You are planning to start a blog? Great!
Today, everyone has the opportunity to start a blog and become successful. You just need to know and pay attention to what you are doing and to the newest trends in the online world. But, before you start a blog, there are some things you need to have: you need to choose a good platform, choose a reliable web host and a domain, design your blog, etc. The list keeps growing.
That is why we have decided to make a list of the best plugins you should install to help you start a new blog.
The first 3 plugins we list are the coming soon plugins that help you create hype, keep your SEO ranking, and build an email list even before you have started your site.
Under Construction Pages
UnderConstructionPage plugin is great for coming soon, under construction, sales or landing pages. It comes with an easy-to-use drag and drop builder, a template of more than 400,000 images you can use to make your perfect page, change text and fonts to create attention-grabbing sales and landing pages. It is also integrated with MailChimp and Google Analytics, so it is easy for you to collect data about your audience and build email lists. It also supports Universal Autoresponder.
You can test the plugin with a demo, and it doesn’t require any registration, not even your email address. It comes in different price ranges, starting with $69 or $250 for a lifetime license.
Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode plugin lets you choose from over 1 million images to create your pages, there are themes so you can personalize and adjust to your online brand, change the text and fonts, and create the Coming Soon pages. It supports the autoresponder, CRM, and marketing software. With this plugin, you also have access to SEO tips and guidelines that will help you rank higher in search engines.
Pricing starts at $39, $79, $199 for a lifetime license. To run it, you need to have a self-hosted WordPress site with a WP version 4.7 or higher or a WP Business plan.
Maintenance
Maintenance plugin allows the WordPress administrator to close the website. This can either be for maintenance, so you can set a temporary page, and enable 503 Service temporarily unavailable page.
You can customize the logo, images, color, and add the desired text to your site. You can collect leads and subscribers (there are opt-in boxes) as it comes with Google Analytics support. It is integrated with MailOptin that connects to MailChimp and other autoresponder services.
Now, we will list the best plugins you must have when starting a new blog.
WP Reset
WP Reset is a plugin that resets the site’s database to the default settings, but without modifying any files. It is great for starting new sites as it deletes all of your personalization and customization, or you can just choose specific files, such as only theme settings. Resetting lets you delete all posts, pages, comments, users, database tables, and more. It is great for a quick re-start of your blog or website.
It is integrated with WP Webhooks, which is a plugin that connects WP to any 3rd party system and lets you initiate actions from WordPress or any other app in a secure system.
Akismet
Akismet is a plugin designed to remove comment spam, as well as to delete junk comments on your blog posts, without you having to check them all one by one. What this plugin does is it checks your comments and contact form submissions against a global spam database. This way, it prevents your site from publishing spam or malicious content.
It is free to install it for a personal blog; paid subscriptions are available for commercial sites and businesses. It has more than 5 million active installations, which proves the necessity of having this plugin tin today’s online world.
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a plugin designed to improve your page loading speed. Having a high loading speed is necessary if you want to keep your customers and your high SEO ranking. It generates a static HTML file from your WP blog. After an HTML file is generated, your web server will serve that instead of a heavier WP PHP script. This lighter file will be served to users who are not logged in, who didn’t leave a comment on your blog, and users who have not seen a password protected post. Garbage collection is done on a regular basis. this gets rid of unnecessary pages. It is also integrated with a CDN (a network of computers that help serve your content faster).
This plugin serves files in 3 ways:
- Expert- the fastest method that uses mod_rewrite, but is also risky because if done incorrectly, it can take down your site
- Simple- it is easy to configure with the .htaccess file and is the recommended way of using this plugin
- WP-cache caching- used to cache pages for known users and logged in users
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a plugin that helps you manage multiple contact forms. You can manage and customize the forms and the mail content. It supports reCAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and Ajax-powered submitting for smoother experience for your visitors.
In a default configuration, it doesn’t track users, use cookies, or send data to external servers. For this, you need to activate certain features, which include reCAPTCHA, Akismet, and Constant Contact that deal with user privacy and security.
It is a reliable and useful plugin with more than 5 million active installations.
Conclusion
We hope this helped you decide what plugins to install so you can start your new blog site. Just remember, starting a blog takes time and dedication, so be sure to spend some time learning about blogging and how to do it properly.
