There are such large amounts of blogs on the Internet. There are thousands more that come online everyday. One of the more popular platforms to host your blog on is WordPress. WordPress combines many powerful and useful tools inside to assist new and veteran bloggers manage their blog.
One particular part of WordPress that helps bloggers is: WordPress plugins. Plugins are extras that you can install into WordPress that can add extra functionality to your blog. You can access these components from third-party sites or on the WordPress.org site.
For new bloggers, working with WordPress is a little intimidating at first. Learning how to work with WordPress in the beginning includes deciding what plugins to install and use on the blog. Looking at everything from SEO to blog performance, there are many plugins to choose from.
For those beginning WordPress blogs, here is a list of some plugins to install on your beginning blog.
5 WordPress Plugins For Beginning Blogs
- All-In-One SEO
This is a WordPress plugin for Search Engine Optimization that works right out of the box. From one dashboard, you can set up and maintain the SEO properties of your WordPress blog. This plugin is simple and very user-friendly.
- WP-Super Cache
This plugin is particularly useful. WordPress is dynamic and uses a database backend to perform its functions. This plugin will create a cached, static html page to serve to your visitors. Since there is no back-end processing, your site will load faster. This is great for high traffic blogs.
- Google Sitemap Generator
Sitemaps are an important part of your blog. With this plugin, you are able to create an XML compliant sitemap with no effort.
- Redirection
Don’t you hate it when you have those pesky 404 errors on your blog? Did you change a url to something more SEO friendly but your visitors are still trying to get to it from the old url? With this plugin, you can set up automatic redirects on post urls and it has a 301-redirect manager.
- Theme Tester
Do you want to change your WordPress theme? Well, how can do you it without everyone seeing what you are doing? Theme Tester is a great plugin for this. When you enable it, only logged-in users to your blog will see what is happening. Once you are ready to release your new theme, simply disable the plugin.
If you are a new blogger, there are different free options out there but I highly recommend WordPress as your blogging platform. The ability to use to plugins is a great time saver.
Once you get more experience working with your first plugins, I would start to add more to increase the functionality of your blog. The before mentioned list of plugins are a good starting point for beginning WordPress blogs.
Have any other WordPress plugins you would recommend for beginning blogs?
Photo Credit: Rennett Stowe
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