One of the main reasons why so many people use WordPress, aside from it being beginner-friendly, is the plethora of available plugins. Apart from allowing you to customize your website to the fullest by adding new features and functions, it also helps you save quite a bit of time. We are, of course, talking about tasks that you could do manually but with the right plugin don’t have to.
Apart from having these simple tasks done more efficiently, you also save a fair chunk of time that could be better used doing something else.
And without further ado, here are several WordPress tools that can help you cut your work time in half.
Anti-spam tools
The first thing that any member of the online community knows is just how dangerous the threat of spam is. Not only can a few spiteful spammers make your website look a lot less reliable than it is, but it can also help them use your platform for their own agendas. Now, recognizing and filtering these comments on your own would be a demanding work, which is why it might be a much better idea to look for a tool such as Akismet to help you out with this.
Apart from solving these temporary problems, Akismet has a database, where it storages all these commenters and comments to recognize them later. This is something that a human might have missed out on.
Analytics
In the introduction, we mentioned tasks that could be done manually but analyzing the performance of your website without an adequate tool is possible only in theory. Not only would it require you to go through volumes and volumes of data (which would take forever) but your results still wouldn’t be near to those you hoped for. Luckily, with Google Analytics+ you can easily check things like conversion and bounce rates, average visit durations and much more.
Digital marketing
As for the issue of digital marketing, you need to have something that deals with analytics and manages your content, preferably at the same time. Furthermore, according to renowned digital marketing experts from GWM, you also need to put detailed reporting and transparency at the forefront, which is yet another thing to look for in this tool. Fortunately, tools like Jetpack, Just Writing can deal with most of these mundane tasks, leaving you to focus on your core-tasks (blogging or running an e-commerce business.)
Image optimization
The next major challenge that website owners face is having to keep their website compatible across different devices. A significant part of this lies in optimizing your images properly, which is all but a simple task to do manually. You would first need to reduce the size of the image and try to maintain its quality at the same time. Then, you have to check the format and change it to .jpeg, .gif or .png. Instead of wasting your precious time on this, you could just get an image optimization software like compressor.io, JPEG Optimizer or Resize Photos. In this way, you get your images optimized in a couple of seconds, without having to do any lifting on your own.
Duplicate content finder
If there is one thing that could get your website into trouble, it is duplicate content. Luckily, with a tool such as Copyscape, all you need to do is move the file or URL of the article you want to check, and press go. In this way, you will get to see in an instant if there are other websites online displaying this same article. Sure, there are many other duplicate content finders you could go with. However, it is unlikely that they will meet this same level of expediency and efficiency.
Social media marketing automation
One major problem with running a business (running an online business being no different), lies in the fact that you get entirely exhausted by menial tasks that could have been done by anyone. For instance, some social media occurrences are so simple and so predictable that they could easily be automated, leaving you with more than enough free time to focus on your core tasks.
This goes far beyond cutting your work time in half since it also raises the overall quality of your work by allowing you to dedicate yourself to a single adversary at the time. The best tools for this job is probably a platform such as IFTTT (if this then that). Apart from automating your social media marketing, this incredible digital tool can also revolutionize your workspace. Of course, this can be done through this tool’s coordination with the notion of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Plugin update checker
Finally, one of the deadliest traps that inexperienced website owners fall into is believing that their job is done once they’ve made their selection of WordPress plugins. Keep in mind, that most of these plugins have different developer teams behind them, which means that their updates come unevenly and are uncoordinated. This ranges from an update that happens on a daily and weekly basis to the one that is released every couple of months.
Now, manually checking if an update is available is an exhausting and counter-productive task. Unfortunately, an alternative can be even more devastating, seeing as how some of your website’s most essential tools might get outdated without you even noticing. The best way to deal with this is to get a plugin update checker like GitHub and have this process automated for you, as well.
In conclusion
While some plugins only offer you slight help, others can make the difference between making your blogging a piece of cake and turning it into a full-time job. Furthermore, dealing with technical issues surrounding your website hosting is far from all you will have to deal with. Therefore, these plugins only take off some of your burdens and let you do your job.
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