3 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Bloggers in 2022

there are over 59 000 plugins available in the wordpress directory as a beginner how can you even choose in this video i'll show you first the three must-have wordpress plugins for bloggers second five nice to have plugins that will help you get more traffic to your blog and save you time and then i will show you what you should consider when choosing a new plugin for your blog [Music] hi i'm anastasia and i share a lot of tips on blogging pinterest and online business subscribe and click on the bell button to get my future videos in your feed and let's get started with the massive plugin number three seo plugin when you start a wordpress site or blog your goal is to get some visitors to it right one of the biggest traffic generators from most of the sites is seo search engine optimization and to help you optimize your site for google bing and other search engines you can use one of the best seo plugins over the years the most known was yoast seo and it is still great but in the last few years a new competitor emerged that offers even more amazing features in the free plan it's ranked math even with the free version rank math lets you analyze up to 5 focus keywords at a time also rank math added ai content credits that help you optimize your posts while yoast still doesn't have any ai features and if you decide to go with a paid version of either one of these plugins ranked math currently costs just 59 a year for unlimited size and yoast seo costs you 99 a year for just one site but i just wanted to give you my honest opinion if you have a blog for many years changing your seo plugin can be a real trouble and it's not really worth switching from yoast in your situation however if your site is new it might be worth using rank math instead or even migrating from another seo plugin to rank math now must have plugin number two is an image optimization plugin images on your site are the biggest contributor to slowing it down a slow site has lower chances to rank well in search results so you have to do your best to reduce your image size without losing the quality too much when you take photos with your phone or a camera they come out in a high resolution and the image file can be too large of course even before you upload your images to the wordpress media library you should do your best to reduce their size in any of your image editing tools but oftentimes even that is not enough especially for sites that include a lot of images to optimize your images to the max and in an automated way you should install an image optimization plugin and the best option i can recommend to you is short pixel i use it for my own blogs but if you are uploading more than 100 images a month you will need to use short pixels paid version it's not very expensive and you can purchase a pack of 30 000 images in advance for just 20 dollars and it will optimize your new images as you upload them to the site but i understand that as a beginner you might prefer to use a completely free plugin and imagefy is my second best option you will be able to optimize about 200 images per month for free here and then you would still have to use their paid plan if you go above the 200 images per month next must have plugin number one is for website backups as a beginner you will make so many mistakes while you're building your site you will likely try different wordpress themes you will test different plugins but imagine you did so much work on your website maybe you wrote your first 10 blog posts already and you accidentally do something that causes your site to crash in the process so you must have a plugin that allows you to do a backup of your site and every time you're about to save some significant changes like a new wordpress theme or activate a new plugin you should do a backup if things go wrong you can easily recover your site as it was right before the update the same applies to situations when your site gets hacked and you need to restore it let's hope this doesn't happen to you but if there is even one percent chance would you be willing to lose all of your work the most popular plugin for backups is opt draft plus you can do pretty much everything with their free version without ever needing to upgrade the second best plugin in this category is called manage vp worker and you can install and use it for free as well and these were my top three must-have plugins you should install this here but i also wanted to show you the other five important plugins that you might need to use depending on your preferences and also if your blog or business requires this functionality at all i like to call them the nice to have plugins let's start with the plugin number five wp rocket for site speed this is a premium plugin that can dramatically improve your site speed and this is really important for your blog's seo performance wp rocket is a cache plugin which means it speeds up the loading of your wordpress pages but this plugin only has a paid version which might not be affordable for beginners so i put it on the list of the nice to have plugins which you likely will need to use only when your site is big enough and has a large traffic volume use my link anastasiablogger.com wp rocket to sign up for this plugin install it on your site and test how it improves your site speed it has a 14 day guarantee period so you can really just give it a try number four on my list of the nice to have plugins is grow by mediavine this one is a plugin for social sharing buttons actually you can find other similar plugins but the biggest competitor it's called social warfare was used in a widespread hacking attack on wordpress sites a few years ago and that's when i switched from that plugin to grow social grow social has a free version that offers you basic social sharing buttons with limited options and it doesn't include any advanced settings specifically for pinterest buttons that's why i personally use the paid version of grow plugin it's not that expensive anyway it's just 34 one-time fee but because you use a paid version you can ask mediavine support for help if you have any questions or issues integrating this plugin into your site you know that i share a lot on this channel about my pinterest marketing strategy and i have to tell you honestly a big part of your success on pinterest is covered by this small but mighty plugin that has very advanced settings specifically for pinterest buttons using the right settings especially for users on mobile devices you can increase the number of shares from your site on pinterest like a lot if you want to learn more about growing traffic from pinterest i will give you a link to my free pinterest masterclass click up there and also in the description down below plugin number three on this list of important plugins is akismat which will help you filter the comments on your blog to reduce the amount of spam for example it will filter out the comments that have nothing to do with the topic of your page akismat used to be free for all users and it's even pre-installed on all wordpress websites but in the future it will have a paid version for commercial blogs and website now plugin number two is called elementor and this is one of the most famous page builders for wordpress sites but depending on your wordpress theme especially if you use one of the premium themes some of them will have their own page builders and in that case you definitely don't need elementor but if it's not your case you might benefit from elementor because it helps you build your pages using the easy drag and drop interface so you first need to find out whether or not your theme already has its own page builder and then if it doesn't elementor should be the best most popular option in the ecosystem and the next plugin to look at is gravity forms to grow your email list again this plugin is not necessary for all the sites as a beginner you might not even want to build an email list but when you are ready to do it gravity forms is a great option this is a paid plugin and i need to remind you that the main reason i often even prefer to use a paid plugin is because that always comes with support and well organized documentation so if anything goes wrong or i cannot figure out something when setting up the forms i can contact their support the best part about gravity forms is that they have a wide range of add-ons and external integrations you will find easy integration with mailchimp aweber get response dropbox paypal stripe and many other platforms now i promised to show you in this video the most important plugins you should install in your wordpress site but of course depending on your needs you might need to choose other plugins and it's literally not that easy to decide which plugin is the best in each category so how can you choose wordpress plugins let me help you a bit with this i'll tell you what are the main factors you should be looking at when you choose the best plugins first you will likely do a search in the wordpress directory looking for the functionality that you need let's say you're looking for a plugin to help you remove category url this is if you want to remove the word category from your urls that wordpress adds by default so in my case all my posts about personal finance would be found on the page anastasiablogger.com slash category slash money but i wanted to have the url much shorter just anastasiablogger.com and i had to use a plugin for that so what i would do i'd go to the wordpress directory just google that keyword wordpress plugins directory you go there and here in the search bar you will search for remove category url once you open the plugin page you should look at the following factors first the number of active installations in most cases if the plugin has the highest number here it is a sign that people like it and it works properly then you should look at the last update so the next thing you should check is how long ago was this plugin updated this factor is very important sometimes you could find a plugin that has a high number of installations but they happened in the past years and the latest version of the plugin is too old and it hasn't been tested with the last few wordpress updates see in our case the very first plugin that shows up hasn't been tested in the three major releases of wordpress and it was last updated more than two years ago and this is a bad sign most likely the developer of this plugin doesn't work on it actively and when the plugin was tested a long time ago it can even crash your site if it doesn't work with the new wordpress version or it can be more vulnerable when it comes to hacking attacks so be careful with this factor now the next factor is user reviews there is no special advice on this factor the more positive reviews obviously the better the next factor is customer support when you open the plugin in the wordpress directory under the rating you will see if there are many support questions answered by the plugin team and if you open the support forum for this particular plugin you can even read through the threads that users created and you will see what kind of issues the support team helped them resolve on a side note if you found a free plugin outside of the official wordpress directory then be careful because it could be harmful for your site now let me know in the comments below which plugin you consider to be your must-have wordpress plugin and check out my video up there on which blog initials are the most profitable this year thank you for watching and see you in the next one

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