Installation with lots of contents in a structured manner, then you should use a table of content plugin.

Using shortcode, you can add TOC to your blog posts or even you can enable auto TOC as per the default setting. I have used this plugin on my blog. You can do all types of customisation to suit your needs and style.

Download this Plugin

Bonus Tips

Before you buy a plugin

Always do some checks, read reviews about any new plugin that you are going to buy or use. Some plugin which are not from the WordPress Plugins directory could be harmful and break your site.

Do not use too many plugins

Use Plugins which are compatible with the latest version of WordPress

What to do if a plugin breaks your site?

You need ftp, rename the plugin folder which broke your site, this will bring your site back

Further – About this list of must have wordpress plugins for beginners

There are many other great plugins that I have not listed here. Must have plugins for a simple blogger would be different from a blogger selling e-books or someone who has a photography blog. List of must have wordpress plugins for a review site is different from a personal blog or a recipe site.

You can find solutions for most of your requirement from the WordPress Plugin directory or from a custom plugin developer.

The list about shows the list of must have plugins for basic needs.

Besides these plugins I would suggest Dreamhost for hosting, Genesis or Elegant themes for theme framework.

Suggested Readings

  1. Tools to Engage your Visitors to spend more time on your blog
  2. Adding a Last Updated date to your WordPress Post
  3. New Bootstrap with Genesis Framework Theme

Adding a Last Updated date to your WordPress Post

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It is very important to keep all your posts and information updated. Rather than creating new posts with similar content, it is suggested to update the information on your website / blog so that the reader gets the right information. This post will show how to display WordPress last updated date for a post.

WordPress Last Updated Date for a Post

I usually keep updating my blog posts like adding new information or even updating outdated information, but the post date will be the date when I initially published the post.

Add Last Updated Information on Post

I just added a few lines of code to display the Last Updated Date just before the post starts.

function addToContents($content) {
$updated='<strong>Last Updated: '.get_the_modified_date('F j, Y').' at '.get_the_modified_date('g:i a').'</strong>';
    if(is_single()) {
        $content = $updated.$content;
    }
}
add_action('the_content','addToContents');

You can add this code to the functions.php of your theme. I use a personal hacks WordPress Plugin to keep all my customisations at one place.

Why should you add the Last Updated Date to your Blog Post?

  1. Gives the right Information to the reader
  2. Shows How Old the content is
  3. Not Sure, but will be helpful for search engines too.

Other WordPress Hacks

  1. My Custom Archive Page Header
  2. Customise Post Content as per Post Format
  3. New Bootstrap with Genesis Framework Theme

WordPress SEO – Very Important to know these SEO issues

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WordPress is the best platform to set up a website or a blog. You can customise WordPress to the best of your need without even changing a single line of WordPress Code. You use WordPress Plugins and Themes to do that. One thing which is very important for a website is to get search engine traffic and rank well in Google SERPS, but there are serious WordPress SEO issues, which you need to be aware and take care.

Is WordPress Search Engine Optimised (SEO) ?

Google and other search engines keep updating their algorithm periodically to give the best search results, remove spams and junk search results, etc. To comply with the updated guidelines of search engines, every webmaster / SEO expert needs to update the SEO settings of the website.

WordPress by default has comply with most of the basic website design guidelines and standards. It is important to check if your theme is as per Google Webmaster guidelines which is very important. I suggest to use reputed themes like Genesis, Elegant Themes, Thesis, which are as per the industry standard.

Issues Related to WordPress Core functionality

There are some serious SEO issues with the default settings of WordPress. You need to understand these issues and then I will explain, how I have take care of these SEO issues of WordPress.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a serious issue as far as Google is concerned. Google wants each and every page to be unique.

Issues with Unattached Images in WordPress

Every unattached image is a WordPress Page. Google indexes these pages and finds that it does not have any proper content. File name is take has title, most of the times that would not make any sense. There would be no text which is unique. These kind of pages are bad for your website and needs to be eleminated or atleast stop Google from Indexing thouse pages.

WordPress Unattached Images 0000.jpg

You need to go to your WordPress Dashboard->Media->Library then filter for Unattached Images. If you have anything, you can either attach it to a post that you will not delete like the About Page or Contact Page or create a dummy page as draft and attach all these to that. Now in your Google Search Console, these pages will show Error 404.

SEO issues Deleting a post in WordPress

You may be surprised that when you delete a page or post, there are some SEO issues. The attached images create separate pages. If you had tags which where used only on that particular post, then you delete those tags too. In that case the tag pages would show error 404. What do you do for this, you need to either redirect that page to a very similar page or set 410 redirect. How do you do all these redirect? I suggest to use Yoast SEO Premium Plugin, it has the redirect feature, which is very useful.

Suggested Reading – WordPress Desktop Apps – Jetpack mandatory

Avoid Indexing post types – attachments / Media

One of the Other WordPress SEO issues – In the Yoast Plugin, Meta and Titles, set Media Attachment page to noIndex to avoid Google Indexing all these attachment pages, which would be more like duplicate pages and would give negative points to your site.

Wordpress SEO issues - No Index attachment pages

WordPress Tagging – Is it good for WordPress SEO

Too much of anything is not good. Yoast has explained about using the tags, which is something very important. I feel using tags like keywords which I have seen often being used by many should be dangerous. if you use tags in the right way, it should work well.

Best WordPress SEO Plugin

You can sort out all the WordPress SEO related issues with some WordPress Plugins. I use the Yoast SEO plugin, recently upgraded to the Pro Version, really worth it.

Tools that you should use to monitor your site

There are some tools which are free and really useful to really know about how your website is looking from a search engine point of view. We just focus on Google as I believe other are irrelevant as far as real search results and traffic are concerned.

Google Search Console

Get all the updates that are very important , the Google Point of view

There are many other SEO paid tools, but I don’t use any.

 

Hope this post gives a good idea about WordPress SEO issues. A little care can sort out the issue

Suggested Reading

  1. WordPress SSL site – Jetpack Issue
  2. Tools to Engage your Visitors to spend more time on your blog
  3. New Bootstrap with Genesis Framework Theme
  4. Analysis of Google Search results with top keywords – SERPs

Bootstrap in WordPress – Responsive YouTube Videos

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If you use a BootStrap Theme, then you should use the feature of responsive Videos.

Check out the video below

[bootube src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/DGDejqJQ7sk”]

function bootstrap_youtube( $atts ) {
    $a = shortcode_atts( array(
        'src' => '',
    ), $atts,'bootube' );
	return strlen($atts['src']) ? '
<div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"><iframe class="embed-responsive-item" src="' . $atts['src'] . '"></iframe></div>
<div style="clear:both;""></div>
' : '';
}
add_shortcode( 'bootube', 'bootstrap_youtube' );

Now check out the usage

usage.jpg

Changing the Genesis Link to your affiliate link

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Like me, many of you are using Genesis Theme framework. If you are interested in affiliate marketing, then you can replace the default genesis link by your affiliate marketing link

add_filter('genesis_footer_creds_text', 'sp_footer_creds_filter');
function sp_footer_creds_filter( $creds ) {
	$creds = '© 2018 &middot; <a href="https://www.asokans.com">Asokans</a> &middot; Built on the <a href="http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=346200&U=1554510&M=28169&urllink=" title="Genesis Framework">Genesis Framework</a>';
	return $creds;
}

You can add this to the functions.php of your genesis child theme.

WordPress REST API Vs XML-RPC

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WordPress XMLRPC is widely used by third party application to communicate with WordPress sites and do almost everything without opening the site or even the admin panel. You can read posts, write new post and even update your plugins, activate, etc. I had earlier developed a WordPress plugin (Kish Multi Pro) which was used by 1000’s for managing multiple blogs.

xmlrpc-rest

WordPress is moving towards WordPress REST API which can do similar things. I recently started working on this and developed a simple theme using Framework7 which is full featured HTML framework to build iOS and Android Apps. You can check out this site on your iPhone or iPad.

Using REST API, you can pull information from WordPress installation as you can do using XML-RPC. Many applications have started using the REST API and as per Matt, this would be the future.