6 Best WordPress Plugins to Save Time
Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day. Bloggers know it better than anyone else: they often have to juggle a full- or part-time job, studies, and blogging itself. The latter can easily become a part-time job as well.
Students can at least free up some time by using an essay service now and then. Think of plugins the same way as you treat essay writers. Professional writer from essay writing service is like a freelancer who takes up a part of the workload while you concentrate on other aspects of the website.
In a nutshell, plugins are time- and life-savers. They’re also one of the reasons why so many websites run on WordPress. This content management system can boast more than 50,000 free and paid plugins for almost any task.
Here are six of them that are invaluable for any blogger running short of free time.
Yoast SEO
Price: free; the paid version with extra features is available from €89 per one site.
Why is it a time-saver?
- Automates some SEO improvements;
- Speeds up the site’s loading time;
- Analyzes your content for SEO;
- Suggests how to optimize the content.
Running a website is impossible without knowing search engine optimization (SEO) basics. But it takes hours upon hours of learning to just wrap your head around what SEO means in practice. Besides, the rules change so fast that even tech-savvy WordPress users often can’t keep up with them.
This is where the Yoast SEO plugin comes in. Even if all you know is that SEO stands for search engine optimization, Yoast will help with the rest. The interface itself is intuitive, and the plugin’s suggestions are clear enough to help anyone make their content SEO-friendly.
UpdraftPlus
Price: free; premium version’s price starts at $42 a year.
Why is it a time-saver?
- Backs up your website to the storage of your choice;
- Allows restoring the website from a previously saved backup in a few clicks;
- Runs backups automatically according to the programmed schedule.
Think about all the time and money you’ve invested in your WordPress website. What would it feel like to lose all of that in a blink of an eye?
Unfortunately, there’s always a chance this could happen. Ransomware or other types of malware, issues from updates, problems on the hosting provider’s side – that’s an incomplete list of what could go wrong.
These scenarios are easily avoidable thanks to this plugin. UpdraftPlus offers nine backup transfer options, from uploading the file directly to your Google Drive or Dropbox to sending it via email or FTP.
What’s more, there’s no need to set a reminder to back everything up in your calendar app – UpdraftPlus supports scheduled backups.
ManageWP
Price: free; premium upgrades are available from $1 each (per website).
Why is it a time-saver?
- Brings all of your website dashboards into one place;
- Allows bulk actions for all or some of them;
- Comes with a scheduled backup every month and before installing any updates;
- Integrates several Google Analytics accounts into one workspace.
Do you run several WordPress websites? Then you know how irritating it is to have to log in to each of those dashboards individually.
Fortunately, there’s ManageWP. It allows combining all of those WordPress dashboards into a single workspace. There, you can install updates for all of them or perform any other bulk actions in just a couple of clicks.
Enable Media Replace
Price: free.
Why is it a time-saver?
- Makes replacing images as easy as a couple of clicks;
- Supports automatically updating all associated links.
Replacing media is a nightmarish experience in WordPress despite years of outstanding progress in other features. To update, say, your old photo on the “About Me” page, you’d have to manually delete it and upload the new one under the same filename.
No more of that nonsense. With Enable Media Replace, you can click “Replace the file” in the media library’s edit window. And, if there are any links to that media file elsewhere, they’ll be automatically updated to display the new file.
Uncanny Automator
Price: free; paid version is available from $149 per year.
Why is it a time-saver?
- No coding experience required;
- Allows creating “if-then” scenarios for 100+ triggering actions;
- Automates these algorithms’ execution.
Do you still manually send out welcome emails to users who filled out your newsletter subscription form? It may be fine when there are just a couple of new emails every day.
But think about the prospect of doing that for months with dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers. A waste of time, isn’t it?
Uncanny Automator allows automating this and many other scenarios. You can program it to execute a certain action after a user posts a comment, views a page, logs in, and you name it. What’s more, using it requires no coding whatsoever.
RafflePress
Price: free; the paid version is available from $49.
Why is it a time-saver?
- Has a variety of templates for every step of the giveaways;
- Comes with a drag-and-drop builder for an intuitive designing experience;
- Allows adding bonus rewards for certain actions (like a Facebook share) and verifies them via APIs.
Giveaways are a powerful marketing tool to grow your email list, get exposure, and boost engagement with your website. But if you set out to make a giveaway from scratch, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise: you’ll need to be the designer, developer, and writer, all in one.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Use RafflePress instead – it has pre-made solutions for every part of the user journey. It’s also intuitive in its use. With it, the road from a giveaway idea to its launch is shorter than ever.
In Conclusion: 5 More Plugins Worth Your Attention
That’s not all. These six plugins are just the tip of the iceberg of all the ways you can speed up your WordPress management. If you can imagine something, there’s probably a WordPress plugin for it. Here are five other life-savers that haven’t made the initial cut, but they are worth tinkering with.
- Really Simple SSL. Switching to HTTPS is made easy with this one – all you need is the SSL certificate itself.
- Redirection. Get rid of 404 errors and manage 301 redirects with this old-timer.
- Broken Link Checker. It automatically scoops out all the broken links and missing images on the website.
- Pretty Links. Customize your URLs to make them easier to remember or just more beautiful. You can also track, shrink, and manage links in a few clicks.
- MonsterInsights. Bring your Google Analytics stats right into the WordPress dashboard. No more opening an extra tab for the GA!