You can create your content for your WordPress page in vanilla mode, without any plugins or aids. It would work. It wouldn’t be very efficient, though. After all, people have come up with a huge range of tools that make the whole content creation, monitoring and more a great deal easier and quicker than it would otherwise be. In this way, you can create higher-quality content in half the time.
Even better, a lot of these plugins are absolutely free. In this way, you can try them out to see what works well for you and what you would rather not use at all so that you can optimize your content creation and ultimately make yourself a content king. Sounds appealing, right?
So what are the plugins out there that you can use?
Jetpack
Jetpack is a great tool in that it offers lots of useful features to help your site function that bit better. Some examples are easy to use share buttons, which you can add to your content so that they get that bit further (After all, most people won’t share anything if it isn’t immediately obvious how to share it).
It will also give you related posts, which will let your readers quickly and easily find stuff that’s similar to what they’re reading. Another cool tool is that it will allow you to create the opportunity for people to comment without allowing them to spam.
As John Nicholls, a Fly Writing contributor shares: “In this way, you’ll create higher engagement with your content and thereby keep your audience on your site longer (and get them to grow your audiences by sharing your content more widely).”
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO was already good before they branched out. Originally, they helped optimize your content for SEO. They did that by giving you a checklist of things that you should do in order to create a higher likelihood that Google would correctly identify the keywords associated with your page. For example, they reminded you to give your page the right slug, to make sure that your headlines had the right words in there and more.
Recently, the tool became even better, when they expanded it to also help you with your readability. In effect, it’s another tab with another checklist, but as this is really good advice, there is nothing wrong with that. What’s more, as – just like with the SEO stuff – they let you know if you’ve done it correctly, these tools make it immensely easy to make sure that you’ve done the best you can with the content you’ve created.
“Yoast really is a must-have. You need almost no SEO experience to use it, and make your content Google-friendly,” states Elena Estrada, the managing editor of 99homeworkhelp website.
Google Analytics
How can you know what content works well and what doesn’t when you don’t know how many people are visiting your site and what pages they’re going to? You can’t (yes, that was a rhetorical question). And when you don’t know that, you can’t make sure that you optimize your content to meet your customer’s needs or to make sure that you’ve got the right stuff to rank well on Google.
For that reason, you need something like Google Analytics. It gives you more information than your average content creator will ever need and then some. Even better, you can optimize the different windows and what you get to see so that you get the information you need right away.
In this way, you can find where people are visiting from, what machines they’re using, as well as what pages they visit. Then, armed with that knowledge, you can actually devise an effective strategy.
WP Smushit
Of course, you want to use images for your site. At the same time, you don’t want them to slow your site down so much that people don’t even wait for the text to load. That’s always difficult. The best strategy that gets you out of this catch-22 is to have a good image compressor plugin installed that will automatically make your images smaller without sacrificing quality.
Possibly the best on the market right now is WP Smushit. It will both compress images and also allow you to resize them so that they will be crunched down to the dimensions that you’re looking for. In this way, they’ll be perfectly optimized for your needs.
Floating Social
What’s better than having social media buttons that are easily accessible by scrolling down the screen? Having social media buttons that don’t even require any scrolling off course! Floating Social does that. It gives you buttons that hover along the side of the screen so that whatever happens, your users have an easy time sharing your content.
“Even better, you can style the buttons as you will. This will make it far easier for you to make sure that they fit the style you’ve got and the layout you’re working with. And that matters. After all, style is everything,” explains Lola Cook, web designer at BestUKWriters.
Last words
So there you have it. Five high-quality plugins that will make your site work better and will make it far more likely that your content gets shared, that you know what content gets the most hits and more. Even better, it’s all free! That means you’re not committed to anything. Instead, you get to try these things and see which best fits your needs and ideas.
Just remember to de-install anything that you don’t end up using, as these can be used as gateways for hackers to gain access, particularly if you don’t update them. And of course, when you don’t use a plugin you’re much more likely not to update it.
All screenshots taken from the mentioned websites
Discover more from Life and Tech Shots Magazine
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
