The Best WordPress Plugins for Food Bloggers
Plugins can be a confusing part of building a wordpress blog. Which wordpress plugins are good, which ones aren’t? What plugin is that blogger using for {insert anything here}. The point is, it’s all a jumbled mess when you’re first starting out and even after you’ve been doing it for any length of time it can still be just as challenging.
Not all wordpress plugins play well together either. Sometimes you won’t know until you’ve installed them. This is by no means a complete list, however it should get you started with some of the best. Please pay close attention to any notes I have made about a few of them (a few you can only use one or the other)
Here are my favorite (and the best) plugins for food bloggers. (just for the record, most of them will work for any blog whether you’re part of the food bloggers or you’re in a completely different niche)
Also, I try to keep using plugins to a minimum for the sheer fact that a lot of plugins slow down the loading of your website. This ticks Google off and can cause your site to be penalized and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want that.
- – I don’t actually use this plugin but I used to. My template comes with a plugin that does what this one does which is in a very simple way make your site as SEO friendly as possible. You definitely need this. Don’t use this plugin if you already use WordPress SEO by Yoast (you only need one)
- – Every blog in the world needs this little plugin that helps to get rid of spam. It is a must.
- – Checks your links out of your blog to make sure you don’t have any broken links. This is helpful because Google wants to see links that work, not a bunch that don’t go anywhere. This is more important for SEO than you realize.
- – This is a wonderful little plugin that goes with your comments that allows your commenter to link back to their most recent post. It’s just a really nice, non-obtrusive way to give back.
- – Built by a Food blogger’s husband, this really is the best recipe plugin for SEO purposes and formatting purposes. It has far more capabilities than most recipe plugins just in it’s free version. There is also a paid version and it’s totally worth the upgrade for the customization options alone. It is one of the only plugins on the market that plays nicely with Ziplists Save recipe feature, allowing you to switch seamlessly from Ziplist to Easy Recipe with no trouble. It is also the ONLY recipe plugin that provides a feature to convert older recipes that were already created with another recipe plugin. It’s awesome.
- – I get the stats right on my dashboard so I don’t have to always sign into GA. It’s wonderful.
- – This builds a complete sitemap of your entire site. It’s wonderful for Search Engine robots to crawl. Not just Google.
- – I actually prefer this over GA, I love the fact that it’s all in one place and there are all kinds of other little add on’s that are part of this plugin. It’s got a lot.
- nrelate – Related Content is a blog widget that appears under each post, linking to related posts from your blog archive. This one is much better than the one that many bloggers use called LinkWithin.
- – Probably self explanatory – adds a pin it button to the top or bottom of all of your posts.
- and WP Easy Copyright are two plug-ins designed to help protect your recipes and posts. You need both. One will protect your feed and helps to keep it from being scraped – when it does get scraped it will send a message back to your dashboard and you’ll be notified so you can do whatever you need. WP Easy Copyright protects your site from being copied.
- – is a plugin designed to tweet your older posts to get more traffic.
- – This plugin is written from the ground up by and Joost de Valk to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere. Do not use WordPress SEO if you already use All in One SEO pack. You only need to choose ONE of them, otherwise they will conflict with each other.
- – Ziplist is a great recipe plugin for beginners or those that need simple & basic. With Ziplist, you can also create a partnered recipe box and shopping list for your readers to enjoy. It allows for customization, but you do need to have some coding knowledge to be able to do that. Otherwise it pretty much looks the same as anyone else using it.
So do you use any wordpress plugins I don’t have listed here? Tell me what they are below in the comments.
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