Plugins Every Blogger Should Know About (Valentine Special)

Valentines day is a day about love right?

Well, I love my fellow bloggers and know quite a few bloggers that are just getting started. So what better way to spread the love then to let some new and maybe old fellow bloggers in on some plugins I use and love.

One of my goals for this year is really to take my blog to a whole new level. With that being said I’ve been doing a ton of research on ways to improve my blog, increase my audience and interact more with my readers.

The platform I use is WordPress.org and I highly recommend it. But once you have your theme installed on your site you still have a lot of ways to improve it’s functionality by installing plugins. Finding plugins can be a little tricky. There are SO many out there and new ones are popping up each day.  Some of them are garbage and some are A-MAZ-ING. But you want to make sure that your installing the right ones because it can totally jack up your entire site. I’ve experienced this first hand and have been blog-less for days because of a silly little plugin. I now only download the ones I know other people use and enjoy.

So here are a few that I use and Love:

nrelate Related Content

This plugin recommends other posts to your readers. This keeps your readers on your site longer and gets traffic to older posts that usually don’t see much action. A great way to do some internal linking.

Tweet old post

This one is for all you twitter bugs out there and a relatively newer find for me. This plugin automatically selects old posts from your blog and posts them to your twitter account. You can chose which categories to post from and from how long ago. For instance if you want to exclude your giveaway category and only want to post from the last 2 years; you can do that! It’s a great way to get some more traffic to your older posts.

Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker is a must have. This plugin goes through your entire site and checks all your links to see if they are still working. It’s a great tool to keep your blog up to date as much as possible. Once it detects a broken link it will email you and you can go and delete the link, fix it or ignore it. (Sometime it thinks it’s broken and it’s not) but either way a great maintenance tool.

Twitterlink Comments

Remember the sharing the love thing … well you really should share the love everyday with your fellow bloggers. Adding this plugin will  give them the option to post their twitter name when they comment on your post. It’s then super easy for others to click on their twitter name and start following them.

CommentLuv

Looking to share the love even more … good; you should. Installing this plugin, when checked will post their last post on their blog under their comment. So other readers can click on it and read their post. You may think, Well why would I want them to click on someone else’s post or go off my blog? Sharing the love remember .. stop being so greedy. Chances are your reader read your post to get to the comment section anways, so don’t worry too much.

WPTouch

This is a must have plugin for today bloggers. It’s a plugin that makes your site mobile friendly. What I didn’t know until recently is that you can customize it to your liking. I customized mine to fit with the color scheme of my brand.

And there you have it, a couple plugins I use and love. Now that I shared some love with you, share some love with me and answer this one question …

What is your all time favorite plugin that you use on your blog?

Tagged as: Blogging