From blogger to blogger #1 | my favorite WordPress plugins

Moving my blog to WordPress was one of the best decisions I made and I should’ve done that earlier. Find the reasons I moved here. When I began to blog WP wasn’t really popular and everybody had their blogs on Blogger, which was a kind of platform. Everybody had its profiles and you could follow the latest posts in your feed. The blogger-surface is super simple and I highly recommend starting to blog there (you never know how long you’ll blog and how much you’ll like it).

Moving to WordPress

After 5 years on blogger it was about time to get more professional and moved to WordPress. I don’t really like the design of the WP-Surface but that’s secondary. Like always it’s just a question of time and getting used to it. You’ll see how quickly you’ll get adapted to it. When it comes to the design and representation of my blogs I’m super fussy. I work a lot in the backend of my posts (i.e. pre-formatted layouts and add codes manually). My layout on Blogger was already made by my dear friend from Hatake, which is why I asked him again for moving to WP – installing the domain, layout, moving all my posts and adjust them to the new layout.

Learning by doing

I’m definitely a LBD-person and I’d love to do all by myself. The good thing about WordPress is, that there is a plugin for everything I want. I could spend hours searching for new tools. One great site is What WordPress Theme is That or WordPress Theme Detector, where you can check themes and plugins your favorite blogs ecc. In fact, I found some great plugins through the sites. In the end you can simply search and install new plugins under ‘Add new’.

Enough talk! Here are my favorite WordPress Plugins:

1. My favorite WordPress Plugins WordPress Editorial Calendar

   A plugin that I can’t live without any longer. The post editor is quite handy but you can’t see your planned/published posts in a calendar version. With the WordPress Editorial Calendar it is so much easier to organize your posts.

2. My favorite WordPress Plugins qTranslate-X

   I’ve always been writing my blog in more languages and most of the blogger I know write in both languages in the same post. Apparently, because of SEO reasons it is not so good to include both languages. Google doesn’t recognize which language is written, which affects your ranking. This was secondary to me since I haven’t noticed any advantage or drawbacks. However, I find it ways more organized when one post is written in one language only. QTranslate-X-Plugin ist for free and easy to handle. Who is searching for more should check out WPML-Plugin.

3. My favorite WordPress Plugins ReplyMe

   I write a lot of comments on other blogs. Who doesn’t jump for joy when getting feedback? Sometimes I also ask for something and it’s super annoying when you don’t get any notification if your question is answered. I know that there is an option but then you subscribe to ALL comments. For me it’s super important that my readers get to read what I answer and up to now I only got good feedback about Replyme. So please install it!

4. My favorite WordPress Plugins Imsanity

   A really handy tool that resizes your pictures automatically. For Retina-Displays WP Retina 2x can be installed too.

5. My favorite WordPress Plugins Jetpack

   Jetpack is the all-rounder of all plugins. There are so many features, whereof my favorites are:

   • Publicize | a handy tool to publish your posts automatically on any social media channel
   • Shortcodes Embeds | an easy tool to include short codes, such as Youtube links and more.
   • Spelling and grammar | yes here comes the spelling! Spelling is definitely a no-go, which happens to me once in a while too! The tool revises your text … if I would only do that all the time!

6. My favorite WordPress Plugins No Follow All External Links

   That endless discussion about No follow links. If you want to learn more there are great articles online. Generally speaking there are a couple of agency that beg bloggers for Do Follow links against payment. Please don’t do that! That is plug and Google can punish you. I did this too in my beginnings of blogging, because I wasn’t enlightened sufficiently. With this plugin you can put all Links automatically to No Follow. If you still want to set a link to dofollow, you can easily add class=”follow” in the HTML-text, e.g. <a href=”beispielslink” class=”follow>link name</a>.

   There is one more add-on that you can delete all no follow links from your comments with the plugin Do Follow. This is good, because if you put all your Links to no follow, Google will suspect that your site is full with ads.

7. My favorite WordPress Plugins Multiple Featured Images

   A tool, that I’ve discovered recently, which is definitely for advances WordPress-user and designer. Usually you can set only one features image, e.g. for facebook, twitter, bloglovin ecc. With this plugin you can add more featured image, which is really handy. For example you can set featured image 1 for your header, featured image 2 for preview pictures in your outfit-category and so on.

8. My favorite WordPress Plugins Cookie Notice

   These days it is obligatory to point out that your site is using cookies. Install it!

9. My favorite WordPress Plugins Antispam Bee

   Spam is super annoying and Antispam Bee is one of the plugins you can use.

10. My favorite WordPress Plugins;Yoast SEO

    And last but not least a little bit of SEO – search engine optimization. Google is important and who doesn’t want to be right on top at every search! With the Yoast SEO tool you can set your seo-title, meta description and type in your focus keyword. When finishing your article there’s a list of what you can improve, e.g. set alt tags or write more text and so on.

    More great SEO plugins are:

    • SEO Redirection Plugin | allows you to unable comments from your post or redirects old posts to a new link (great if you’re changing the style of your permalink)
    • Rankie – WordPress Rank Tracker Plugin | a Plugin that shows you your Google-Rank. Moreover, you can check single keywords.
    • SEO friendly Images | adds Alt and Title-Tags automatically to your pictures.
    • Hide My WP | for the little hackers out there (like me ;) )! With this tool you can hide that you’re using WordPress and nobody sees your theme and plugins, e.g. with the above mentioned WordPress Theme Detector.

I hope you liked this article and please share it if you’ve liked it!

have a great day!