Did you know that over 2 billion blog posts are being published each year worldwide? If you do the math, that’s 5,760,000 per day and 4,000 released each minute.
That’s a lot!
In the sea of all these blog posts (and authors), how are you going to shine a spotlight on yourself and the content you create? How are you going to appear in, let’s say, top 40 results on Google?
Well, if you think that quality posts know how to find their way to users’ hearts, you might want to think again. Being a blogger is so much more than being a creative writer and posting #ootd’s and #lifestyle tips on the ‘gram.
Luckily for you, you are not just a blogger, you are a blogger that uses a WordPress theme and with that fact comes a lot of benefits. WordPress has plugins, the extensions, that can help you reach your audience efficiently, build credibility in the audience minds and slowly, but surely climb your way to the top.
Now, if you are thinking I am going to install all the plugins I possibly can on my blog and I’ll reach the first page on Google results in no time, you are severely mistaken. Adding numerous plugins can slow down your WordPress site which can, in the long-term, result in Google’s crawlers marking your blog and ranking it lower.
So, you need to use the plugins, in moderation. You need to decide which activities you want to leave up to these tools and which ones you want to complete by yourself.
To save you some time and help you find the right plugins, we have created a list of the top 10 WordPress plugins for a fashion/lifestyle blog that won’t clog your WordPress theme.
Here they are:
- Editorial Calendar
- Nofollow for External Link
- Yoast SEO
- Jetpack
- Akismet
- All 404 Redirect to Homepage
- Instagram Feed
- WP Super Cache
- Simple Social Icons
- Broken Link Checker
Disclaimer: Themes Kingdom team is not affiliated with any of the mentioned plugins nor do we earn a commission if you end up purchasing any of the tools through referral links in this blog post. We merely wanted to name some services that can help you get more visitors to your blog.
Editorial Calendar
Having a private editorial calendar will help you separate “the work” from all the meetings, events and personal meetups you added to your Google calendar. That is why we would highly suggest you use Editorial Calendar, a plugin in the form of a scheduler that allows you to see when each of your posts is going to be published.
The reason why this plugin can come in handy is the fact that you can quickly change the publishing dates, by dragging and dropping your posts dates. Additionally, you can rapidly edit titles and times and manage posts written by multiple editors (just in case you have more than one editor on your blog).
This plugin that made our Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list is definitely worth checking out.
Nofollow for external link
As you might know, for SEO purposes, it is wise to have external links in your blog posts. But, there’s a catch. If there are too many affiliate links or the sites you are linking to are ranked lower in the SERPs, you may get penalized by Google. That is why it is a good idea to install a plugin that stops Google from “seeing” all those links (yeah, that’s possible!).
Luckily for you, you don’t have to use numerous plugins, just one 一 the Nofollow for external link plugin. This plugin adds HTML tags “rel=nofollow” and “target=_blank” to the links in your posts, pages, and menus.
This tool is one of the best WordPress plugins for a fashion/lifestyle blog that has over 20,000 active installations and works like a charm.
Yoast SEO
Did you really think that the Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list could go without Yoast SEO? Hell no!
Yoast SEO is like a little black dress 一 it’s has been in trend every season, each year. That’s how good it is.
This tool is the original WordPress SEO plugin that saw the light of the day 11 years ago and has been helping WP site owners around the globe ever since. There are so many options Yoast offers 一 from taking care of your XML sitemap, editing snippets that appear in the search results to making suggestions regarding the number of keyword phrases per post. Yoast truly offers a full package.
Jetpack
With over 5 million downloads, Jetpack is, undoubtedly, the king of WP plugins, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it made our Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list.
Jetpack is a freemium plugin provides an insight on how your blog is performing (giving you the insight scoop of on-site analytics), pointing to the critical issues and helping you promote your blog (on social media, for example). Additionally, Jetpack protects your blog by monitoring its uptime, doing daily back-ups and malware scanning.
If you check our WordPress themes, you’ll see that all of them are Jetpack-infused. That’s no coincidence!
Akismet
Akismet is the plugin from our Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list that lowers the chance of having malicious content in your blog posts.
This tool (which has over 5 million active installations!) checks the comments on your blog posts and contact form submissions and compares them to the global database of spam. Once the comments are compared, it filters out the ones that look suspicious.
Some other Akismet features are:
- It allows you to check the comments history to see which ones have been filtered by the plugin.
- You can review all the comments on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
- Akismet speeds up your website by keeping your disk clear and deleting the worst spam comments.
- Akismet moderators can see the number of users’ approved comments.
All 404 Redirect to Homepage
All 404 Redirect to Homepage plugin is, so to speak, Yoast’s assistant when it comes to SEO.
As you might know, a 404 page is a page that doesn’t lead your blog visitors anywhere on your website and instead displays the message that the requested page is not available. You probably remember bumping on a “404 Not Found” once in a while.
The reason why you want to minimize the number of these pages is the fact search engines’ crawlers recognize these pages and assume that the site isn’t maintained which results in a lower ranking. The scary thing can happen if you have too many 404s and Google decides to stop indexing your blog. Not to mention, if users come across a lot of broken links, they won’t go through the trouble of continuing the search for your content.
These are all the reasons why we included All 404 Redirect to Homepage plugin in the Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list.
This plugin is pretty quick and intuitive to use 一 in just a couple of steps you can redirect all 404 error pages to any of the pages you like (most commonly the homepage).
Instagram Feed
An essential channel for promoting your lifestyle or fashion blog is no other than the ‘gram. It’s no secret that, with this social media channel, you can reach your target audience the quickest. That is why it is a good idea to connect your Instagram posts with the blog. That is how you will boost social engagement and increase the number of followers.
So, to connect these two channels, we present you with the Instagram Feed.
This plugin which made our Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list allows you to display photos from your Instagram account in your blog feed. You can quickly customize the image layout, make it mobile-friendly, as well as customize the width, height, number of photos, image size, spacing, and other parameters.
Here are some additional Instagram Feed features:
- You can set multiple Instagram feeds on one page or several different pages, throughout your blog.
- There is a Load More button that immediately loads the rest of your images.
- You can include the Follow on Instagram button, as well.
- You can choose how you want to display your IG photos 一 chronologically or in random order.
WP Super Cache
If you have read our previous post on how to speed up a WordPress site, then you remember that cache is the data a browser saves when a user visits your blog for the first time. The browser saves this information and stores it in the cache, so next time the same user visits, the cached files are displayed, instead of the new ones. This process lowers the page load time of your blog.
But, there’s a catch. Every once in a while, when you make changes on your blog, it is a good idea to clear the files so the returning visitors can see the changes you made.
Now, since you already have a lot of chores to complete, we would advise you to automate this process, as well. If you are thinking about leaving this task to a plugin, turn to the WP Super Cache plugin.
When it comes to this tool, the one thing you have to remember is that it does the caching in three ways: expert, simple and WP-Cache caching. Additionally, it compresses pages, it doesn’t cache pages for known users, and has a Content Network Delivery support.
If you want to read more about this plugin that made our Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list, be sure to check the plugin’s official page on WordPress.org.
Simple Social Icons
Adding an Instagram feed to your website is just one way to increase social engagement. But, you have to admit that if you want to promote your blog effectively and connect with the social media followers, it’s not enough to have social media icons placed in the footer. This time, you want to make your blog posts easily shareable. That is where Simple Social Icons plugin steps in.
Simple Social Icons is one of the best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog that is intuitive to set up and quick to customize 一 you can change the color and the size of the icons in just a few seconds. With over 200,000 active installations, we are sure you won’t have a problem customizing the social links.
Broken Link Checker
Two of the critical recommendations SEO experts always mention are internal and external linking. As Moz.com suggests, internal links are hyperlinks that point at the same domain as the domain that the link exists on. Vice versa, external links are hyperlinks that point at any domain other than the domain the link exists on. Both of these practices have a significant effect on how your blog ranks.
But, sometimes, the sources you linked change the domain which resulted in you linking to a broken URL. The Broken Link Checker plugin is there to help 一 lets you know if any broken links are found in the blog posts, pages, comments, and blogroll.
Here are some features of this plugin:
- It monitors pages and posts, but also it finds the missing links in images.
- Once the broken links are found, you will be notified in the Dashboard or by email.
- If you like, you can mark broken links differently throughout posts.
With over 600,000 active installations, Broken Link Checker easily made our Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list.
Plugins 一 all installed!
We hope that the listed plugins will help you organize your #bloggerlife more effectively and help you get recognized in the blogging community.
So, now that your blog is all set, you can move onto doing social media promotion, promoting blog posts by emailing your subscribers, posting on bookmarking sites, social groups, forums, etc.
You better get busy!
Which plugins do you use? Are there any others, that are not the Best WordPress plugins for a fashion blog list, you would recommend to your fellow bloggers? Share with us your thoughts in the comments, down below.
