If you’re running a blog or a website, you want to increase your traffic. Since WordPress is a popular platform for these sort of things, and offers a variety of plugins to increase its usefulness, here’s a list of five plugins that you really should be using if you’re really that interested in gaining traction and not having your readers wander off elsewhere.
W3 Total Cache
The W3 Total Cache plugin will cause your page to load in almost half the time that it otherwise would, and will keep it up and running if you get a sudden rush of traffic. After all, if your pages are taking too long to load, there’s a good chance that you’ll lose out on readers, shares, and search engine traffic – which is the last thing you want. There are similar plugins out there for WordPress, but this seems to be the most effective one for the job given its functionality.
Tweet Old Post
If you have a lot of posts on your blog, many of them will invariably end up being lost in the archive, and most blogs don’t have anything set up to encourage readers to view their older pages With this plugin, you can change settings to include links, add additional text, and how many posts that it unearths per day. Basically, with minimal investment of your time, you can have your older posts contribute to your Twitter marketing, rather than simply being condemned to obscurity and doing nothing for you.
Delete Duplicated Posts
It’s only to be expected that you will occasionally end up uploading a duplicated post – and the last thing you want is for your blog to look unprofessional, which is exactly what duplicated posts can do. Fortunately, there’s a very useful plugin for deleting duplicated posts – which scans every post you upload, deleting any duplicates that have already been posted, and it even detects similar posts that you’ve already put up on your WordPress blog.
All in One SEO Pack
With over nine million downloads, one of the most popular WordPress plugins is the All in One SEO Pack – which is user-friendly and works with other WP plugins by generating META tags and optimizing post titles for search engines. In other words, it basically takes all of the difficulty out of SEO work, and you don’t have to be a professional at search engine optimization to use it and get good results. If you are trying to get a better response with search engines, this one is for you, unless you really understand how search engines work.
Sharebar
Presumably, you want people to like, share, or Tweet your posts if you want to increase traffic. The Sharebar plugin offers those options beside of your posts, rather than forcing your readers to scroll through the page in order to share it, since it keeps moving as the reader scrolls through your posts. After all, if someone shares your posts, they’re essentially doing you a favor, so you may as well make that as easy as possible fore them.
