Essential Blog Plugins

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If you're following my series on How to Start a Blog, after you get setup you'll want to install the essential blog plugins. When I first started blogging in 1999, there were no plugins and the word blog wasn't even a thing back then. Fast forward today, and blogs are read by over 500 million people and those people view more than 22 billion blog posts per month. AND that number will skyrocket. That puts you in a great spot to start a blog around your passion & your interests & just have fun it while your audience & income grows.

What Factors will Increase Search Engine Rankings

Before you write one piece of content, you want to make sure the blog foundation is setup to scale (in case something goes viral right out the gate). This is the blog foundation that will increase search engine rankings & blog audience retention.

Loading Times
SEO
Backups
Template Builder
Anti-Spam
Speed
Security

We'll increase loading times & help your readers get a fast experience while helping your readers find you with their search terms right out the gate. These are the essential blog plugins that will deliver that experience.

The Essential WordPress Plugin for SEO

I use and recommend Yoast SEO (which I upgraded and bought the premium version). Yoast has saved me an enormous amount of time when it comes to SEO because I appreciate the color coded red-light, green-light system. If the site needs improvement with any area of SEO, then, below each post in your WordPress dashboard, Yoast will give you a red-light or a green-light. Let me show you a picture of what THIS blog post looks like after the initial 1st and 2nd run through.

Yoast's Recommendation to Improve Blog SEO

Okay so everything is green except for “Keyphrase distribution”. I need to add my focus keyword which would be “essential blog plugins” throughout the site. It even tells you to distribute the keyphrase throughout the site.

If you look to the right of the warning message, you will see an EYE. When you click on the eye, it will highlight that phrase within your blog post so you can see where your focused keyword is. Once this turns green, this blog post will be ready to publish out.

UPDATE: 30-minutes later, it's green and ready for final walkthrough.

Click here to Download Yoast SEO for Free.

The Plugins to Speed Up Your Site

Now that you're using Siteground for your hosting, they have a great plugin called SG Optimizer. This essential blog plugin only works with Siteground hosting. The SG Optimzer optimizes the large images and will automatically minimize html, javascript and css resources to speed up the load times of each page. It's magic.

And it's free. Download the Free SG Optimizer Plugin to Speed Up Your Site

How to Analyze Your Blog for Free

If you want to know how your site is doing, then you can easily use a site called GT Metrix.

Click Here to Analyze Your WordPress Blog for Free

GTMetrix will tell you what areas you need to improve upon (even though just with these essential blog plugins, we took our site from a D- to a C+).

In order to get to the B+ range, we took it a step further and used another plugin called Fast Velocity Minify. It will merge and minify the CSS and Javascript. You'll want to compress the HTML and images to increase load time. Google now penalizes for slow loading sites. After we installed this plugin, our site jumped to the B+ range, but this is an ongoing challenge for SuperAffiliate. One of my goals in the next 90 days is to speed up the site and get it in the A+ range.

Click Here to Speed Up Your Blog with the Free Plugin: Fast Velocity Minify

The Blog Plugin to Create Your Blog Template

I use a free plugin to create the look / feel of the site. Elementor is the best page builder I have used in the past 15 years. The trick to using Elementor is to create templates and drop them in where you want them to go. That way – let's say you have the same header and footer on every page. You create the one header/one footer template and assign to every page or post. That way, if you want to make changes to the header, you just pull up the template and it auto-updates throughout the site.

You can use this template process for almost everything in your blog. Create a blog post template and assign it to the single post. Want to change the look of the blog, just edit the template and it auto-updates on the single post. Freakin lifesaver.

We Recommend The Free Page Builder Elementor

Elementor now has over 3.3 million users and because it has built-in everything (forms, pages, sections, lists, call to actions), I felt it belongs in the essential blog plugin list.

Click Here to Download the Free Page Builder Called Elementor

The Plugin that Will Give You Free SSL.

If you're looking to get the free ssl for your blog. All Siteground blogs come with free SSL. First, you would login to your cpanel through the Siteground Control Center. There's an icon called Let's Encrypt. Click on that icon and it will walk you through how to install SSL on your domain name.

Download the Really Simple SSL Plugin

In addition, once you get that installed, install an essential WordPress plugin called Really Simple SSL. This is the lightest, easiest way to force all your images and posts to have the “lock” all secure message for every post later on.

Click here to force SSL on all your images and pages.

The Blog Plugin that will Give You Free Security.

Back in 2007, our site got hit with malware and deleted over 200 posts. Plus, there were very few WordPress tutorials like this in the mid 2000's. I really needed these essential blog plugins back then. I felt I had to wipe the site clean and start over. Now, they have free blog security plugins that protect your site against malware and viruses. We've come along way since manually having to create folders and upload plugins like this: How to Install WordPress Plugins

Download Wordfence Security Plugin

One of the essential blog plugins that will protect you from malware attacks and virus is Wordfence Security. We use it for all of our sites, and they send you a daily report if any files were uploaded or any changes were made to your existing files.

Click Here to Download the FREE Security Plugin

Once you get the essential blog plugins installed and activated, you're ready to start planning your content. On the next training, we'll talk about how to create the best content that engages your audience.

Download the PDF Version of This Blog Post

Download the PDF File of This Blog Post: Essential Blog Plugins

How to make money with a blog. These are the essential blog plugins.

Kit Elliott

Kit Elliott has been affiliate marketing for the past 15 years. As a former sixth grade Science teacher, he teaches his affiliate marketing training at Unstoppable Affiliate. Unstoppable Affiliate is the premier training that will carry affiliates through the 2020's by switching from ego marketing to solution based marketing. Visit http://www.UnstoppableAffiliate.com for details.

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