Its another year, and the blogging blunders of yesteryear need to be gotten over with. WordPress offers the performance and reliability that a blogger would ideally prefer to work with. While the open source tool itself is pretty easy to work with, the wonderful developer community behind it is the reason behind WordPress’s tremendous growth in the recent past. The plugins developed for WordPress make it worthwhile to accomplish all your blogging activities in a jiffy. These plugins are great for you to worry less about the functionality of the site and they let you work on improving your content and provide value to your readers.
There are a lot of functionalities that go into the making of a WordPress blog. These functionalities are structured on the plugins that come for specific tasks. In this comprehensive list, we will be covering the best of the best plugins in each category ranging from SEO to social sharing. These plugins from each category are the best at what they do and will cover both your blog’s front-end and back-end necessities. So, if you are planning to revamp your WordPress blog this new year and liven up with some new plugins, you are at the right place and in safe hands!
So, let’s get started on the Best WordPress plugins in 2015.
Best WordPress Plugins For Social Share
MashShare is a free social share plugin for WordPress, adapted from the popular blog, Mashable. Use this catchy social sharing plugin to increase your likelihood of getting your content shared more often. This plugin makes it easy for your readers to find and hit the share buttons while reading your content. With a share and view count accompanying the share bar, your readers will also be getting a glimpse of your authority on the web.
MashShare also offers add-ons to its free app to include even more social media buttons as a part of the widget. The MashShare Pro plugin with add-ons comes in at €18.00 for a single website license.
DiggDigg is one of the most widely used WordPress plugins for social sharing. Developed by Buffer, this plugin makes social sharing fun for your readers. With option to easily switch between horizontal or vertical and static or floating, this plugin just dances to your tunes. Add buttons from different social media networks to this sharing bar and get more likes and engagement for your content.
Best WordPress Plugins For SEO
Yoast
If there’s one SEO plugin that your WordPress blog would need, it would be the Yoast SEO plugin. The hands down winner for all things SEO, Yoast is an all-in-one solution for making your blog perform better in search results. Control your blog’s post metadata and title descriptions, Robots meta configuration and clean up everything that effects your website on the search front. With a well guided walk-through and support available for this plugin, you will always be in safe hands.
Google XML Sitemap
Although Yoast SEO plugin does include Sitemaps for your website, Google XML Sitemap is rather better and easy to use. You can simply disable Yoast SEO plugins’ Sitemap option and have this plugin do the sitemap work for your blog. Use this free plugin to help the search engines better index your WordPress blog.
Google XML Image Sitemap
Just like how your articles get indexed into the search engine by using XML sitemaps, this free plugin does the same for your images. Get the images used in your blog indexed across various search engines like Google and Bing. This plugin gets those search engines to sift through your blog for images and get them indexed to be discoverable in search.