Best WordPress Plugins

Web users do not want to visit websites that are slow to load, especially blogs. Therefore, the speed of your website should be a primary concern when you start blogging to promote yourself. People also have a keen interest on shared content. If your posts and content have received a high number of shares, you can be sure that they will be read and shared even more. The speed of your website and the social sharing should be what you pay more attention to in the creation of your blog. The key benefit of using WordPress is that many of these aspects are already taken care of. You only need a plugin and with a few checks in some important boxes, you will not have to worry about the speed of your site and the number of shares you will receive. Here are some plugins that you ought to use to elevate the speed and sharing of your blog:

1. WordPress SEO

Wordpress SEO
This is a stand out plugin as it has a host of cool features. These include a snippet review and a page analysis that can help you optimize your page’s content to include meta data like titles, descriptions and keywords. This plugin comes with a number of other options which include Robots Meta configuration to help you keep single posts or pages out of the index. Canonical will allow you to control the correct canonical on each page. The breadcrumbs can be used to control which taxonomy will be showed for each post as well as the title that will be used. There are also the XML sitemaps that use XSLT style sheet that will render your sitemap readable.

2. HTTP Compression

HTTP Compression
When you want to minimize the size of your pages, so that you are able to elevate your loading speed, this is the right plug in to choose. In fact, this is just what is needed to ensure that you will not lose your visitors. This plugin can be used to compress your pages in gzip format, which leaves you with a 60-80% reduction in the size of your pages and in the end, your pages’ download speed will increase by 3-4 times. You have to use the latest version of WordPress though, to be able to use the gzip compression for you to enjoy the benefits. Make sure that you install the latest version.

3. Share This

Share this Plugins
This is a plugin that will make it easy for your users to share out your articles and posts. This plugin makes your sharing buttons highly visible. This way, you will get higher rankings because a lot of people will easily be able to share your content on social media. The plugin is easy to install and after that, you can customize it in just a few seconds to suit your blog needs. This explains why a lot of popular sites are using it today. Your users are given the ability to share your content to over 50 social networks including through emails and in the end, they can get real time metrics.

4. Facebook Comments Box

Facebook Comment Boc
This is a social plugin and it works by allowing your users to comment on your site. It has amazing benefits for the blogger as it allows you to become socially relevant. Those comments that are most relevant, those that have been left by your friends, the ones that are liked the most and those active threads are all listed in order from the top to the bottom so as to leverage the social signals of your users. This plugin also promotes distribution; it can allow its users to spread discussions onto Facebook. If you keep your ‘post to Facebook’ box checked, the comments of your users will show up on their Facebook streams, and this will expose not just their comments but your blog post as well. This way, their friends and those that follow their friends will see and be able to access your link. The other benefit is that your friends are able to comment on the discussion by liking or replying to your comment, which can be done directly on Facebook. All these discussions are linked and connected back to your site.

5. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache
This is another great plugin to use in order to speed up your website. It becomes especially helpful in case of a sudden flow of traffic. WP super cache works by creating static HTML files that are served instead of the heavier PHP scripts in WordPress. The plugin will also work when your server is underpowered. It is a plugin that has been tested and proven to work without any hitch at all; therefore it is a good plugin to try

6. Yet Another Related Post Plugin

Related Post Plugin
This is also a very useful plugin. In most cases, your users will visit your site because they followed a certain link. Imagine what would happen if the article they followed was not of much use to them, but there is an article that they may be interested in, and they probably might share it out. This is the main reason why this is an important plugin. What this plugin does is to scan through your archives to find articles and posts that are relevant to the particular post you are about to post. It will then display those relevant posts and articles at the end of your post. You get customized recommendations this way because the algorithm looks at different posts, tags, titles, categories, keywords and content in order to determine the other posts that should show up at the end of the post you are about to share. You get a customized template too, in order to take charge of the way your post will look.

If therefore you are using WordPress, running a fast and social-friendly website is very easy. You only need to make use of these plugins and your site’s performance will be improved in just a few hours.