WordPress Plugins – Which Ones Should I Choose?

WordPress Plugins are tools which help with the efficiency of  Wordpress website.  They are downloaded from the internet.

If you are just starting in Online marketing, you will need to know which are the most useful WordPress plugins to have, and why you should use them.

First you need to

• Choose your domain name
• Install it on WordPress
• Be ready to start writing content for your Pages and Posts.

Then it is time to think about what WordPress plugins you will need.

Plugins

Plugins are downloaded from the internet, and they help your website to work more efficiently.

Most of the plugins are free to download within WordPress, and when you are just starting to build your site I would strongly advise you to stick to using the free ones.

As your website grows, you may find a plugin that you would like to purchase, but do be careful with this, as some of the bought ones tend to be quite large, and will take up too much space on WordPress.

It is widely recommended that it is not a good idea to have too many plugins, as this can slow down the loading time for your website.

But some plugins are essential in order for your website to work properly, so do not worry too much about this unless you do find your site is too slow loading!

It is very easy to install a plugin.

Simply go to the plugins section in WordPress, search for the plugin you need, click to download it and then click on “Activate”

Hey presto, your plugin is installed and active!   

Recommended Plugins for Beginners

WP SpamShield – Necessary  for Websites Not Hosted by SiteRubix

Once you have begun to publish on your website, one of the most important plugins you will need is one which filters out the spammy comments that you will inevitably get.

Many such comments are not from real people at all, but from robots, and WP Spamshield will effectively filter those out without you ever needing to look at them or do anything about them.

This plugin is essential! Or at least it was until

Unless of course ……

Your website is hosted at SiteRubix, which is an extremely good Hosting which is provided FREE to all members of Wealthy Affiliate

SiteRubix now includes SiteProtect, which does all that WP Spamshield does, and much more, to protect your website, thus eliminating any need for a spam shield plugin.

As it is not recommended to have too many plugins, as they can slow down the loading speed of your site, that is another great advantage of SiteRubix hosting.

SEO WordPress Plugins

Before you start to publish your pages or posts, you will need to install an SEO plugin.  

SEO means Search Engine Optimisation. In other words, an SEO plugin provides you with the best way to present your pages and posts so that Google will recognise them and rank them.

A good Google ranking is the holy grail of Online Marketers, as it means that their website will be found near the top of any Google search that may be made, and therefore it will be easily found by prospective customers/visitors.

Two of the best WordPress plugins for SEO are Yoast and All in One SEO. Both of these will do the job for you, so it is your choice which one you choose. My own personal preference is Yoast. 

WordPress Plugins for Sharing With Social Media.

Once you start to publish your posts, you will want to share them with  Social Media, and you will hope that the visitors will also want to share them.

In order to make this easier, you will need a Social Media WordPress Plugin. There is a number of these to choose from.

Some have a very limited number of buttons and some have a large number to choose from.

Some have static buttons, and some give you the option to have them “floating in” from the sidebar.

Obviously the choice is yours, and you can play about with them choosing the best one for you, as it is very easy to install them from WordPress, and equally easy to delete them!

Two which give you a larger choice of buttons are Custom Share Buttons With Floating Sidebar and AddToAny Share Buttons.

My Best Recommendation for Social Sharing

But in my opinion, by far the best wordpress plugin which gives you not only the ability to install Social Media buttons, but also gives you the ability to collect the email addresses of your visitors and gives you very useful analytics of the way in which your site is being used, is Sumo Me.

Above are the various tools which are included in Sumo Me. Most of the tools there are free to use; some are not, but the free ones are enough for most people’s use.

If you decide to use Sumo Me you may need a little help with setting it up.

No problem!

One of my brilliant friends in Wealthy Affiliate, PJGermain, has written a great, simple to understand and easy to follow training on Sumo Me, which you can access here.

Please feel free to check it out!

This is just one of the hundreds of really great trainings which are available in Wealthy Affiliate.

 

Pretty Link WordPress Plugin

Once you start to advertise and share your pages and posts, you will be using their links to do so.                                     

For example, the link to this post which you are reading is https://onlinemarketingwithchrissie.com/tools-wordpress-useful/

You must agree that that link is very long and it looks ugly and awkward.

Pretty Link is one of the most useful WordPress Plugins. It enables you to shorten your link,and make it look much more attractive.

When I use Pretty Link to shorten my post link, it then looks like this: https://onlinemarketingwithchrissie.com/plugins.

You must admit that it looks much better!

The free version of Pretty Link is called Pretty Link Lite, and that will be perfectly adequate for your needs.

WP Clone WordPress Plugin

The final plugin which I would recommend  is WP Clone.    

It is essential to frequently back up your WordPress site so that there is never any risk of losing all your hard work.

Whilst WordPress itself give you the power to back up your site with the “Export” button on the sidebar, this will back up just your text and not your images.

WP Clone will back up everything which is on your website, including the images, so that you will never lose any part of it.

A good alternative to WPClone is BackWPup, which will do the same thing and is also very efficient.

There is one more plugin that I would highly recommend, and that is

WPEdit.

I love WPEdit!

It adds a number of tools to the WordPress Editor, giving you amount other things the ability to change the font size and font style, which the normal WordPress Editor does not give you and which I personally frequently feel the need to do.

You can also insert tables into your posts, and you can also add accents to letters, which is particularly useful if you are writing in a language which requires letters to be accented, such as Spanish or French.

I have written a training about how to use WPEdit within Wealthy Affiliate, and you can see it here if you wish.

I do hope that you have found this information useful and helpful.

If you would like more help and training on the use of WordPress Plugins and every other aspect of Online Marketing, check out Wealthy Affiliate University, my Number 1 Recommendation for the best possible start in Online Marketing!

If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you in the Comments box below, and I will reply just as soon as I possibly can.

Many thanks for dropping by