Plugins for Food Bloggers

Plugins are tools used to manage your site. You don’t have to understand coding to implement this.

Here is a list of plugins I use.

Please feel free to drop in a mail or comment if you have any questions?

PLUGINS:

• WP RecipeMaker: This is where you display recipes in a specific format. Its neat and this plugin indexes recipes well, which in turn helps search engines. It is an easy, user-friendly and SEO optimized plugin for WordPress. (Earlier I used Easy recipe Plus. If you are currently using an old plugin to display recipes and you want to convert into the new format, you can do it with the click of a button). It has a PRO version which is chargeable.
• Askimet– This filters out your spam comments. To give you an idea I have about 1500 comments lying in my spam folder which has accumulated in just two days. That the amount of spam you can get and you don’t even want to think about manually deleting them.
• YOAST SEO – This will help search engines find your content and you can set how the content should look when the search is displayed. (Earlier I used All in one SEO which was good but Yoast is way better. It guides you to change contents from SEO and readability point of view.)
• Google Analytics Dashboard: Helps you check page views and other stats based on country and regions.
• Comment reply notification: When someone comments on your website you don’t want them to keep checking back if you have replied. This plugin will notify your readers when you reply to their query or comment.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

• Shareaholic: Provides share buttons, related content, and analytics. Its all-in-one content amplification that helps drive your website traffic.
• Social Warfare: These are the floating buttons you see on the site. They encourage social media engagement without slowing down the site.
• Visual Recipe Index: Again like the name suggests, it will automatically create a visual recipe Index which makes it easier for readers to go through your recipes or content. Here is a good tutorial I found to set it up. (I currently use a template which was designed by my site programmer)
• Jquery pin it button for images: This adds a pin it button on your images. Pinterest is one of the biggest photo sharing sites and you want to give your users the convenience of saving recipes.
• Subscribe to Email using Mail chimp: Mailchimp will generate custom and professional looking e-mails. I like this tutorial from stuffedweb.com.
• WP Popular posts: Will display the popular posts like the name suggests, but you have an option of selecting the time-period.
• Twitter streams: Displays Tweets on your website.
• Simple Social Icons: This is the social media icons displayed on the top right-hand side of the blog.
• Yum Button: Help your viewers save recipes to Yummly. Your recipes will be searchable by over 15 million users per month which generates a significant amount of traffic. This feature is available in Social warfare now.

PERFORMANCE:

• FV Gravatar Cache: Speeds up your website by making sure the gravatar is stored on your website and not loading from the gravatar server.
• Broken Links Checker: Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. Broken links can be bad for your SEO. Read more about this here.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com to better index your blog.
• Heartbeat Control: Increases server performance. Read more here.
• WP Fastest Cache: Reduces page load time and speeds up your website through caching
• WP Smush: Reduce image file sizes, improves performance and boosts your SEO.

MONETIZING:

• WP Mobile Detect: Hides desktop ads from mobile, and adds mobile-only ads. (WP Touch is paid).
• Q2W3 Fixed Widget: Fixes positioning of the selected widgets, when the page is scrolled down. Ideal for displaying ads.

BACKUP AND SECURITY:

• Backwpup: Backup your website from time to time and be on the safer side. A computer crash or a coffee spill is all it takes to destroy the effort you have put in for years. This is a free plugin. Your hosting provider backs up your content for your time but the most reliable way would be to pay someone to do it for you. I currently use a paid version Backwpup-pro which automatically updates my backups every day.
• Limit Login Attempts: This plugin limits the time a password can be used, thus protecting your site from potential hackers.
• Wordfence Security: Scans for virus, malware, and acts as a firewall.

A VERY IMPORTANT APP TO CONSIDER: GRAMMARLY

This is one of the best things I came across. It is a writing enhancement app which proofreads your work for spellings and grammar and also gives you word suggestions. They have both free and paid version. I use the paid version now. It has increased my productivity significantly.

P.s: Some of the plugins have PRO/PAID options available which includes more features.

Some plugins can reduce your site speed dramatically. Its a good idea to backup your site before you plan to do any changes. You can check your site speed at GTMetrix.com.

Do you know of any other plugins which can be useful? We would love to hear from you 🙂

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