As a new blogger, one of the many questions that would be going through your mind is “what do I need to grow my blog fast?”
Then you search online and find people talking about WordPress blogging plugins and you’re wondering what that is.
Wait a minute before you bore yourself with terminologies.
WordPress plugins in simple terms are a list of instructions written in html, Javascript and CSS programming languages that your site will follow to carry out particular operations you want it to perform.
So instead of you giving out instructions by yourself through codes, these WordPress plugins have been designed by Web Developers to do the tasks those codes will do – and all those codes are in just one big file.
There are presently thousands of WordPress blogging plugins in the repository but you only need some essential ones to grow your blog very fast.
Must Have Essential WordPress Plugins To Grow Blog Traffic for A Beginner (New Blogger)
- SEO Plugin
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins are a big part of any website wanting to show up on search engine results pages (SERPs), especially Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.
These WordPress plugins help grow your blog traffic fast by allowing you curate your Off-page and On-page SEO, so your contents may stand out among your competitors.
With these WordPress blogging plugins, growing your new blog traffic will be a piece of cake because, you will be able to control how Search engines show your blog posts to your readers.
You will have the ability to coin your targeted keywords in places users and search engines will enjoy and expect to have it for good readability and relevance.
You will be able to use these plugins to: control your Sitemap file, meta data (description, image, name, etc), set keywords optimization for your posts, control your posts meta description on search engines.
In addition, you will be able to give your images or media SEO optimized captions and titles and all other additions to your posts that will make content of your post is understood correctly and served to the right audience.
This will in turn increase your visibility in searches and help you grow your blog audience.
Most Popular SEO plugins for WordPress are Yoast SEO, RankMath, All in One SEO, etc.
These plugins have both Free and Premium plans that you can use.
Of course, it’s so typical that Premium SEO plugins offer more benefits to site owners or SEO experts than the free ones.
But most of the times, it’s the free services you need to grow your blog traffic and audience initially from scratch.
As for the SEO plugin to choose, I can’t say which one will be best for you.
I have used both RankMath and Yoast SEO plugins on my blog, although I use Yoast presently.
There are some features RankMath provides for free that you need a Premium Yoast plugin to access and there are some features you won’t find on Yoast at all.
I use Yoast, but that doesn’t mean it’s better than RankMath. I changed because I had a Sitemap updating problem due to conflict between RankMath and my former caching plugin (W3 Total Cache).
So I was able to eliminate this conflict when I switched to Yoast SEO.
Bottom line: If you plan to use W3 Total Cache, don’t opt in for RankMath, use Yoast SEO plugin instead.
If at all you want to use RankMath, use another Caching Plugin that will be compatible with it.
I have switched between caching plugins, and Yoast SEO has not had any conflicts with any of them – WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache.
- Analytics Plugin
Analytics is a big part of your blogging career growth. You will need a WordPress plugin that will show you an insight of the audience and activities that occur on your site.
Some of the parameters your analytics are measured in terms of are: users, sessions, page views, bounce rates, location, audience, mobile devices, etc.
With these plugins you will be able to know how your posts and pages are performing and determine what you need to improve your site or blog traffic.
Monster Insights Analytics and Sitekit Plugin are the best choices for Analytics WordPress Plugin.
MonsterInsights and Sitekit draw data directly from Google Analytics and their installation is very simple.
Although, while MonsterInsights shows only Analytics, Sitekit offers more features like, PageSpeed Insights, Adsense and Search Console.
You can use Sitekit to place Adsense codes on your site and get fast approval.
Bottom line: Go for MonsterInsights if you need only analytics. But if you want more features without having to install separate plugins, go for Sitekit.
- Caching Plugin
Caching is a method of storing data in a temporary memory.
So basically, what caching does for your site is store your web pages and media in a temporary storage or memory such that when a new visitor lands on your that same page, they’ll be served from that cache.
So these caching plugins provide CDN (Content Delivery Network) that your web pages would be stored, so that when a new visitor hits your site, the CDN serves them instead of your own server.
This whole process improves the speed and performance of your web pages by decreasing the time your pages take to load.
When this happens, your bounce rates will decrease because people will be able to fully browse your pages without turning back due to too much loading time.
The lower your bounce rates, the faster your blog audience or traffic will grow because search engines will interpret it that your contents satisfy your readers’ intent.
For caching, you can use free WordPress plugins like W3 Total Cache, Super Cache and Premium plugins like Wp Rocket.
Bottom line: If you’re low on budget, I’ll suggest W3 Total Cache, but if you have the extra dollar to buy Premium plugins, go for Wp Rocket.
Although, you can get almost all what WPRocket will give you on W3 Total Cache plugin, however, WPRocket is more beginner-friendly.
- Security Plugin
Every site on the web is a target for attack for hackers and information infiltrators.
Site attacks ranges from brute force attacks, spamming, etc.
Many new bloggers install nulled WordPress themes and plugins on their sites because they want Premium softwares but are low on budget.
These files have been modified by the sharers and most of the times, malicious codes have been inserted into them.
This opens a back door for attackers to infiltrate your blog and take over your entire site.
But with a security plugin, you’ll be able lock the backend of your site, prevent spamming and brute force attacks and prevent editing of your theme and plugins files.
Sometimes some of these codes even divert your blog traffic to attacker’s URL and this harms your SEO and impacts your site traffic adversely.
You can also use the plugins to scan your entire site or parts of it for viruses, trojans and malicious codes that can harm your site.
For a free security plugin, I would suggest Sucuri plugin.
It has almost all you need to secure your site.
However, you can try out any other plugin you like to choose the one that suits your taste more.
- Newsletter or Forms Plugin
If you wish to incorporate Email Marketing in your blogging journey right from the beginning, you will need sign up form plugin for users to provide information such as email address and names if they wish to receive newsletters and updates from you.
Email Marketing has several benefits you can enjoy and will help your grow your blog traffic through repeat visitors or even boost sales if you have any product for sale.
Examples of these WordPress plugins are MailChimp, Creative Mail by Constant Contact, Contact Form 7, WPForms, etc.
What you need to know before choosing a WordPress plugin as a beginner
There are a number of things to look at when choosing your plugins. I will dive into this, one by one.
Content Management System
The first question when you’re trying to choose a plugin for your site as a beginner is “which CMS am I gonna use?”.
CMS which means Content Management System is your determining factor in this decision.
Just as the name goes – this is the software you will be using to create and manage all your digital contents on the site, and by that, I mean your posts, pictures, audios or podcasts, videos and other files including your themes and plugins.
There are numerous Content Management Systems in the market that you can choose from, and your choice depends what you need and the purpose of your business.
For example, Blogger’s blogspot offers both free subdomain and hosting on Google servers and when you purchase your own domain name, you can still connect it to blogspot and host for free.
Whereas, in WordPress, while they offer both free WordPress.com subdomain and hosting, when you get your own custom domain name, you must get a premium hosting from a hosting company of your choice.
In Plugin terms, you cannot use WordPress plugins on Blogger’s Blogspot, so you can only write scripts to do the exact actions you need the plugins to do in the HTML code of your Blogspot.
So basically, if you’re not good with codes as a beginner or new blogger, you may want to rethink having your blog on Blogger.
Yes, it would work, but you won’t be able to customize freely on it. They’re only a handful of theme templates compared to the wide WordPress themes and plugins repository.
Some other popular CMS out there include: Joomla, Drupla, PrestaShop, Magento etc.
Most of these also have their forms of plugin or modules that work exactly like those of WordPress, but the latter controls a greater part of the industry.
So if you’re thinking of WordPress plugins, note that they can only be used on a WordPress site – and not anywhere else. So you may want to migrate from that CMS you’re presently at.
Type of Website
So yeah, the kind of website or blog you want to open will determine the WordPress plugins you will need for you to thrive.
An e-commerce website needs a whole different bunch of WordPress plugins compared to what a Graphics Design website will need.
This is because the organisations, functions, features and looks of your site must match its purpose.
An e-commerce site looking like a magazine site or personal blog will not communicate the correct information to the visitors.
A video site that doesn’t have a video player WordPress plugin or script installed for its users means the owner is definitely joking with his business.
The first relevant factor to consider before even choosing your plugins is your WordPress theme.
Your theme must be able to match your business pattern and say what your site has to offer at a glance look from the homepage.
Unless you’re code savvy and you wanna build your site from scratch without using already coded themes and plugins.
If you got what it takes, then it’s your best shot because you will know better to add only codes that your site actually needs, compared to all other bloated themes that assume what you might need and pack everything for you.
You should always try to choose a lightweight theme that will improve speed and user experience. You don’t like a slow site, well nobody does. Slow sites will only increase your BOUNCE RATES ( when visitors leave your site without doing what they came to do).
Budget
Your budget goes a long way in determining which WordPress plugins you will choose for your blog(s).
There are plugins that offer Free Plan and Premium plans. And there are some that are only available to only Premium users – they don’t offer free services.
An example of such plugins is WPRocket.
WPRocket is a caching plugin that’s aimed at reducing the load speed of your web pages and prevent slow site and overload of your servers.
But unlike its counterparts like W3 Total Cache, Auto-Optimize, etc, it doesn’t offer free services – it goes straight to a paid plan service only.
This is how many WordPress plugins are. Some will give you free access to some features and tell you to buy the premium plugin for some advanced or restricted features.
Most of the times, the free plugins can be enough and sometimes, we need some of those extra features so we may need to pay for them.
But as a beginner in the blogging business, you may be low on budget and would love to enjoy the features you need for free.
This is where the choice or decision making comes in.
Some WordPress plugins will offer what another plugin wants you to pay for as a free feature. So you if you’re cutting budget, you will need to go for the one that offers want you want for free or at a price you’re willing to pay.
