Five must have wordpress plugins for food bloggers - plugins can save you time, improve your user's experience and speed up your site.
Five must have wordpress plugins for food bloggers
I have two little kids and so the only time I get to work on my blog is when they're at daycare (3 days a week) or asleep. Soo... you betcha in those moments I want to be making the most of every second not wasting time doing things I don't need to do (like deleting spam or formatting recipes).
That's why I use plugins. Well that and they are great at making things look pretty.
Too many plugins can slow down your site though so you want to make sure that plugins add value to you - save you time or do something that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise - and add value to your reader - make things more readable, easier to access, easier to leave a comment, speedier page load etc.
I've made a little collection of some of my favourites - five must have WordPress plugins for food bloggers (because until earlier this year, I was 100% a food blogger).
Akismet Anti-Spam
Spam is a nasty thing whether it’s in the canned meat form or as comments on your blog. No one wants either in their life.
Personally, I’m not a fan of any spam-blocker that makes readers enter extra details, use their brain to solve some problem or try and decipher some ridiculously blurry, illegible word.
That’s why I love Akismet. It works it’s anti-spam magic behind-the-scenes.
How do I know it works? I thought I ‘didn’t need it’ a few months back and deleted it from my site. The next morning I had more than 100 spam comments. Yes I reinstalled it later that day.
Easy Recipes Plus
I like pretty things. I like things to look neat and tidy and I like things to be consistent, including the look of my recipes.
So I use Easy Recipes Plus. It’s ridiculously easy to use and once you set up the template (once and then it will be set for any future recipes) all you have to do it pop in the details of the recipe.
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It creates a printable version of it too for those people who still like to print out their recipes.
Plus, if down the track you decide you don’t like the look of it, you can change it and it will update all your existing recipes too.
Pretty Links
Again with the pretty I know but this one is my current fav for making nice, neat little URLs. Say you have something like www.yourwebsite.com/shop/awesomeproduct instead of having to direct people to that huge link in for example a Facebook Live or even just a social media post, you can create a ‘pretty link’ of www.yourwebsite.com/awesome to automatically link through to the longer URL.
Cool huh? What’s even cooler is it doesn’t have to be a link on your own site. So for my podcast the link looks like this https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/from-the-heart-of-the-home/id1298429833 but I have a pretty link set up as www.clairekcreations.com/fth - much easier to remember and looks much better right?
WordPress Editorial Calendar
You might be sensing a theme here but I’m a very visual person and that’s the top reason why I love the WordPress Editorial Calendar. Instead of viewing all your blog posts in a list on a page, this plugin lets you arrange the posts on a calendar so at a glance you can see what’s posted when.
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You can also drag and drop things around to plan out your content. It’s especially useful if you bulk schedule posts.
YOAST SEO
SEO. Ahh SEO you lovely beast you. I don’t know about you but for nearly 6 years I totally ignored SEO. I put it in the ‘too hard’ basket but the Yoast plugin makes it, dare I say, simple for anyone to throw some good SEO into blog posts.
You want traffic to your website, you need SEO and if you don’t want to spend hours learning about SEO, Yoast will be your best friend.
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