New blogs are created every second, but if you’re trying to build a stellar money-making blog, you need a plan. Each of these plugins can help you in accomplishing your goal, by working together to help you build a strong online presence.
HelloBar
To make money, you need leads, and HelloBar is one of the best lead generation plugins available on the market today. You can use it to create custom, static CTAs to turn your visitors into subscribers, or promote on-site engagement. HelloBar is completely free and setting it up takes less than a minute.
Yoast SEO
Though the name suggests the plugin is just for search engine optimization, Yoast SEO is actually much more. It’s a full website optimization platform. It allows you to add titles and descriptions to all your posts and pages, set focus keywords, configure robots.txt, check your copy for readability, address canonical URLs, set a primary category for your posts, breadcrumbs, clean up your permalinks, and automatically build an XML sitemap – eliminating the need for a plugin just for your sitemap. Plus, the free version includes RSS enhancements, and the ability to edit your robots.txt and .htaccess files.
There’s a premium version of this plugin available, which adds a redirect manager, add more than one focus keyword to each post or page, social previews, and premium support. Pricing is based on the number of sites you’ll use the plugin on, starting at $69 for a single site, and going to $1499 for up to 200 sites.
WordFence Security
Even though WordPress is built to be a secure platform, there are hackers who will try to get in and wreck havoc, just because. WordFence is a fairly basic security plugin to add another layer of protection. It can block the IP address of bots that are trying to make their way into your website. There is a premium version available that adds more features, such as premium support, password auditing, scheduled scans, country blocking, and the ability to see if your website is being used to spam people. Pricing varies based on the number of licenses and the length of the license, with discounts for bulk purchases. The most a person will ever pay for a single premium license is $8.25/month, but licenses are billed annually.
AMP
Maybe you’ve heard of Google AMP, maybe you haven’t – but if you want to create a fast and easy experience for your mobile users, you’ll want to make sure it’s implemented on your website. If you’re not a developer by trade, you’ll likely struggle with implementation without this plugin.
Simple Share Buttons Adder
The Simple Share Buttons Adder is a basic plugin designed to add social share buttons to all your posts and pages. It’s possible to upload your own custom images, if you want. There’s a pro version, priced by the year, which starts at $10 for a single site. It includes additional features like custom colors, button positioning, and custom sizes. It is responsive and includes a URL shortener. It’s also possible to use shortcodes and control the share text. This plugin may not be necessary if you’re using a theme that includes this feature.
Backup Buddy
Backup Buddy is a user-friendly WordPress backup and migration plugin. You never know when your website could get hacked, and even if your host keeps daily backups of your websites, it’s always a good idea to keep your own backups offsite. It’s not a free plugin, but it is worth every penny. Plans start at $80/year, but if you’d rather buy it at a one-time fee, you can pay $297 to get lifetime plugin updates, a year of ticketed support, 1GB of backup space, and you can use it to backup an unlimited number of sites. The $80/year plan allows you to back up a single website. You can backup up your entire site, schedule backups to run automatically, and even restore your site or move to a new host with ease.
Contact Form 7
At the least, your website needs a contact form. Contact Form 7 is a simple, free, plugin that can manage multiple forms. It includes CAPTCHA to help avoid SPAM, and supports Akismet filtering. Build the forms and insert them wherever you want with a simple shortcode.
Edit Flow
This is especially important if you’re building a blog where there will be multiple contributors. Edit Flow makes it easy for you to manage your editorial workflow and includes an editorial calendar, the ability to manage authors, assign blog posts, leave editorial comments, and more. It’s also possible to create a custom post status, and even plan your content strategy directly from within WordPress.
There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress plugins to choose from, with new ones developed every day. It’s important to limit your plugins to keep your website loading time as fast as possible, but plugins are necessary to add functionality on both the front and backend.
