5 Essential Elements to Include in Your WordPress Blog

5 Essential Elements to Include in Your WordPress Blog

With the millions of blogs crowding the Web, it is more important than ever to stand out in a bold way. A little known fact about WordPress is that almost a quarter of the internet is powered by this platform. WordPress is the ground zero for websites, apps, portals and of course, blogs!

What makes this platform so popular is its superior simplicity. WordPress is easy to use while still making an impact. It comes with a wide array of plugins that allow you to create whatever you want, however you want. Just to support my statement, we used wordpress for the blog of our price comparison startup even though it was a completely custom built CMS.

Here are four of the most essential elements you need to include in your WordPress blog:

1. SEO

If you don’t know, now you SEO! Search Engine Optimization is the premier way to attract audiences to your blog. You can create keywords within your post so that Google will crawl it for popular words that appear on searches. The most recommended SEO tool on WordPress SEO Yoast. This plugin is exceptional because it can be used by anyone! You can check to see how optimized your blog post is and adjust the keywords in your content accordingly.

2. Jetpack

From the folks behind WordPress comes Jetpack, a powerful plugin with dozens of optional modules to add features and functionality to your blog. Previously, these functions were only available to WordPress.com users. Jetpack allows you to add forms, share to social media, increase security and manage email subscriptions. Enable just the modules that you need to save on resources, or use them all for the maximum experience. Jetpack can replace a dozen other plugins on your WordPress-powered site! If you choose to upgrade to Jetpack, you can also make backups of your site and scan for vulnerabilities in real-time, among other features, but the basic version is definitely recommended for any WordPress site owner.

3. W3 Total Cache

Website performance is more important than ever, especially with mobile browsers. The more plugins you add, the more bogged down your site becomes. The W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress ensures your blog loads as quickly as possible so your visitors can read posts, buy products and engage with your community rather than heading to your competitor. There are plenty of options to customize the plugin to meet your needs and find balance between performance and power. Because W3 Total Cache is so popular, you’ll find no lack of tutorials to use it. See your page rank increase on Google thanks to this WordPress plugin. Another plus? Reducing load on your server might save you some money, so give W3 Total Cache a try!

4. Disqus

Although WordPress comes with comments enabled right out of the box, you might prefer the advanced options available from Disqus, which you’ve probably used as a visitor on other sites in the past. Disqus replaces the default comments of WordPress, easily allowing for threaded comments, comment voting, comment moderation, comment formatting and displaying avatars. Plus, it integrates with your readers’ social media accounts, so they don’t need to sign up for a new account with Disqus. Whenever they log in to Disqus on any site, they’ll see updates to any comments made via Disqus. You can achieve most of these goals with WordPress, a little PHP know-how and a few plugins, but Disqus does it all for you.

5. Publish to Schedule

Never be late again with the automatic Publish to Schedule plugin. Because it’s automated, this particular plugin is highly recommended for your blog. for example, what if you’re on vacation and won’t have internet access? This plugin allows you to set up the days and times you want to post your content, automatically! So you can sail into the sunset without worrying about losing fans. Publish to Schedule is the easiest way for you to schedule your blog posts, and a must for WordPress blog users!