10 Plugins That Will Make Your WordPress Blog Stand Out and Earn More ~ My Blogger Lab

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If you have your own blog, then these are 10 plugins you must hear about. And, not only to hear about but also to use them to make your blog stand out in a sea of competition in the niche you write about and in which you have your business. WordPress is currently used by a third of the websites on the planet in both free and premium versions. To install (add) the WordPress plugin you need to have your personal domain and hosting because the free version is limited.

Having already mentioned this, it should be explained why it is better to have a domain and hosting for your blog/website after you have built it - for which you can even employ online tools that require no technical skills. If we take the example that a blog is your house, in order to start building it, you need to have a place where you will build it - you need a lot, and here hosting represents your lot. Hosting has servers that store all your data and the entire content of the blog (in this case the house) including texts, images, videos, PDF files, and more.

Table of Contents:

OneSignal
Icegram Plugin
All-in-One WP Migration
Really Simple SSL
WP Fastest Cache
WPS Hide Login
Smush
Yoast SEO
Elementor Website Builder
WP Content Copy Protection

Once you have found a place, i.e. good hosting for a blog, the next thing is to have an address - a street and a number so that your friends can come to visit you - and that address is actually a domain. For example, your home address in the web world would be your domain, e.g. thenameoftheblog.com. Now that you have a lot and a street, you can build a house. Start with the foundations and walls of the house, that is, choose a theme for the blog - you want your house to last, so choose the ‘material’ that will last.

The next step is the doors and windows of the house, that is, the navigation, menu, and categories through which passers-by and neighbors can see and go through in order to view the house (blog). Your mailbox where you get all the packages and letters in the web world is your email address, something like contact@thenameoftheblog.com. Let’s not forget that after you build a house, you need to maintain it. This is where support and updating step in.

Why is it better to have your own domain + hosting? We will answer with a question - Do you want someone else to own your house? If, for example, the lot is rented, then the owner can break down the house at any time, right? It is the same with free hosting platforms - they can deny you access to the blog or crash it. That is why it is important to have your own hosting.

Now, the plugins…

1. OneSignal

This plugin allows you to send push notifications to the subscribers directly in the web browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera…). With its help, you can also inform them about new updates on your blog or about new posts.

The function of the OneSignal plugin is similar to the newsletter, except that the subscribers do not need to log in to the email - your notification can pop up while they are surfing, whether they are on Facebook, YouTube, or some other site.

2. Icegram Plugin

This plugin allows you to have a pop-up banner on your blog in the header, such as “Download free recipes” and similar. There are plenty of options in the free version so it is worth a look if you need and want banners.

3. All-in-One WP Migration

This super-free plugin is something you will definitely need on the blog. If you are changing a theme or ‘messing around’ and testing something, and you are not sure what you are doing - back up your blog. So, in case something goes wrong, you can immediately restore your blog to the old one with the All-in-One WP Migration plugin.

Backup is an insurance policy when it comes to your blog. It is the security of everything you have done so far. It is kept in a secret place in a folder on your computer, while some keep it on a USB or external hard drive - the choice is yours.

Most bloggers make a backup only when a situation forces them to do so, that is, when someone hacks them and inserts a virus or when they mess with a theme and plugins that are not compatible, so there a little chaos emerges. In fact, you can back up your blog when you have a big traffic jump on the blog (a big change of theme or plugins), or for 6 to 12 months. All-in-One WP Migration plugin will help you with this.

4. Really Simple SSL

The most important thing on Google is to make your blog safe for users. If the URL of a domain has https:// then it is safe for users but, if it has http://, then it is not secure. Because of that, Google will pop up a window that says the website contains a virus and the like, and that will lead to the reputation of the blog itself being poor.

The good thing is that you automatically get an SSL certificate by purchasing web hosting. In other words, most hosting providers offer special cards and memberships, where their members have a free domain and hosting with SSL provided and installed.

5. WP Fastest Cache

No one likes to wait a long time to read something on the Internet. Today, people are looking to find out information faster, and this is one of the most important factors for a better website ranking on Google search results. In particular, this plugin will make a few changes and speed up your blog, of course, as much as possible. Sometimes the speed, that is, the slow loading of a page, depends on the resolution of the images in the sense that they are too large. This is just one example of why a web page could load slowly.

Out of all search engines in the world, Google is the largest and most popular. Every day, billions of people use Google to find a solution or information for a particular topic. When you optimize the text well and it is on the first page of Google search results, you will get organic visits to the blog every day, and if that topic is in demand, you will still have it in the coming years.

Statistics show that in 2020, over 70% of people read blogs daily, and most skip ads and look for organic content because they trust it more. So there has never been a better time to start blogging and get your article on the first page of Google search results.

6. WPS Hide Login

By installing and configuring this plugin, you will hide your admin link. Every blogger wants to protect his blog from hackers. Even though the WordPress platform is secure enough because hundreds of developers work on it, it is useful to further protect your blog as hackers keep looking for new ways to harm you.

Why is blog security important? Hackers can cause serious damage, steal user data, passwords, install malware or viruses, and even transmit malware and harm users of your blog. For these reasons, Google blacklists 10,000 websites every day to protect users on the web. You do not want your blog to be on this list.

One of the most important steps to protecting your blog is not to use plugins that have not passed WordPress verification. Various sites offer nice themes and plugins that look great but the background of the code is outdated or there are omissions because they are not updated. That is why the WordPress system periodically checks each theme/plugin, and we advise you not to use those that are not ‘tested’. WPS Hide Login falls into the group of tested plugins.

7. Smush

We mentioned that slow page loading is often the result of high image resolution so by optimizing images for a blog with the help of this plugin you can improve user experience (UX) and speed up the loading.

The advantages of WP Smush are that it is very easy to use and optimization is possible during image uploading. You can optimize up to 50 existing images, whilst optimizing multiple images is charged. For beginners, this is more than enough.

As for the flaws of WP Smush, just reducing the image size, especially if the files are extremely large, is usually not enough. By using WP Smush, you cannot really have an impact on optimization or any kind of control. For example, if you upload a 3 MB image, it will be reduced by 10-25% without losing quality, which is still a large image of some 2.4 MB.

8. Yoast SEO

This plugin is the first thing we advise you to install on a blog because it is a perfect tool for SEO optimization. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins with over five million downloads. It is often used as a ‘main’ SEO plugin.

With this plugin you can do many things: create an XML sitemap, verify your site in webmaster tools (Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex…), exclude certain types of content from indexing in search engine results (categories, tags, media pages), create headlines and forms for the meta description, and the like.

The functionality of this add-on is mostly at a basic level, based on things like keywords in titles, subtitles, and content. That is why we do not recommend striving for a perfect result as it will probably spoil your content a bit. Basically, Yoast SEO is a good way for beginners to run a blog/website.

9. Elementor Website Builder

This is one of the plugins that will give you the ability to use every pixel of the screen the way you want. It is easy to use (on the drag & drop principle) and with its help, you can create your own landing page for Instagram.

Elementor has some limitations, one of which is often reported by webmasters - the lack of a button that opens the video in the Lightbox. You could work around the problem by using an image with or without a play button. We are surprised that they did not offer this.

Fortunately, there are some great add-ons for Elementor on the market. However, you need to be quite careful when choosing a plugin developer. Having a WordPress website built on Elementor creates a dependency on it. Then, creating an add-on built by another developer creates another dependency. For the success of your WordPress blog/site, it is crucial to ensure that the plugin developer has a lot of installations and associated revenue to maintain and improve the plugins as the versions of WordPress and Elementary are updated.

10. WP Content Copy Protection

This plugin will block users from right-clicking on your website. That way, no one can select your text (copy-paste) or download an image (i.e. save image). Copying (stealing) your texts and posting them by someone else on their blog is a problem that many bloggers face. Of course, no one feels good when they find the post they conceived and wrote copied, even to the last word, on another blog.

In the eyes of Google, the site where the text was first published is considered as the owner of the content. However, this is not necessarily always the case because, if your blog is relatively new on the Internet, then Google can award ‘ownership’ to the older one, i.e. more relevant blog. This leads to the situation that Google penalizes copied texts/sites by removing them from the search but it often happens that the original is also penalized. Google even deactivates your earnings through AdSense.

Therefore, with the help of the WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click plugin, the copy-paste option is blocked. That way, the plagiarist can only do the printscreen of the text and then type it in manually, which is, you will agree, too much work and the ‘thieves’ quickly give up on it.

Short message for the end as the conclusion of the article: Consider which plugins you install and be sure to check if they are compatible with your theme.

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