What are the best blogging tools for a high performing blog toady? That is what I have decided to answer in this article. One of the most important thing for a blog to fit in on the internet toady is performance. You could argue and say that it is page style and yes styling is also very important, but who is going to see it if you have a slow page. Today everyone is in a rush, people don’t stick around for a page to load or video to buffer. They just move on to a faster site or another video. What you need to be competitive on the internet today is the ability to combine both performance and style.
Luckily for you I have composed a list of my top 11 best blogging tools for a modern blog. If you implement these tools on your site you will most certainly get higher performance and better control over your site.
Lets jump right into the list of my top 11 best blogging tools.
1. XML Sitemaps And Google News
By: RavanH
This Plugin enables you to create an XML Sitemap. Why do you need an XML Sitemap? You upload the sitemap to Google searchconsole to let Google know that you have things on a site you want to be indexed. This way Google knows that when someones searches on a topic, they will include your post in the result if it matches the topic searched for. One more good thing is that this plugin will also allow you to get you images indexed as well, with an XML images file. This will make your posts appear in the image search as well.
XML Sitemaps was created with one thing in mind, simplicity. I have tried a lot of different plugins for XML files but so many of them where hard to use or was missing auto XML for images. This one is just outstanding when it comes to simplicity, a few clicks and you are done.
2. Yoast SEO
By: Team Yoast
Yoast SEO is a plugin that will help you with seo (search engine optimization). Seo is a way to optimize post and pages so they rank higher on search engines results. This is also crucial for organic traffic, you need to rank high for people to find you. Yoast will help you with seo and readability so you end up with a post or a page that is both good for search engines and easy to read for the readers.
I personally love this plugin because it helps me with optimize my page for a high rank and with structural design of my pages and posts. Easy to use and does what it promises is why it is one of the best blogging tools out there in my mind.
3. WP Autoterms
By: WP Auto Terms
Do you find it hard to write a privacy policy? Look no further, this plugin will help you with just that and many more things. In essence it will help you create any legal page with a few clicks. What else can I say about this plugin, it made my life easier when I could get help with my legal pages that is for sure.
4. Thirsty Affiliates
By: Rymera Web Co
Do you love a well structured site? Do you use affiliate links? With this plugin you can add all your affiliate links to a list for ease of use. All you do is click on the TA icon in you post and select a link from the list, done. Yet again it’s all about simplifying things, so you can use your time on more important things than looking for your affiliate links. Wasting time on unnecessary things is one of the worst things I know, I want to spend my time producing content for you not looking for links.
5. Sumo
By: SumoME
One of the first steps on a blog should be to collect email addresses. Let your audience know whats new or that you have a great deal for them. You need to learn how to do this, collect addresses. With Sumo you get a possibility to make a nice email collecting page. Design the page however you want it and let Sumo take care of the task of showing it to the reader. It has a nice function that tracks where the mouse is and how long the viewer has been on the site. based on this info it shows the collecting page at just the right time for maximum conversion.
One drawback is that it has a very limited gallery of templates in the free version.
6. Remove Amazon Links From RSS Feed
By: Phil McDonnell
If you have Amazon links in your post and a newsletter that sends to your audience via RSS, you need to remove the link. If you read the terms for amazon associates it says that you can’t use their links in an RSS feed. This plugin makes that possible and automatically. I use this to make sure that my back is free if someone would happen to look into my RSS feed.
7. PageSpeed Ninja
By: PageSpeed Ninja
Lets talk performance, With this plugin you can omptimize your site for performance, make lazy loading images load fast or combine and inline Javascript and CSS. This is the tool for today’s stressed out market place, make you site fast so your reader sticks around and read more. I do believe that it is customer support to have a fast site, I know that I usually don hang around to long on a slow site.
8. Health Check And Troubleshooting
By: The WordPress.org Community
You don’t want a sick website or a site full if issues. with this plugin you will get a notice if you site is under performing or has some trouble. First of all it bad for you to have a site full of issues and second, search engines could stop indexing if it’s too ill. That will hurt your organic traffic a lot. With this you can make sure that your site don’t need to go to the hospital anytime soon.
9. Google Fonts For WordPress
By: Fonts Plugin
Do you want access to more than 800 fonts fort your site. This is the right plugin for you then. This plugin features a live preview, one click updates, SSL and HTTPS comparability and is tested with PHP7 just to mention a few things. Make your site stand out with a good font theme.
10. Feature Images In RSS For Mailchimp And Other Email
By: 5 star plugin
Do you want images in your RSS? Of course you do. Adding images to you RSS feed will make it stand out and be much more pleasurable to read. The simplicity makes it worth downloading and try. This is one of those tools that makes life easier, It just grabs the image and put it in the RSS. Simple just like I want it.
11. Broken Link Checker
By: ManageWP
This plugin scan you page to see if there are any links that doesn’t work as they should. If it find a broken link it will notify you so you can hava a look at it. Broken links are a sad thing especially if you are using affiliate links to make money. If the links are broken and you don’t know about it, it will not generate any money. So do the right thing and get notified if something is wrong.
Note: It appears that Amazon links end up on the broken list even if they are not broken. I don’t know why but now you know, so don’t be surprised if they end up there.
Final Words
There you have it, my list of what I believe are the 11 best blogging tools for a modern blog. I encourage you to try them out for yourself and see if they fit you and your site. maybe they do, maybe they don’t, all I know is that when I found out about them my blogging world changed, for the better. Now I have an indexed site with proper SEO and no health issues. don’t you want the same?
This list of top 11 best blogging tools are all composed out of free plugins. This goes to show how much performance you can get for free.
