When you choose WordPress as your blogging platform, you not only get an easy-to-use and feature-packed content management system but also get a huge catalog of plugins to choose from. There is a mind-blowing amount of plugins available in WordPress directory and they give you the possibility to enhance the functionality of your blog on every aspect you find necessary.
As the time goes by bloggers become more reader-oriented and try to provide the most satisfactory experience for the people visiting their blogs. That means, besides writing a good content, they also strive to equip their blogs with the functionalities that would help to better serve their visitors.
Below you can find 5 great WordPress plugins that will enhance the functionality of your blog and help you to establish a stable readers’ base.
Sliders are great and people love them. They can help you to drive attention to the important parts of your content and also enhance your blog’s functionality and design. That’s why they’re so popular lately and are a must-have feature on almost every type of blog. Among so many available slider plugins I would recommend checking out WordPress Slider WD. It’s a responsive and feature-rich WordPress slider plugin that will be a great addition to your blog. You can create beautiful slides with images, and it allows you to embed media files from YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Flickr, Dailymotion to the slides.
Text, image, video, social sharing button, hotspot, media embed layers are another way to make your slides more attracting and functional. The slider also supports parallax, carousel, and filmstrip options and offers a bunch of transition and layer effects to choose from. You can customize and adjust every setting and parameter of the slider to fit the needs of your blog. Also, there is an option to insert the slider into your posts and pages using the available shortcodes.
Nowadays online calendars go beyond indicating only months and days. They are capable of doing way more things and are sure to enhance the functionality of your blog. For instance, Event Calendar WD can be your best partner in managing online events that you organize for your visitors. It’s the most feature-rich WordPress event calendar to find in the directory. It allows you to display events on your blog in beautiful views and provide detailed information about them. You can categorize the events, add the locations on the map, mention event organizers, insert social sharing buttons, and many other options.
For regularly organized events the plugin offers recurring events feature that will automatically display the events after you specify the repeating rate for it. Event Calendar WD is responsive and will display your event equally good on both desktop and mobile devices. It also uses structured event markup feature, to ensure search engines easily discover event on your blog.
If you want pages on your blog to look different from standard WordPress pages then you should consider checking out Page Builder plugin by SiteOrigin. It allows you to create and edit column-based pages for your blog. You can create responsive pages by adding rows, widgets, or by using the prebuilt page templates without any coding skills. There are various row and widget styles available to choose from, and you can also add custom CSS.
It supports live editing option, which allows you to instantly see the changes you have made. The history browser functionality saves all the changes you’ve made to the page, and you can easily experiment with the looks any time you want. You can also edit all your existing pages and give them a whole new look by preserving their content. The plugin works out of the box with almost all WordPress themes. It also comes with a bundle of most common widgets to use.
The plugin will help you to enhance the look of your blog and make it stand out.
As you start blogging, your blog will most probably get more traffic and readers over time. That also means that your posts will get more engagement and the number of the commenters will increase as well. WordPress Disqus plugin will come to help if you feel the need to make your comments section better. It makes commenting on your blog easier and increases the engagement of your posts. Once the users are logged in, they can leave comments on thousands of websites that also use Disqus.
The comments on your blog will be organized in threads and it will get much easier for the commenters to reply, follow and subscribe to some of them. Users can also vote up or down to the comments and even share them on social networks.
As a blog owner, you can turn on/off the comments approval feature, import/export the comments, flag some of them for review, and many other useful features.
If you’re planning to improve your blog, SumoMe WordPress plugin can help you to get the job done. It comes bundled with useful tools to help you to add opt-ins, contact forms, welcome mats, floating social icons, notification bar to your site. It will enhance the functionality of your blog in many ways and also help you to generate more subscribers. It works great with all WordPress themes and is easy to use and customize.
You can create cool lightbox pop-ups to encourage email subscriptions or easily display call-to-actions with the welcome mat feature. Images on your posts can be shared across different social networks. The floating smart bar on top or bottom of your blog can be used to encourage to newsletter subscription , social account following or visiting specific pages or posts. All the features of SumoMe plugin are highly customizable, to have your opt-ins, forms, and pop-ups look exactly the way you want.
If you’re on the way of making your blog better, that’s a really commendable step. That means you put a lot of efforts and care about your blog visitors and readers. These useful WordPress plugins can really help you to enhance the functionality of your blog and take it to the next level. Your blog visitors will surely appreciate it.
If you’ve tried any of them out, please share your experience with others and me. I’ll be glad to hear from you.
