50+ WP Plugins That Can Increase Traffic and Engagement on Your Blog
WP Plugins
Traffic is one of the most important elements of a successful blog. Even if the blogger has the best-looking website, it does not matter if no one visits it. On the other hand, attracting high traffic is also one of the most challenging tasks for us bloggers because the entire blogosphere has more than 100 million blogs and still growing.
Another challenge for us is to encourage visitors to stay longer on our websites and attract repeat visitors. It is called Engagement. The longer visitors remain in our blogs, the better. Like traffic, visitor engagement is also an essential element of a successful blog.
Luckily for those bloggers who use WordPress as their publishing platform, they can use various WP plugins that can increase traffic and visitor engagement to their blogs. Below is the 50+ WP Plugins that can Increase Traffic and Engagement to your blogs that are classified based on their purpose.
A. Blog commenting
Blog commenting has dual purposes. The first one is to encourage two-way communications between the reader and the owner of the blog which is an important part of creating good relations and encourage repeat visitors.
The second one is for the benefit of the commentators which are to get backlinks and get more traffic. Therefore, the blog commenting system must not only allow good communications between the blog owner and its commentators but to allow commentators to promote their content.
The following are WP Plugins that can power up the commenting system of your blog:
1. Commentluv - reward your commentators using Commentluv plugin by allowing them to place the link to their latest blog post near their comments
2. Intense Debate Comments- a plugin that encourages conversation on your site or blog, thus increases reader engagement.
3. WP Comment Remix- provides reply and quote links to your readers
4. Growmap Anti Spam Plugin (GASP)- provides an easier way to confirm that your readers are not spammers compared to using captcha
5. @Reply WP Plugin- adds a reply feature to your comments similar to Twitter
6. Easy Comment Uploads- allows readers to attach images and other files to their comments
7. Tango Smileys Extended- enables users to choose from smileys in comments to express their thoughts and opinions easier
8. Subscribe to Comments- allows commentators to sign up for notifications of comment replies or subsequent comments
9. No-follow free- removes no-follow attribute within the comment section
10. Ozh’ Absolute Comments- allows blog owners to reply easily to comments without the need of visiting the post.
B. Content Syndication
This simply involves making your contents accessible to other channels in order to reach more readers who are subscribed to those channels. WP Plugins that allow content syndication includes:
11. Syndicate Press - include RSS, RDF or Atom feeds in your WordPress Posts, Pages, Widgets or anywhere in your blog
12 Feed Word Press- an RSS/Atom Aggregator plugin
13. At Content- allows to syndicate your blog at AtContent.com (PR 3 and an Alexa Rank of 52,300)
14. Syndicate Out- syndicates articles within a specified category to another WP blog
15. WPEmatico- lets bloggers post automatically from the RSS/Atom feeds organized into campaigns.
16. Triberr- a plugin for Triberr members. It seamlessly integrate your blog with Tribber
C. Podcasting and Audio
Not all visitors are visual learners. Many of them are auditory learners which mean that they prefer to listen to audiobooks and podcasts rather than reading articles. To encourage better engagement with auditory learners, our blog must provide an option to listen to podcasts or audio versions of our articles.
Another benefit of podcasting through submitting your podcasts in Podcast search engines and directories.
17. SoundGecko- a WP plugin that lets readers listen to audio version of your blog. The “Listen” button that is located below is a SoundGecko plugin. I would like to thank Nwosu for this idea.
18.Odiogo- it does not only let blogger provide an audio version of their posts but it also provides an option to syndicate your podcasts via RSS feeds. As of this writing, Odiogo does not accept sign up because they are currently upgrading their system.
19. Podcasting Plugin by TSG – it improves existing podcasting support by adding various iTunes-compatible feeds and media players
20. Seriously Simple Podcasting – is a user-friendly podcasting solution for WordPress
D. Social Sharing Plugins
These plugins provide social buttons to our readers to let them share our content easily via social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn and other social networking sites.Below are social sharing plugins
21. Digg Digg -display all social sharing buttons nicely on your site, similar to Mashable
22. !Share: Best Free Social Share Plugin- allows users to design their own Social Floating Bar and/or Attention Grabber Bar.
23. Social Login, Social Sharing, Social Commenting and more!- allowsSocial Login, Social Sharing, and Social Commenting on your blog
24. Shareaholic share buttons & related posts- a social sharing plugin that provides almost all social sharing buttons. This blog is using Shareaholic. It a has a little flair that would entice visitors to share our contents such as placing phrases like “Sharing is Sexy,” “Share the Wealth” and “Sharing is Caring.”
25. Sharexy -social content distribution network where bloggers can publish news, articles, reviews and your blog updates announcements and distribute them to thousands of Bloggers and Readers easily and totally Free
26. Flare -share your articles across some of the most popular networks with a little Flare
27. Sociable- a fastest growing leader in the sharing space of WP plugins.
28. Social Login & Social Sharing by Janrain -enables users to publish their comments or activities from your blogs to various social media sites simultaneously.
29. WP Social Share - enables visitors to share blog posts directly from your blog to social network sites
30. Dropdown Social Share menu -social share icon with drop down menu
31. O3 Social Share -syndicates your article to social media sites easily
32. Tilt Social Share Widget -a simple widget that enables sharing of your posts and/or pages.
33. Slick Social Share Buttons - floating or sliding panel with social sharing buttons
E. SEO Plugins
As the name suggests, these plugins let blog authors optimize their blog to search engines.
34. WordPress SEO by Yoast- an out of the box SEO plugin by Yoast
35. News SEO by Yoast (can only be used by users of SEO by Yoast). It adds Google News XML Sitemaps capabilities to WP SEO by Yoast.
36. All in One SEO Pack- optimizes SEO of your Blog and ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
37. Woocommerce All in One SEO Pack- extends the capabilities of All In One SEO Pack to place the All in One SEO Pack dialog on the Add/Edit Products screen within WooCommerce
38. SEO Plugin by SQUIRRLY- helps bloggers in seeking the right keywords to rank in less than two minutes and can monitor SEO in real time
39. Basic SEO Pack- Simple but complete SEO Pack to make your blog SEO Friendly.
40. SEO WordPress- a powerful plugin with various SEO Features, integrated with Google Authorship and Google Analytics
F. Plugins that Improves Readability and Speed of Your Blog
To increase traffic and engagement, bloggers must improve readability of their blogs. Speed also contributes greatly towards better engagement of your readers because visitors do not like slow-loading websites.
41. W3 Total Cache- it is the only WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework, created to enhance user experience and page speed.
42. Web Page Speed Checker is a plugin created to control the Google Page Speed Score of your blog pages. It connects with Google Page Speed Online to monitor optimization rules and evaluate it with your blog addresses.
43. WPBooster CDN will make your WordPress sites load faster and perform Better! This plugin enables the blogger to compare possible your server and WP Booster of display speed for the image.
44. WP Fast Cache – created for pure website loading speed
45. Drop Caps enables bloggers to customized drop caps similar to print publications such as newspapers and magazines.
46. WP Super Edit - adds two full rows of additional features to your visual editor toolbar, like options for applying specific styles and for adding and formatting tables. For instance, rather than using default fonts of your blog, WP Super Edit allows you to increase font sizes, font colors and font styles for your posts and it also has features similar to MS Word such as inserting tables, enables bullets and numbering. This blog is using WP Super Edit
47. jQuery Font Resizer- allows readers to increase or decrease the size of fonts to improve readability
48. Simple Pull Quote- enables bloggers to insert quotes to highlight specific phrases and sentences
49. After the Deadline- correct grammatical and spelling mistakes in your posts
50. Any font- replace standard fonts with any TrueType or OpenType fonts at selected places on the blog or site.
51. WP Google Fonts- enables bloggers to use Google Font directory to add different fonts to a WP blog.
