Smart little helpers to make your blogging life easier und more productive

When you start a blog, or even when you've been blogging for a while, there will come a day when you think about speeding up your productivity and success. WordPress already offers a ton of useful features and flexibility. However, there are still some functions you might be missing, or you've never even thought about yet. There are several basic Wordpress plugins that may help to improve your blogs' performance and success. There is everything from SEO to sharing your posts on social media, email marketing and analytics.

Having tried hundreds of WordPress plugins ever since we 've been using word press, we’ve shortlisted the ones we really use on our blogs into a concised basic "15 Best of Plugins List". So here is a compact selection of essential free and premium plugins, that may help you to kickstart your blog and boost your productivity.

Best of basic plugins list for bloggers

It’s most important to publish high quality, unique content as often as possible. But, you also need to understand the importance of streamlining your blog for user experience and to improve your content with SEO-friendly features. You will need to share your posts to social media to improve your outreach and to engage with your readers, with following up comments and trackbacks and follow-up readers with e-mail lists and blog subscriptions. More importantly you will have to analyse your activities to see what works best in order to improve your efforts and  success.

The following selection of plugins will help you to streamline your blog performance, getting rid of unnecessary manual workload and thus leave you with more time for creating awesome content for your blog.

1. WP Optimize (free) - keep your blog running smoothly

WP-Optimize is a basic plugin that helps you keeping your blog running smoothly by constantly cleaning out your trash and removing redundant, unnecessary and superfluous data. It also squeezes your database tables to a minimum, cleans out old post revisions and cleaning unapproved comments. By not letting extra data build up on your site, your blog will run faster and perform much better for your audience.


2. AntiSpam Bee (free & business) - keep your blog spam free

Once you have published you blog, you can be sure to get spam comments and this will become pretty annoying. And, you will also get in touch with trackback spam. A trackback is also a kind of comment to notify that someone has linked your post on their site. Trackbacks are great for networking with other bloggers, but unfortunately, they are also very attractive for spammers.

One solution to defend spammers is to deactivate the comment and trackback functions on your blog, but this will deprive you from the opportunity to engage with your readers and connect with other bloggers. The plugin Antispam Bee blocks spammy comments and trackbacks effectively, without using captchas. The plugin detects spam based on checking incoming comments and trackbacks against public databases and typical spam comment structures as well as local database for comments previously marked as spam.  Thus, it eliminates spam comments by automatically reviewing and filtering your comments but lets you keep control of which comments are displayed and which comments are caught and cleared under your blog's "Comments" tab. Cleaning out spam regularly speeds up your site and saves space on your blogs database. Thus, AntiSpam Bee is a very useful plugin, doing all the dirty work for you and saves your time for getting rid of annoying spammers.

3. W3 Total Cache (free) - site performance and speed

Another basic performance tool that improves your website and helps you deliver a better user experience for your blog audience. The plugin improves your site by increasing server performance, reducing download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. This is basically done by cashing, minifiying and compressing your data to optimum.

4. Editorial Calendar (free) - schedule and manage your blog content

The Editorial Calendar plugin is an all-in-one content organization tool, that helps you to keep your blog organized and keep track of your content creation and publishing processes. You can easily manage and schedule your posts with a simple drag-and-drop functionality. The plugin allows you to manage drafts, quickly edit titles, change publishing times and also manage posts from multiple authors.

Get the Editorial Calendar plugin for your blog.

5. Yoast SEO (free & premium)  - compose SEO friendly posts


WordPress provides already powerful SEO capabilities and features to improve your blogs' ranking, but don't assume wrongly that this is all you need to do to get found.
Yoast SEO is the industry standard plugin to help you improving every single of your posts with SEO friendly features such as defining a focus keyword, creating a SEO title and SERP snippet for your blog posts. This will improve the readablity of your copy and will thus improve your posts for search engines as well as readers. The plugin ensures that you check all options for improving your posts to drive the right traffic to your blog.

Yoast SEO is free for some basic features and offers a bunch of elaborate features with a paid subscription.


6. SEO Friendly Images (free) - make your images SEO-friendly

Visualizing your content with images such as photos oder graphics becomes more and more important. But, it's not enough to add images to your blog posts. In order to make your images "findable" for search engines, you will have to add some basic SEO features to them. Appropriate ALT and TITLE attributes with a keyword rich descriptions will do the trick. With the ALT attribute search engines match your images to search terms. The TITEL attribute will show to readers on mouse over or when images are blocked by browsers. The Friendly Images plugin automatically adds ALT and TITLE attributes to all your images. This will improve traffic from search engines and to make the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

7. Sexy Author Bio (free) - show your profile

The plugin adds a custom author box below your posts and can be used for single and multiple authors. It offers tons of options to customize the contents and look of the box and automatically includes five social icons to connect your readers to your social profiles such as: Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, RSS, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, Yahoo! & YouTube and many more.

8. Better Click2Tweet (free) - ready to use tweets for your readers

We also used the Click2Tweet plugin but now ended up with using Better Click2Tweet for its' indeed better usablity. The plugin adds ready to use Twitter boxes to your posts or pages. The plugin is very easy to use, fully customizable with CSS. The "via" and URL can bei easily removed the URL from the resulting tweets, and links can turned into nofollow links. The plugin uses the official shortcode API for better security and compatibility.


9. Blog2Social (free & premium) - schedule and share your blog posts to social media

Once you have optimized and published a new post, you will need to share it to your social media channels in order to get more outreach for your content. You can do this manually or automate it. Blog2Social is a very powerful and sophisticated tool to share and cross-promote your blog posts to your social media channels, directly from the dashboard. The plugin allows you to auto-post or to customize your posts individually and to schedule your posts to be shared at the best times to post on each network.

The plugin auto-posts your blog posts to Facebook (profiles, pages), Twitter, Google+ (profiles, pages, groups), LinkedIn (profiles, pages), XING (profiles, pages, groups), Diigo, Delicious, to Tumblr, Medium, Torial for re-publishing your post, as well as your images on Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest. You may also re-post old post and pre-schedule your scheduled post for auto-posting.
This plugin really saves a lot of time and legwork every time you publish a new post and helps you to get more outreach for your post in less time.

Blog2Social is free to use it for sharing your posts to social media but you might also find it worth to try the premium version for the more elaborate features.

10. MashShare (free & paid add-ons) -  social media sharing buttons

You do not only want to share your posts yourself, you also want your readers to do this. The easiest way to motivate your readers to share your posts is to offer ready to use sharing buttons on your site. A powerful and free sharing button plugin comes from Mashable and offers easy to use, professional looking and highly customizable social media sharing buttons for all popular networks. And, you don't need to worry about the performance of your site. Other social buttons often use external scripts which may increase loading times. The MashShare code is loaded directly from your website and thus does not slow down your site. Also MashShare ensures yours and your visitors privacy. Mashare also offers a bunch of useful add-ons such as a dashboard for total share count on posts screen, most shared posts widget and many more.

Share buttons for your Twitter, Facebook and a subscribe button for your news feed and mailing list are free, more options are available as paid add-ons, starting from $29 per year.

11. Simple Social Icons (free) - social media follow buttons

Not only do you want your visitors to share your posts, you also want them to follow you on your social media channels. Placing social media follow buttons on your site can increase the number of followers on your social profiles. The Simple Social Icons plugin is free and easy to use. It will display social icons on your site that will take your visitors straight to your social profiles. You can choose which profiles you want to link to such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and many more.


12. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (free) - keep visitors on your site

Publishing high quality content on a regular basis and driving readers to your site is not an easy task. When readers visits your website, you want them to stick around for as long as possible. Steering them towards other content of interest will be one method to achieve this. This related post plugin will display a list of related posts, pointing your readers to related content. You can customize the  algorithm to match the needs of your website by keeping full control over how your results are displayed.

13. Content aware sidebars (free & professional plan) - display sticky content on your sidebar

Another plugin to add sticky content to the eye of your readers is a special This plugin lets you display custom sidebars on any post, page or category of your blog. This helps you to displaying content specific adds or offers to your sidebar for different contexts. The sidebar manager lets you create post sidebars, page sidebars, category sidebars and more.

14. OptinMonster (paid) - catch your readers with optin forms

If you don’t have an email marketing solution in place, this plugin is a good place to start converting visitors into subscribers. A more elaborate way to catch your readers is to put up some sophisticated action triggered optin forms. This plugin is a great list building, lead generating and conversion tool. It allows you create beautiful forms, including pop-ups, sidebar forms, footer bars, floating headers, slide ins and action triggered forms. The exit intent pop-up allows you to catch your visitors before leaving your site. The plugin is lightweight, modular and very easy to grasp. All of the forms are mobile friendly and responsive, increasing your chance of capturing smartphone and tablet users.

The plugin is part of the Optin Monster web service and starts from $49 per month.

15. Google Analytics Dashboard (free) - get a better grasp of your stats

Keeping track of your stats is crucial to get a better grasp of your audiences' preferences and makes it easier to create content that performs best for your blog. This plugin is certainly not necessary, since you can open Google Analytics to look at your blog stats. But it is definitely convenient, since the plugin puts those stats right inside your WordPress dashboard. If you’re regularly checking your stats on page views and performance of your posts, the plugin helps you keeping track of your stats more quickly and conveniently.

Wrap up
I hope the list of basic plugins will help you to improve and kickstart your blog. Please let me know what works for you and what not by adding a comment to this post.

Find out more about useful plugins on our blog:

http://www.blog2social.com/en/blog/15-basic-plugin-tips-to-kickstart-your-blog-and-boost-productivity/