14 Must Have WordPress Plugins Every Content Creator Needs

Long story short: you need a strategy when choosing the right WordPress plugins as a content creator. The right tools will make or break your website. When you create content as a business, you not only need to create high quality content, but you also need a website that support your business by delivering the content in high speed, and SEO optimized for major search engines such as Google.

Every plugin introduced in this blog post is considered essential and necessary for our business.

Best Practices for Plugin Management

• Don’t install any more plugins for your WordPress site than it’s necessary
• Don’t keep a plugin if you don’t know how to use it
• Don’t keep a plugin if it’s been deactivated and not in-use (aka keep your plugins clean and clear will make your life as a creator a lot easier)
• Do keep your plugins updated – you can do this by enabling this feature

What Are the Best WordPress Plugins You Must Have?

1. Kadence (Theme)

Kadence Theme is a lightweight yet full featured WordPress theme for creating beautiful fast loading and accessible websites, easier than ever. It features an easy to use drag and drop header and footer builder to build any type of header in minutes. With Kadence, our website’s desktop and mobile performance are stellar compared to the old SquareSpace site.

2. Siteground (Hosting)

SiteGround web hosting is trusted by more than 2,800,000 domains for its top speed, unmatched security, 24/7 fast, and expert support. We started using SiteGround in 2014 and the services they provide remains top notch. It’s no joke when they say “24/7 fast and expert service”. We have rarely needed to submit support tickets. But when we do, the turnaround has been as soon as under 1 minute and our issues are always resolved in live chat with a detailed email follow-up.

3. ThirstyAffiliates

ThirstyAffiliates is one of the most widely used WordPress plugins for link cloaking. It helps add, manage, and track affiliate links from your admin dashboard. With its various features, you can create a branded affiliate link for your products. Most affiliate links are long and ugly. ThirstyAffiliates helps you create clean and simple links such as feisworld.com/go/thirstyaffiliates – so that your links appear more professional and trustworthy. This will help you generate more affiliate income from your visitors.

4. Fluent Forms Pro

Fluent Forms is the ultimate user-friendly, customizable drag-and-drop WordPress Contact Form Plugin that offers you all the premium features, plus many more completely unique additional features. Fluent Forms are flexible, look good and work well with most email marketing platforms.

5. RankMath

RankMath is a Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress that makes it easy for anyone to optimize their content with built-in suggestions based on widely-accepted best practices. Rank Math is seamlessly integrated with your WordPress theme on the sidebar, you don’t have to leave the site during editing and publishing, which is a huge plus for creators to save time. It’s easy to learn and to use on a regular basis. Also check out How To Increase Rank Math Score To 80+ WITHOUT Content AI Credits

6. LinkWhisper

Link Whisper suggests link based on the content of your site. In other words, it finds relevant connections that are related. These in-content, relevant links are the most powerful type of internal link there is. One of our biggest struggles at Feisworld is building connections between posts. After creating content for nearly a decade, it’s difficult (and sometimes impossible) to recall what was written previously. LinkWhisper is a brilliant tool to solve an important issue for us.

Furthermore, you are in complete control to either accept or reject the link suggestion.

7. Revive Old Posts

Revive Old Posts can work as a WP Auto Republish plugin that updates your post’s publish date after it has been shared to your connected social media accounts.

First we were skeptical if this plugin is going to make a difference for us in traffic. After just 3 days of using this plugin, take a look at the impact we are seeing:

8. Wp Rocket

WP Rocket is a caching and performance optimization plugin to improve the loading speed of WordPress websites. You can install and configure WP Rocket in less than 3 minutes. As seen at the top of this page, our desktop and mobile receive 93, 100 in performance. Together with a clean and lightweight WordPress theme, we are pleased with the results WP Rocket bring to the table.

WP Rocket has many advanced features that work for you in the background, such as basic cache options, CSS and JavaScript optimization, LazyLoad, preload fonts, image optimization and more.

9. Shortpixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel Image Optimizer is a freemium, easy to use, comprehensive, stable, and frequently updated image compression plugin. The type of content we create at Feisworld regularly uses a ton of images – podcast guest images, screenshots, etc., it’s essential to optimize images so our site health remains at its peak.

10. Popupsmart

Popupsmart has an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface since it is a no-code popup builder. Under the “hood”, you are able to manage layouts, customization, target and publish all within the Popupsmart dashboard. If you aren’t sure whether it’s the right popup builder and email capturer for you, simply sign up for their free account which provides up to 5,000 monthly views.

As of November 2022, feisworld.com is using Popupsmart 1.5 (instead of 2.0) for it to be compatible with our current version of WordPress. Version 1.5 redirects you to dashboard.popupsmart.com

11. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet is a free anti-spam plugin, included by default on any new WordPress installation. It automatically checks all comments and messages from contact forms, then filters out those that look like spam. With over 5 million active installations, it is the most popular anti-spam plugin in the official directory.

12. Mammoth .Docx Converter

Mammoth is designed to convert .docx documents, such as those created by Microsoft Word, Google Docs and LibreOffice, and convert them to HTML. Mammoth aims to produce simple and clean HTML by using semantic information in the document, and ignoring other details. For instance, Mammoth converts any paragraph with the style Heading1 to h1 elements, rather than attempting to exactly copy the styling (font, text size, colour, etc.) of the heading. This allows you to paste from Word documents without the usual mess.

13. Woocommerce

WooCommerce lets you turn a WordPress website into an ecommerce store. WooCommerce is fully compatible with the functions on your WordPress site. It means you can have a WordPress ecommerce site with products, a shopping cart, and checkout options.

We find WooCommerce does have a slight learning curve, including the time to set up a product can take some time at first. But once you get used to the user interface, the process does get easier. WooCommerce also has a product CSV importer and exporter if you have a large number of products, categories, etc.

14. Podcast Importer Secondline Pro

Podcast Importer SecondLine is the easiest way to properly import your podcast to WordPress is here. With the Podcast Importer Pro plugin, you’ll be able to import all your podcasts to WordPress automatically.

Feisworld.com chooses to use the Pro version because it offers the following features in addition to what’s available in the free version:

• Add unlimited scheduled podcasts imports (Shows).
• Sync episodes once every hour or in a simple click.
• Import podcast episodes to any Custom Post Type.
• Set a predefined import interval for when episodes are imported.
• Assign a Custom Taxonomy to any imported podcast episode.
• Force a complete re-sync for your previously imported episodes.
• Import the audio player into a custom field.
• Set a global/default featured image to all episodes.
• Import categories from the feed into a Custom Taxonomy.
• Import tags from the feed into the default Post Tags taxonomy.

Conclusion

What are your favorite plugins? Did we miss anything that’ll be a great addition to this list? Please reply in the comment to let us know.

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