As a content creator, you need a robust toolbox full of powerful tools to create the best content possible. Better content – as you know – is key to increasing your website traffic, collecting subscribers, building an audience, and ultimately growing your sales.
One of the main advantages of building a website with WordPress is the ability to extend your site’s functionality with plugins. With 54,000+ plugins available to download (many for free), there isn’t much your website can’t do. Each plugin is a potential tool that can help you serve better content to your audience.
But you don’t have to explore all of those plugins on your own. We’ve done the work for you. In this article, we’ve hand-picked the best WordPress plugins for podcasters, writers, and other content creators.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the quintessential WordPress SEO plugin. It’s a complete content optimization suite with tons of powerful tools to improve your website’s search rankings. It will set your metatags, build an XML sitemap, create canonical URLs, and, of course, optimize your copy so your pages rise to the top of Google’s search results.
2. reSmush.it
Large images take longer to load, which can damage your search rankings and the user experience. It’s important to optimize your images for the web so each page loads as fast as possible.
reSmush.it is a WordPress image compression plugin. It will automatically reduce the sizes of your images when you upload them without affecting their quality. It also offers a bulk optimization tool that will address older images on your site.
3. Seriously Simple Podcasting
Whether you’re just getting into podcasting or you’re already a veteran podcaster, Seriously Simple Podcasting is the best WordPress podcast plugin available to help you create and manage your podcast. Everything is managed right inside your WordPress dashboard.
How it works: Simply add a new podcast episode the same way you would add a new post, then upload your audio file (or insert the URL) and add content (like transcriptions and show notes) to the page. Seriously Simple Podcasting will embed a modern audio player at the top of the page.
Check out these extra features:
- Bring all of your podcast content into WordPress site with one-click imports.
- Manage multiple shows, each with their own RSS feed.
- Integrated statistics help you understand your show’s performance.
- Use Castos to host your podcast for a super convenient workflow.
- Free add-ons extend the plugins functionality.
4. MailChimp for WordPress
Email marketing plays a key role in building an audience. An email list is an invaluable way to notify your fans about content, podcast episodes, courses, promotions, or other news.
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers because it’s cheap (free for small audiences) and easy to use. Their WordPress plugin integrates with your website so you can create opt-in forms that build your following.
5. WPForms
At some point, you want your audience to contact you. You might want them to a survey, submit an application, or sign up through a landing page. To create these connections, you need a plugin to create your own forms.
WPForms is a user friendly drag-and-drop form builder. You can build sophisticated forms right from the WordPress dashboard. It’s highly customizable, but it also comes with pre-built templates to help you build new forms quickly.
The free version comes with plenty of basic contact form tools, but the premium version is packed with powerful features, like email notifications, thank you pages, form confirmations, and spam protection. The premium version also unlocks different types of forms, such as surveys, post submissions, payment forms, and more. There are also plenty of addons to extend its functionality.
6. ImageInject
Great content needs plenty of high quality images to break up written text, please Google’s search algorithm, and create a better overall user experience. But taking your own photos isn’t feasible, so it makes sense to use images with open licenses.
ImageInject is a simple way to add quality photos to your content. Use it to search the massive Flickr database of 200+ million photos and Pixabay’s repository of 150,000+ photos for open license images that make your content pop. Search and import photos right from your WordPress dashboard.
7. UpdraftPlus
Imagine posting dozens or hundreds of articles and podcast episodes, only to lose it all in a site crash. That could ruin your business, which is why every content creator needs a backup plugin to secure their hard work.
UpdraftPlus is simple and reliable. You can create and download backups at will, or create an automatic schedule so you always have a recent backup. You can even send the backup straight to your favorite cloud storage provider.
8. Jetpack
Jetpack is a massive security, performance, and site management plugin by the same people who brought us WordPress. It will improve your site speed, help with SEO, and give you powerful tools to boost the user experience. Look at this big list of features:
- Downtime alerts
- Brute force attack and spam protection
- Site backups
- Image and video CDN
- Lazy loading
- Professional themes
- Speed optimizations
- Design elements (carousels, galleries, slide shows, and more)
- Detailed page and post insights
- Promote content to social media sites
- Generate ad revenue
- Publish from mobile
- Create site notifications
- Offer text improvements
9. Elementor Website Builder
Designing professional WordPress pages is difficult if you don’t know how to write code. You may want to create elegant and attractive design elements, but you don’t want to waste time learning web development. Fortunately, that isn’t necessary anymore.
Elementor is a powerful, easy-to-use page builder that helps you design beautiful pages and posts without writing any code. See your creations and changes take effect in real time.
10. Weglot Translate
Weglot is a powerful cloud-based website translation plugin that will instantly turn your site into a multi language platform. This is a critical plugin for anyone who wants to appeal to a broader audience of fans without doing all the translating work yourself.
Weglot’s flexible pricing lets you pick and choose which of their 60+ languages you want to serve (or simply choose them all). The dashboard helps you edit translations for accuracy. You also get access to professional translation and localization services.
11. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the most powerful Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It Integrates your website with Google Analytics and creates a handy dashboard in the backend of WordPress for you to view the most important analytics. You can monitor your traffic, top content, referral sources, profitable pages, user engagement, and more.
12. Ninja Tables
Depending on the type of content you produce, a well-designed table is a powerful way to display information neatly and efficiently. But designing your own tables with HTML is difficult, especially if you want to keep them responsive. Plus, it’s just a headache.
Ninja Tables is the best WordPress plugin for table creation. you can build any type of table for any purpose. The plugin comes with more than 100 table styles, but you can also create something custom with their real-time visual editor so your design comes out perfect.
13. Edit Flow
Collaborating is critical when you’re working with a team to produce content. You need a tool to keep everyone organized so content gets published on schedule and nothing falls through the cracks.
Edit Flow is a content collaboration tool that makes it easy to work with your team within WordPress. This is a modular plugin, which makes it highly customizable to meet your needs. It’s like a built-in project management tool for WordPress.
Check out these great features:
- A calendar gives you a convenient month-by-month look at your content.
- Create custom statuses to define the stages of your content production.
- Leave editorial comments (with threads) for members of your team.
- Add editorial metadata to keep track of important details.
- Receive updates on the content you’re following.
- View your upcoming posts in a traditional story budget view.
- Keep team members organized by role.
14. Social Media Share Buttons
Your amazing content deserves to be shared! But few website visitors will copy the URL from their address bar and paste it into their preferred social media platform. You can make this process easy for them by providing convenient click-to-share buttons.
Social Media Share Buttons is a straightforward plugin that lets you add share icons for RSS, email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, and 200+ other social media platforms. If you don’t like the provided buttons, you can upload custom images of your choice. There are plenty of customizations to make the icons fit in with your theme.
15. WP Rocket
Like we said before, page speed is important to create a pleasant experience. Google wants to see fast pages, too. An effective way to speed up your site is by caching your pages.
WP Rocket is a caching plugin that creates saved copies of each of your dynamically generated pages. This means your server has to do less work to load the page for visitors. In one study, WP Rocket reduced page load times by 63%.
Don’t Settle for Poor Content
As a content creator or any kind, you can’t skimp on quality and polish. Your audience expects to see and hear the best you can produce. While this list of the WordPress plugins for content creators certainly isn’t exhaustive, these tools will boost the quality of your work instantly.
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