Five Plugins Crucial To Starting A WordPress Blog

There are many reasons to start blogging. To get something off your mind, to start a movement, to educate, to market your business. Whatever your motives are for writing a blog, you more than likely want people to be able to find their way to it and offer them a great reading experience.

Great writing is of course the first thing that you need in order to attract readers and keep them on your blog (or send them to your main website). You also need to offer a good user experience and  optimize your WordPress blog for search engines.

To help improve these aspects of your blog you'll want to install some plugins. There's an incredible amount of WordPress plugins available that add very useful functionalities to your blog.

We've rounded up five plugins that you cannot go without on your WordPress blog.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Developer of this plugin Joost de Valk is quite the celebrity in the WordPress SEO community. The SEO plugin he has created is the best, most robust WordPress SEO plugin out there. Many famous blogs use this plugin.

With almost 6 million downloads and near 3000 five-star ratings, you can't really go wrong with it. The plugin provides great features such as SEO page analysis,  a snippet preview tool, technical WordPress SEO tweaks and much more.

W3 Total Cache

Nobody likes waiting around, especially not on the internet. Having a slow loading website hurts your site's user experience and will lead people to navigate away from your site. This is where the W3 Total Cache plugin helps you out.

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This plugin provides a WordPress Performance Optimization framework that helps you speed up your site. The plugin boast benefits such as: a ten times site performance improvement if fully configured and up to 80% bandwidth savings. Installation of this free plugin on any WordPress blog is a must.

Akismet

The Akismet plugin is installed with WordPress by default, but still needs to be activated before you can use it. This plugin catches spammy looking comments so that you can review them before they show up on your blog.

This way you can still allow people to comment and have any normal looking comments immediately appear on your blog, relieving you of the tedious task of reviewing all comments that are made on your blog. You can then just review the comments that were flagged by Akismet and check if they are really spam or not.

Floating Social Bar

You want your awesome content to be shared so you should make sharing really easy for your readers. The Floating Social Bar plugin allows you to add a floating bar to your blog pages/posts, containing share buttons for a number of different social media channels. You can specify where you want the bar to be shown. Because it's floating, it makes it very easy for your reader to share while they are reading your blog post.

Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

Another great plugin by Joost de Valk that makes it really easy to set up Google Analytics for your WordPress blog. A must-have plugin for your blog.

Zane Schwarzlose

About the Author:

Zane Schwarzlose is a search engine specialist at Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin web design company. Zane finds the Yoast plugin to be the most helpful.