Sixteen Must-Have WordPress Blog Plugins

WordPress Blog Plugins

Some of you may not know that I have been using WordPress since 2005. The main reason I started creating websites with WP was to market my Property Lettings Business. I started out in a niche market for Student Lettings in Sunderland. For a while our business was probably the only “Student Lettings” Business in Sunderland that had a searchable website to showcase the properties.  I tried lots of WordPress Blog Plugins over the years and the list below is some of the most useful plugins I’m using now.

WordPress Blog Plugins

Here is a list of some of the plugins I have installed on my websites.

Akismet Anti-Spam –  Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from spam. Your site is fully configured and being protected, even while you sleep.

Shareaholic – share buttons for your pages and posts, help you and others to share your content around the web via selected social media networks. I also like the print PDF of web page which I found very useful in my property business.

Facebook comments by WPDevart – This Facebook comments plugin will help you to display Facebook Comments box on your website. You can use Facebook Comments on your pages/posts.

Pixel Caffeine – Quickest and easiest way to connect your Facebook Advertising account. Install the base code pixel on your web pages so you can build custom audiences from your website / blog for your Facebook marketing.

Pretty Links Marketers Edition – Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website.

NextScripts, Social Networks Autoposter – This plugin automatically publishes posts from your blog to multiple accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles and/or pages.

WP InstaLegalPages – A helpful and time saver premium plugin to auto-add legal pages on your sites. (you will need to check and edit where required to fit with your product or service, but very handy plugin.

YouTube Advanced by Embed Plus – Uses an advanced YouTube player to enhance the playback and engagement of each YouTube embed. Just paste YouTube Links!

Note the White Screen of Death

OptimizePress – OptimizePress plugin for marketers. Create squeeze pages, sales letters and much more with ease. This plugin has caused me some headaches (note “White Screen of Death”) a few years ago.

Yoast SEO – I use this on all of my websites. The all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps. It helps you to optimise your headlines and post copy so that it is search engine friendly.

Google Sitemap – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

W3 Total Cache – Improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing download times via features like content delivery.

WP Email Capture – Captures email addresses for insertion into software such as Aweber or Mailchimp

WordPress Editorial Calendar – The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog

WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click – This WP plugin protects the posts content from being copied by any other web site author, if you don’t want your content to spread without your permission! There will be no copy and paste function.

WP Property – WP- Property is a leading WordPress plugin for creating and managing real estate sales and property rentals and management.
This last WordPress Blog plugin I used to showcase the student rental properties. I don’t use this now, but it is still available to transform WordPress sites into Property Marketing websites.