Start an active blog or a website and it doesn’t take long to realize what goes on behind the scenes makes blogging…a job. You started blogging because you love writing about the subject and being part of a community, not because you want to spend hours sifting through spam comments and checking for broken links. Fortunately, there are some great WordPress plugins available that will take care of the menial work that comes with running a website.
There are two very important participants that do not like broken links on your site, your readers and Google! Readers looking for more information and clicking through a link, only to get a 404 Not Found error, become frustrated and will leave your site. Google gets just as angry when it finds a broken link on your site. A blog with a lot of broken links is assumed to be a poor reader experience and will see its search ranking disappear.
Links break more often than you think. Websites to which you link might be abandoned, a page might have been removed or the URL changed. Before the Broken Link Checker plugin, you had to rely on visitors to alert you when a link became broken. The plugin continuously monitors links in your posts, pages and comments. If a broken link is found, the plugin will send you a notification by email and can even prevent search engines from following the links.
Akismet is another of the must-have WordPress plugins that everyone has downloaded. In fact, it’s the #1 downloaded plugin on WordPress with 24 million downloads.
Even new blogs will get targeted by spammers looking to build an easy backlink or promote their get-rich-scheme. In fact, many blogs get more spam comments than legitimate comments. WordPress community Torque reports that spammers hit blogs with 132 million junk comments every month!
It’s pretty easy to delete or hit spam on a single comment but imagine having to do it 132 million times. That’s a lot of lost time that could be spent creating or promoting new posts.
The Akismet plugin automatically checks all comments and filters out those that look like spam. URLs are shown in the comment body so scammers can’t hide links in their comments. The plugin isn’t perfect and you’ll still need to manually delete a few spam comments that slip through but it will save you a ton of time.
I’ve been writing content for nearly a decade. I can put a quality post down in a flash and even optimize it for SEO. The one thing that takes way too much time is finding relevant images for the article.
Until I found the PhotoDropper Wordpress plugin. The plugin allows you to search for free and premium images by keyword and right in your WordPress editor. The plugin searches 243+ million free images with Creative Commons license and 10+ million premium images. After searching by keyword, you simply click on an image and click “insert into post.” The plugin even handles the creative commons attribution.
Productivity is part of the process that ensures success for your website. You also need to cover areas like speed and security to have a top-notch operational website. A white-label 24/7 support service and a Wordpress hosting VPS can also assist you in fine tuning the productivity aspect of your website.
Help! I need more WordPress plugins to improve my productivity. Let me know if you have a few.
Content marketing guru at Mailmunch. I’m passionate about writing content that resonates with people. Live simply, give generously, stay happy.