In Episode 21, the Niche Blogging Tips Podcast, we are going to discuss the top 10 plugins for WordPress. Stay tuned.

Welcome to the Niche Blogging Tips Podcast where we help you start and grow a successful blog. And now your host Andre Vaughn.

The thought of having a blog is so important, especially when you're new. But just like a lot of new bloggers, you get stuck in a lot of different places because you're getting all this information from all these different places, all these different bloggers or whatnot. But what we did was we put together a free mini course we call it the Five Day Blogging Mini Retreat is what we call it, and you can get that at niche blogging. tips.com anywhere on the website, NicheBloggingTips.com. Sign up for Five Day Blogging Mini Retreat, it's a free mini course a Free Five Day Blogging Mini Retreat, check it out at NicheBloggingTips.com.

Alright, these are my top 10 plugins for WordPress. If you're starting a blog, I'm gonna get right into it. The first one I have is back link. checker backlink checker screwed up already Broken Link Checker, okay, we're on the right track now Broken Link Checker. And that's a plug in where it monitors and test all of your internal links and External links on your site what it's looking for broken links on your site. And it helps you fix bad links to improve the SEO and user experience.

Some of the features that it has, it monitors External links like I said, an internal links and your posts and pages, detects links that don't work missing images and redirects and notifies you either via the dashboard or by email makes broken links display differently and posts prevent search engines from following broken links. You can search and filter links by URL anchor texts and so on links can be edited directly from the plugins page without manually updating each posts. It can save you a lot of headache and heartache. So broken Link Checker is the first one.

The second one is Exclude Pages from menu that's the name of it Exclude Pages from menu. And what this does is it provides an easy option to remove any page from navigation menu from the navigation menu. So let's say if you are using, let's say if you are making a page about an affiliate link, and you want it to you know use the redirect or what have you.

When you make that page you can you want to click the button that says exclude this page, you don't want that page to show up in your pages on your menu. Exclude Pages from menu also it says the plug in provides option in the page edit screen which I just described, which you can use to remove the page. So that's basically it. It's not a it's not a it's not a real hard, real hard plugin, it's easy to manage to install and manage it really is Exclude Pages from menu.

The third one is Fixed Widget. You basically use it as basically a sticky widget says to create use it to create sticky widgets, sticky blocks and other elements that stay in the visible screen area when a user scrolls the page up or down. sticky wages are now are more visible than unfixed widgets, and therefore have a significantly higher click through rate. It says that's why this option is worthwhile for ads or other elements that visitors should interact with. Anytime if actually, if you're looking you can really see it if you're on a desktop.

So if you're on a desktop and you're scrolling and you're on a, say you're on a blog that has using the sidebar, you can use the sticky widget if you want like on niche blog and tips website, we have a sticky widget on our opt in page for our five day mini course that widget will it it won't like when you're reading down the blog. It won't move. It'll move all the way from like the search and I forget what else we have on there. But it'll move all the way down you'll see it it'll still be visible. Without that sticky widget you won't be able to see that particular widget of our five day mini course basically the third one we have on actually that was the third one Fixed Widget.

The fourth one is called Page Links to and this plug in allows you to make a WordPress page your posts are some type of custom post link to a URL of your choosing instead of its WordPress URL. So it will also redirect people who go to the old our normal URL to the new one you've chosen. Setup navigation navigational links to non WordPress sections of your site or to off site resources. Also, you can publish content on other blogs, but have them show up in your WordPress posts string, all you have to do to supply is a title is just apply a title and a URL. The post title will link to the content on the site, you can create a pretty URL for something complicated, so it's pretty easy to use. That is called Page Links.

To this fifth one is Advanced Editor Tools. This was previously called Tiny MCE Advanced, so Tiny MCE Advanced, it introduces a classic paragraph block for the block editor, which is called Gutenberg. If you're not quite ready to switch to the block editor or have plugins that cannot be used, they're using the classic paragraph block is your best option. It lets you to continue to use the familiar Tiny MCE editor for most tasks, and at the same time gives you full access to all blocks and new features in the block editor.

So I really love this plugin six is optimize actually the Optimized Press, which is a theme that we use. It has two plugins, optimize builder, and then optimize press dashboard. So those are two, I'm just kind of calling this one plug in. But those are to optimize builder, which is the Optimize Builder says Build lightning fast build lightning fast conversion optimized web pages.

So it's just a plug in to build your web pages within the Optimized Press platform. And so Dragon has obviously a drag and drop feature for Optimized Press. And with the dashboard, you can manage your Optimized Press products integrations templates and general settings for the Optimized Press dashboard plugin, I really really, really, really love this all works well for me, I use it on a couple of my blocks. That was number six Optimized Press. Even though there's two plugins, remember I said there's two plugins so but we'll just call it one.

Number seven is easy Table of Contents, it adds a user friendly and fully automatic way to create and display a table of contents generated from the page content is used a free user friendly and is basically just a plug in that allows you to insert a table of contents until your posts pages are you know, if you have any custom post types, it says the features are automatically generate a table of contents, blah, blah, blah, just named that and has a couple of little tags that IT support. That's not really not important, but easy table concepts. And they do have a pro version of this is well in the pro version. I don't have the Pro version right now I'll probably upgrade to it eventually. I've seen it on on different blogs. And it works. It actually works much better than the free version. So that was number seven easy table of contents.

The next one is Autoptimize. It's really spelt auto like automobile, auto, and then the P T I M ice but I'll still call it auto optimize. And that just makes your site faster by optimizing CSS J S images, you know Google Font and all that good stuff. It just really makes optimizing your site very easy. It can aggregate aggregate minify and cut scripts in styles and Jake CSS and the page here by default, but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS and I know all that mumbo jumbo that I just said went over some people here but if you understand web design, you understand what I'm talking about. It also says you can optimize and lazy load images as well. I really liked this plug in also that's Autoptimize.

The number nine of the Top 10 Plugins for WordPress that I have here on my list. It's good ol Yoast SEO SEO, you can't go wrong with Yoast SEO. The first true All In One SEO solution for WordPress, including on page content analysis. There are some other things you can use like sitemaps. I don't do that I just go straight to Google console and upload my my Sitemaps it says Yoast SEO is the number one WordPress SEO plugin.

I really believe that I've used this plug in for a long, long time and it says since 2008 It's helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines Yoast mission is SEO for everyone to plug in uses range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet. SEO Yoast SEO free contains everything that you need to manage your SEO, and SEO and the Yoast SEO premium plugin and its extensions unlock even more tools and functionality.

Now when you're when you're in your WordPress dashboard, you can see it or you scroll all the way down where it will give you a visual of how it will look in the search engines how what if somebody is looking up you know the type of content that you've just written or that you're about to write, you know, you want to fill that stuff in and it actually tells you everything that you need to know it gives you check marks a failing grade, all of that stuff well not a failing grade but you know it'll kind of light up green means all good and anything less than that means you still got improvement to do on your content Nick kind of guide you through the entire process of search engine optimization. So that's number nine Yoast S E O.

And this last one is called WP discuss and it's the number one WordPress comment plugin innovative modern and for rich comment system to supercharge your website comment section I did this because I didn't like to use this plug in because I really don't like the plug in that comes on the web not the plug in actual comment deal on the WordPress on on the regular WordPress when you're when you're blogging or whatnot and and it's real easy to spam. And that's why I use this plugin because it's it makes it harder to spam comments.

It says um what does it say here super fast and responsive with dozens of features. This is the best alternative to discuss and Jetpack comments. And you know, those are the alternatives. Alternatives rather discuss in jetpack comment. I really like it I really really really really like using this WP disk is for my comments. Those are the 10 blogging plugins for WordPress. And that's just my list.

Do you have a list? What are your best 10 plugins for the WordPress platform I really love to hear and you can leave that and the private Facebook group at nichebloggingtips.com/group. Also, you can leave it in I guess the review section of Apple podcast if you guys haven't left a review, you can talk about it there also I'll respond. Make sure that you leave a review if you haven't all ready. I hope you got some type of value out of this episode. And hey, as always, thank you so much. We'll see in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the Niche Blogging Tips Podcast at www.nichebloggingtips.com.

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