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You’ve just taken that first step in becoming self-hosted. You have your hosting provider, your own domain name and you’ve installed WordPress. You may have already written your first blog post. But what the hell is a plugin?! how do I know what ones I need?!
If you haven’t, no problemo! Grab your free ultimate guide on getting started with hosting at Bluehost. This step-by-step ultimate guide will show you how to set up an account with Bluehost from start to finish. There is also bonus content showing you how to migrate your existing WordPress.com site to your self-hosted domain. My free guide to you has made it as easy as pie. Click the image below to grab your free ‘The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide on Getting Started with Bluehost‘
Now what? How do you make your site have all the cool stuff that you see on other peoples blogs?
The answer is plugins. They are beautiful little things. Especially if you have no coding experience or confidence with coding.
If you do know how to code (smarty pants), there is no saying that you can’t use both.
So what is a plugin on WordPress?
Basically, a plugin is a piece of software that can add features to your site or/and improve how it functions. You can pretty much find a plugin for anything when using the plugin search and most of them are free as well if you can’t, I want to know because I haven’t ever not found something suitable and I’m curious.
This is a list of the 21 plugins that I use on Eclectically Ema. I would say that 95% of these are essential for a new blogger to use on their site. The other 5% make a bloggers life slightly easier.
Askimet Anti-Spam
Askimet protects your blog from spam comments and contact form submissions. It’s completely free for personal blogs and has over 1 MILLION active installations. This is essential because it stops you from accidentally having harmful content on your page as well as improving the speed of your site, by filtering out the worst spam automatically.
Better Click to Tweet
You know when you are reading someone’s blog post and they have this cool link that you can tweet a pre-written tweet?
20+ Essential WordPress Plugins for new bloggers to save you time, and make your life easier. #wordpress #plugins #newbloggers #mombloggers #lifestylebloggers Click To Tweet
Just like that one right…see what did there? With 5 stars and 20,000+ active installs, this plugin allows you to create attractive prewritten tweetable links, that when tweeted, include a link to the relevant post and have your Twitter handle included as well! Better Click to Tweet is just another great way of promoting your content, so not essential, but very very worth it.
Broken Link Checker
Deffo, an essential. Nothing worse than having 20+ blog posts and then realising the links don’t work on one of them for some reason…then you have to manually go through and check all the links in every post, on every page, to every piece of media you may have linked an URL to. Not with Broken Link Checker. They will send you an email and show on your dashboard letting you know if any need some attention. This plugin makes it EXTREMELY easy to fix them as well.
Child Theme Configurator
I cannot stress enough, how important having a child theme is.
Let me put it this way, I completely broke my site about 3 weeks into going live because I put a bit of code in the wrong place…or took a bit of code out by accident (I just remember it broke). This meant reinstalling my theme again, rebuilding my sidebar, my brand colours, header image, the lot!
When you have a child theme, you make changes to the child theme, This is so the functionality of your main theme remains untouched which means if you make a BOO BOO! your site won’t break. 4.5 stars, 200,000+ active installs, it speaks for itself really.
Compress JPEG and PNG images
This is something that was suggested to me via someone else’s blog post and I now make sure I regularly check that everything that can be compressed is. I didn’t even think about the amount of space all the media on my site must be taking up. When you upload an image, there are 5 different sizes of it!
The free version allows you to compress approximately 100 images a month, so at the start of a new month, you get another 100 free and so on and so on.
This is what my total savings looks like after 3 months of blogging. The space-saving is quite significant and my image quality has not suffered one bit. My readers, however, have had a bonus because by compressing your images it helps to speed up your site and load time. This plugin will only work with JPEG and PNG images and PNG animations, so any PDF’s won’t be compressed.
Disqus for WordPress
Disqus is not essential, but it does make it easier for readers to comment, for you to comment on others blog posts and reply to comments on your own posts. The plugin integrates seamlessly with WordPress and linking it with your Disqus account is easy. Easy to moderate, view analytics and settings. Using Disqus also means that once a reader has logged in once, they won’t have to do it again. This makes usability much better.
FMTC Affiliate Disclosure
If you use affiliate links within your blog posts, then make sure you get this plugin. It took me a while to get this, but once I did it made writing posts A LOT easier. It makes sure that all your disclaimers display the same text. It displays it at the very top f your post, which is essential because it will mean the disclosure comes before any possible links. Using this plugin, it also means that on platforms like Pinterest, your affiliate disclosure does not appear in the snippet of text that Pinterest shows when someone clicks on a pin.
The only downside is that the disclosure is shown on every single post, even if the post contains no links or links that are not affiliate links. Better to be safe than sorry though. Disclosing that you use affiliate links is your responsibility and essential.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
You may have a google analytics account (if you don’t, GET ONE). This is a great little plugin that will show you an overview of your dashboard. This beats having to be signed into google analytics in a separate tab constantly. Looking at your site’s stats is a habit that can become quite obsessive, so if this if you. Download the plugin.
GS Pinterest Portfolio lite
I use this to display one of my Pinterest boards in my sidebar area, although there are other options within the plugin that you can use. Take a look if you like, just over there ——->. Pinterest is by far, probably the most important platform for bloggers. Until your site is established the direct and organic searches will be few and far between. Pinterest and social media will probably be your main source of traffic. So make sure you’re showcasing your content from the main Pinterest board on your site.
Instagram Feed
Instagram is a visual platform, just like Pinterest and perhaps, just like your site. Get your insta feed on your site. This is a great plugin for Instagram on WordPress. It will help direct people to follow you, it will show you are active on both platforms and also…..people are nosey. If you include snippets of your life, then peeps will love it. 700,000+ active installs and 5 stars. I never had any problem in linking my account or getting my feed to show in my sidebar with this plugin, although I did with another quite popular one. I would recommend this one any day.
Jetpack by WordPress.com
This plugin is a plugin….full of….plugins?! You probably already have a wordpress.com account, you just connect your self-hosted blog to it (jetpack makes it super duper easy to do) and you get more detailed insights for your posts. It helps your site load quicker, helps to filter spam and malicious login attempts and so so so so so so much more. Connecting your blog to your wordpress.com account also means that you can use the WordPress app to draft posts while you’re on the go which makes it an essential!!
jQuery Pin it Button for Images
A simple plugin that applies the Pin it symbol over your images when hovered. I briefly mentioned how important Pinterest was earlier. This is just making your readers lives so much easier to save and share your content, which in return means more pageviews! You get so many options with this plugin you would think you had to pay for it, you don’t it’s FREE! It looks like this (hover over the image below)
MailChimp Forms by MailMunch
If you’re using MailChimp for your email list, you wanna download MailChimp Forms by MailMunch. It’s what I use to create opt-in boxes such as the one in my sidebar. It’s really easy to integrate with your MailChimp account and the forms look much nicer than the ones that MailChimp directly offers you. So if you’re wanting to grow your email list, grab this plugin for WordPress.
Pinterest Verify
This is essential if you are serious about Pinterest. This verifies your site with Pinterest, so you don’t have to go looking for the correct piece of code in the right place. This plugin puts the meta tag in the correct place, now other pinners can see that your site is verified which makes it that much more professional and trustworthy. It also gives you access to Pinterest Analytics, which is marvellous.
Redirection
This is the newest plugin I have on my site. Tell ya something, it pretty much saved my bacon this month. I’m not going to go into ‘why’ too much, but if you change the format of your URLs or change your URLs and you’ve already created pins, use this plugin to redirect that traffic to a working page.
Site Origin CSS
If you are like me and like things ‘just so’. Then you will probably never find a theme that has everything you want, just the way you want it. Many themes have a custom CSS section in the customise section. This is great if you know the code. Site origin CSS works a bit like customise on WordPress. You can alter the CSS while viewing the changes immediately. without having to know the code for it. RESULT.
Updraftplus- Backup/Restore
Making backup’s of your site is essential. If your site goes down…..or you break it (because you don’t have a child theme) as I did, then restoring the last backup is way better than having to start from scratch and losing all your site content as well. wouldn’t that be devastating?! updraftplus is ESSENTIAL, make it one of the first things you install!!
W3 Total Cache
W3 total cache improves SEO, user experience and improves page load times. If a user has already accessed your site, especially when they are visiting a page for a multiple-time, it would have been cached so that the load time is almost instant. Not essential, but improves site speed as well as user experience and that will be a factor to repeat readers.
WordPress Editorial Calendar
This is definitely not essential, but when planning out content, it makes your life so much easier. You are able to see 4 weeks at a time in calendar format. When you are trying to establish a content schedule, it’s important to post consistently and evenly. It’s a drag and drop system and makes it easy to use and adjust. It also schedules the posts when you assign them to a date. Nothing like a deadline to work to, to make sure you stay motivated. It works for me!
WordPress- Optimize
This is a bit like a cleanup tool. It removes all unnecessary data from your site. This data also slows up your site and takes up valuable space. Ever noticed, when your writing a blog post and your constantly saving the draft? for example, I have 13 revisions of this post. This means I have saved it and then carried on writing 13 times! WordPress-Optimize will get rid of all the old ones and keep the most recent. This also works in tandem with Updraftplus and this means it will back up your site via that plugin before it makes any changes to the data on your site. Awesome!
Yoast Plugin
The most essential WordPress plugin
This is like the most essential gold standard plugin. Saving the best till last obvs!!!
Not only does this help you rank with SEO, but it also helps you write amazing search engine optimised content. It’ll ask you to input a keyword, tell you how many times you’ve used that keyword. It will analyse how readable your content is as well. This is a plugin that you are silly not to install, honestly, make it like number 1 on your plugin to-do list.
Don’t forget if you’re still trying to figure out whether a self-hosted blog is for you, and you aren’t sure about what hosting provider to go with, how to import any existing content. You can always grab my FREE guide ‘ The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide on Getting Started with Bluehost’
I have also included an awesome, NOT ON THE BLOG step-by-step guide on how to export and then import your existing wordpress.com site. Click the image above to get started now.
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