We all know how cool WordPress is. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it even cooler. And that’s the best thing about WordPress. When you first get it, you’ll have enough of a functionality to post and publish whatever you’d like. However, If that’s not the option you wanna go with, you can supercharge it with the right set of tools that are necessary for your blog to stand out.
With this in mind I’ve made a list of 8 WordPress plugins that aim to power up your blog by enhancing its functionality in so many ways. They target different aspects of your blog and make sure it looks and functions at its best. On with the list!
WordPress Google Maps Plugin
Google maps are used for many purposes and can be found on almost all kinds of blogs and websites. Apart from maps, they also provide tons of other functionalities that will come in handy no matter what’s the focus of your blog or what’s your niche audience.
Google Maps WD is a versatile and user-friendly plugin for adding functional maps to your blog. It comes with road, traffic, satellite, terrain and hybrid map styles, and allows you to spice your maps up with polygon, polyline, circle and rectangle overlays.The plugin features a store locator functionality, which shows the selected location on the map within a specified radius.It is a great option for corporate blogs or business sites. Mark any location or spot on the map with custom made icons,and give them your personal style with the available map themes and skins.The plugin, however, is not limited to only pointing out locations, it also gives the opportunity to provide directions to any location with walking, driving, bicycling and transit modes. The maps are responsive and fully customizable.
WordPress Form Builder
No matter what kind of a blog you run, the chances are high you’ll need some sort of a form on it. And the bad news is that WordPress doesn’t come with a form making functionality. No worries!
Whether your visitors want to apply for a competition, register for an event,or simply contact you, Form Maker will take care of all of them. It allows you to create any kind of application, registration, survey, questionnaire, or contact forms with tons of field options that you may ever need. It comes with various text input fields for names and addresses, times and date fields, password input, country select and custom select, check box for multiple selection options, etc. You can fully customize the forms, either using the plugin settings or choosing one of the 41 editable themes that Form Maker comes with. And if the style customization options are still not enough, its theme CSS is open for editing.
WordPress Slider Plugin
Sliders are trendy and we all love them. Why? Because they bring a nice touch to the website and are able to display various information. None of the WordPress default themes come with a slider, so if you want to feature one (or several) on your blog you need to get the right tool for it.
Slider WD is the best option you can go with, as it will not only equip it with an advanced slider, but will also enhance the design of your blog with its transition effects and custom styling options. It allows you to add both images and videos to the slides, embed content from Instagram, Flickr and Dailymotion, display social sharing buttons, and spice it all up with carousel and parallax effects. The slider also supports image, video and hotspot layers and filmstrip view option. The plugin is responsive and fully customizable as well.
Sumo Me Plugin
Want to display email subscription forms to your visitors? Encourage social sharing? Add call-to action box on your blog ? Sumo Me comes with all that functionality and even more. It’s a feature-packed WordPress plugin that equips your blog with a highlighter, welcome mat, heat maps, smart bar, image sharer and list building tools.
The plugin comes with various customizable templates to make sure the pop-up boxes look exactly as you want. It’s also analytics integrated to show you what people do and where they click on your blog. The plugin is mobile optimized and ensures mobile surfers enjoy the best experience on your blog.
Header and Footer
Take the header and footer sections of your blog to the next level by adding various services and tools to them. Header and Footer plugin allows you to insert Google analytics code, custom tracking code, Google Webmaster tools, etc, to your blog’s header and footer parts and easily manage them. You can also insert those codes before, after or in the middle of any of your post and pages, or everywhere on your theme using placeholders. The plugin allows CSS edits and works out of the box.
WP Super Cache
A super fast loading blog is a total advantage nowadays. I don’t mean that WordPress loads slowly, but over time, as you publish more posts and, therefore, get more traffic, you may encounter loading speed issues. To guarantee your blog’s high loading speed and provide a better user experience you’ll need to check out WP Super Cache plugin. What it actually does, is serving static HTML files with mode_rewrite to your blog visitors instead of loading heavy PHP scripts. As a result your blog loads faster. It uses legacy caching feature to provides cached pages to the known users as well.
All in One WP Security and Firewall
WordPress is secure itself, but if your want to add some additional levels of security to it All in One WP Security and Firewall will help you to get the work done. It checks your website for security risks and vulnerabilities, and grades the level of your security based on the features that you have activated. The plugin is equipped with advanced user account,user login, user registration, database security features, and also has a powerful security scanner tool that alerts you instantly when something goes wrong with your WordPress system. Its comments spam security function monitors your comments section and automatically blocks IP addresses that have already submitted several comments labeled as spam.
WordPress SEO Plugin
Search engine optimization is crucial for your blog’s success. Without proper optimization techniques it’s not gonna drive much traffic, and your blog is bound to stay unexplored. Luckily, there is a super advanced WordPress tool that is there to supercharge the optimization of your website and make it easily discoverable by search engines and your niche audience. And that’s Yoast SEO. It helps you optimize your website for better search rankings by helping you to write keyword rich content, better headings and post titles, monitors the length of the meta descriptions of your posts, and reminds you to implement some useful techniques for better results. Its snippet preview feature instantly shows all the changes you have made to the content, and displays how your posts will look like in search results.
This is a short list of highly useful WordPress plugins that are sure to power up the functionality of your blog and take it to the next level. They will bring different functionalities to it and enhance not only its features, but its look and feel likewise.
If you have other great plugins in mind that I’ve missed out, please let me know by commenting below. I’d love to hear from you.
Gayane Mar is a passionate web-blogger who started her blogging activity a few years ago. Her posts are all about web design and web development. She writes all these posts for good people who need some guidance or advice with web development. The driving force behind her writings is the great hope that her blog posts would be helpful for each and every one reading them. If you are interested you can follow her own blog wpcapitan.com.
