8 Awesome Plugins To Make You Blogging Brilliant

Despite endless amounts of effort and attention, is your blog struggling to live up to its potential?

Perhaps you’re new to the world of blogging with tonnes of fresh ideas but do the practicalities of achieving your goals seem like a mountain to climb?

Sadly there’s no quick fix to making a successful blog and there isn’t a standard formula either. Keeping a blog isn’t as simple as just ‘creating content’ – but why shouldn’t it be?

If you love writing and creating awesome content don’t let anything get in your way. Introduce yourself to these 8 plugins that will take the stress of keeping a blog far away and help you to become blogging brilliant!

Writing

Just Writing

Do you ever find yourself struggling to focus? It happens to the best of us and it’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Let’s face it, the internet is full of outstanding distractions!

However, there are times when you need to just knuckle down and get writing without any hindrances. To help eliminate those pesky distractions I recommend Just Writing.

Just Writing is a really simple plugin that enlarges the WordPress editor window so that it takes up the whole screen, eliminating any background distractions. The plugin can be turned on and off at a click of the button and it genuinely is a really good way to avoid the temptation of watching cat videos on YouTube (or something like that). You can access all of the editorial functions in full screen mode too!

Get this plugin if:

• You spend too much time watching cat videos and not enough time writing.
• You’re looking for a larger, clean and clutter free workspace.

Social Media

In my opinion Social Media is a blogger’s best friend.

Let’s face it, not every blog is going to be on the first page of a Google search. So having the ability to share your content on social media is a great way to get publicity without the need to master the art of SEO.

Floating Social Media Icons

This nifty little plugin allows you to add social media sharing icons to your blog posts. This will allow your users to share your work via social media as-well as link users to your profiles so you can gain more followers.

I love this plugin because it’s equally adept in supporting manual and automatic integration. This means you can have full control over the visual properties of the icons if need be, however if you’re looking for a quick and easy solution you can pick one of the 20+ themes to get you started. It’s very versatile.

The icons look great and it’s super easy to install and get going. If you’re looking to improve your social media presence, I would certainly recommend Floating Social Media Icons.

Get this plugin if:

• You want to increase your social media presence by gaining followers.
• You want to broaden the reach of your content via social media.

Buffer

Though technically not a plugin, Buffer is an awesome service that will help you keep on top of your social media.

If you’re a frequent social media publisher it can be quite difficult to keep everything organised. You may find it’s often the case that you have a queue of content that needs to be shared, however remembering what’s what can be tricky.

Introducing Buffer – the answer to your problem.

Buffer allows you to literally queue your social media posts, giving you full control over when to publish each post and to which social media site it publishes on. You can schedule your social media posts to be published in advance so the moment an idea springs to mind you can write up the post and allow Buffer to take care of publishing it for you.

Get this if:

• You need a little help organising your social media publishes.

Comments

Akismet

It’s great to hear feedback – especially if it’s nice feedback!

I always believe it’s a positive sign if people are commenting on your content. But sadly there are a few fools out there who will use any comment section as a chance to be offensive or self promote, leaving you with quite a dilemma…

You don’t want to prevent genuine people from commenting, but how do you stop spam comments?

The answer is Akismet.

Akismet scans and processes all of the comments on your blog checking for spam comments. It filters out all of the comments it thinks are spam, leaving only genuine comments and replies. Each comment has a status history so you can review the comments that Akismet filtered, then a moderator can make changes to the filtered list as they please.

Akismet is a very popular plugin with a very good reputation and I highly recommend it for those who receive lot’s of comments on their articles.

Get this plugin if:

• You are prone to spam comments or if you simply want to avoid the threat of spam.
• You like engaging with your audience via the comments section.

Performance

WP Optimize

Whenever we’re writing a blog post we save as we go along right?

Each time we hit that ‘Save Draft’ button, WordPress saves that draft as a revision. This is a very handy tool that prevents some very unfortunate errors, however each revision takes up a certain amount of data.

If your post is X amount of data and you’ve made 10 revisions, that’s 10 times the amount of data taken up per post. Just imagine if you had 10 or more revisions for every one of the posts on your blog!

WP Optimize automatically scans your WordPress database and reduces the number of unnecessary revisions each post holds, saving you a whole lot of space and reducing the clutter in your WordPress database. It does the same with spam comments and other waste data stored unnecessarily on your database.

WP Optimize’s feature list is huge. It comes jam packed with handy little tricks to clear up some space and free your data so WordPress performs better for you.

Get this plugin if:

• You have lots of content and media and want to maintain the performance of WordPress.

Security

WordFence Security

WordFence is by far the most comprehensive and user friendly WordPress security plugin that I have come across (I’ll eat my hat if anyone can name one better). Best of all it’s absolutely free and once installed it’s fairly autonomous, so you can focus on writing some juicy content!

WordFence’s feature list is really, really long. It’s jam packed with all kinds of tricks to keep your site safe from harm. Here are just a few:

Blocking Feature – Blocks known attackers. If another site using WordFence is attacked and blocks the attacker, your site is automatically protected.

Login Security – Massively improve login security by using your password and your mobile phone to sign in. This is called Two Factor Authentication.

Security Scanning – Scans your files, themes and plugins and compares them with WordPress.org versions to ensure their legitimacy.

WordPress Firewall – A firewall to block common security threats like fake Googlebots, malicious scans from hackers and botnets.

Monitoring Features – See all your traffic in real-time, including robots, humans, 404 errors, logins, logouts and who is consuming most of your content. Enhances your situational awareness of which security threats your site is facing.

Get this plugin if:

• Well… You should just get this plugin.

Newsletter Signup

Optin Forms

Optin forms are a great way to promote your content and build a loyal following for your blog. If your users like what you do, why not offer them a subscription service that updates them with all your latest content via email? To do this you need to create an optin form so users can add their emails and click subscribe!

My favourite optin form plugin is called Optin Form (coincidentally). This plugin allows you to create a range of optin forms based upon the designs provided. Each design can be fully customised to suit the theme of your blog and it requires no knowledge of HTML or CSS.

Optin Form is compatible with most of the main email solutions such as iContact and MailChimp.

Get this plugin if:

• You’re serious about building an audience for you blog.
• You want optin forms that fit your blog’s style.

Backup

Updraft Plus

There’s nothing more devastating than spending hours on a piece of work for it to be suddenly lost thanks to a momentary lapse in concentration or a malicious cyber attack – sadly we’ve all been there one way or another.

Overtime you’ll fill your blog with loads of awesome content; content you’ve spent hours creating. And whilst your data stored on WordPress is pretty safe – I can’t stress how important it is to back up your data.

My personal favourite backup and restoration plugin is Updraft Plus. Updraft Plus performs cloud backups of your site’s content and database at a click of a button. It is compatible with DropBox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Rackspace and many more cloud servers.

The plugin works autonomously providing scheduled backups, or you can perform backups manually – whatever suits best. You’ll never have to worry about losing your data again, safe in the knowledge Updraft has your back covered.

Get this plugin if:

• You want to keep your content safe from harm and need an autonomous solution that works from the off.