We exclusively make business websites and blogs for WordPress. So over the years we have tested hundreds if not thousands (there are over 20,000 plugins) of WordPress plugins.
Social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are here to stay. So it’s a no-brainer to make your website content super easy to share across these platforms. These plugins are especially useful if you are a blogger and want to share more of your content on social media.
By installing and using the plugins below it will make your content more engaging and very simple for users to share your content across many popular social media platforms.
So without further ado, we have compiled a list of the best WordPress plugins that you need to download on your self-hosted WordPress website right now. And these plugins are completely free to use!
Top 5 WordPress Plugins for More Discoverable and Shareable Content
Simple Share Buttons Adder
This plugin makes it super easy to add custom social media sharing icons to each of your pages and blog posts. Once you have installed this plugin you can customize the social media plugins to match your website color scheme or use some of their pre-made social media icon sets.
Once the Simple Share Buttons Adder plugin is installed and activated, go to Settings –> Share Buttons on your WordPress administration panel. Then go to “Styling” and under Image Set select Custom. Save the changes and then visit this website to make custom social media icons. Once you make your custom icons, download them to your WordPress Media library and add the File URL of each social media icon to the designated area. Save the changes and you now have custom social media sharing icons on every single one of your blog posts! (Make sure to select the proper settings so the icons appear on each of your posts.)
Disqus Comment System
Let’s be real. The default WordPress commenting system is pretty ugly. This commenting plugin makes it so easy to replace the default WordPress comments area with a beautiful new interface. Just install it, create an account, update the settings and you are good to go!
All In One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack is currently the second most popular WordPress plugin with an astounding 17 million downloads. This plugin is very important to have installed on your WordPress website because it will help you manage your websites’ search engine optimization (SEO).
Once installed, the plugin automatically adds fields at the end of each post so that you can better optimize each individual page and post. By putting some work into the SEO of your website, you will significantly increase your blog traffic.
This plugin also has a bunch of other cool features including a dynamic sitemap. Having a sitemap is important because it will allow Google to more easily find and index all the pages of your website. The plugin also allows you to manage social media sharing by allowing you to select the default sharing image your website selects when sharing a post or page on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and other social media channels.
Click To Tweet
Want an easy way for your website visitors to share your content on Twitter? This plugin allows you to easily create tweetables within the body of your blog posts and pages so that whenever someone clicks on the link it will automatically be added to a users Twitter status box. This will let your website visitors more easily tweet about your business or blog.
Frizzly
This plugin makes it easy for your readers to share images on Facebook, tweet posts that are associated with an image and pin images to Pinterest. By installing this plugin, a Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest button will appear over images when a user hovers over it. BONUS: The image a user shares from your blog will have a direct link back to your blog post which also helps your sites SEO (higher Google rankings yay!).
NOTEWORTHY MENTIONS:
TinyMCE Advanced
Ever wish the visual editor in WordPress offered more options? Tiny MCE Advanced will add more features to the WordPress toolbar such as tables, emoticons and custom font families to name a few. This will allow you to more easily add some variation to your blog post copy without needing to know any HTML. This plugin basically will help your content look prettier so if you are looking to jazz up your copy then this is the plugin for you.
There you have it! These are the top free WordPress plugins that we recommend and use on many of the business websites and blogs that we have built over the years. Social media is here to stay so if you would like to get more traffic to your website then make sure your content is easily shareable with your users!
