Essential WordPress Plugins Your Site Shouldn’t Be Without

I only use plugins if I absolutely have to – these are my essential plugins that your site shouldn’t be without.

These WordPress Plugins I Use and Recommend

There are just 4 plugins I use on my sites. In all cases they do much more than a few lines of code could do in your child theme folder. They truly enhance what I’m able to do with WordPress.

That could be creating affiliate links with ease, podcasting or SEO. Here they are:

EasyAzon

This is the best Amazon affiliate plugin I have found for WordPress. I’ve been using it for years and have found the updates to be frequent and helpful.

The best thing about EasyAzon is that you can insert Amazon products directly into your posts. The plugin handles directing your reader to the correct Amazon site for their country. It’ll even add your Amazon Associates affiliate link so you earn a commission on Amazon sales no matter where your reader is located.

Pretty Link Pro

When I need to redirect a link of create a clean affiliate link Pretty Link Pro is my go to plugin. Yes I could insert all my redirects into .htaccess and let Apache take care of anything but I’d miss out.

Pretty Link Pro will give you click stats and reports so you can find your most popular links. You can redirect with 301, 302, 307 codes and more depending on the message you want to send to search engines. Finally, everything is displayed in a beautiful graphical interface… much better than an .htaccess file!

PowerPress

If you’re a podcaster you need PowerPress. While hosted WordPress includes native podcasting support this is not so with self-hosted WordPress.

If you want to publish podcast episodes and create an RSS feed for iTunes, Sticher and Spreaker you’ll need a plugin like this one.

PowerPress is the plugin of choice in the podcasting community and is backed by the rock solid support of one of the largest podcast hosting companies in the world – Blubbry.

Yoast SEO

Another plugin that I’ve used for many years. The releases are so frequent it still gives me a reason to click update in WordPress regularly.

Not only will Yoast SEO do everything you need – behind the scenes – to make your site search engine friendly. This excellent plugin offers writing and optimisation suggestions on the fly and as you type a post inside WordPress.

It’ll help you make your posts readable and ensure you’re doing all the right things to rank for your chosen target keyword.

Did I Miss an Essential WordPress Plugin?

Are you using a plugin that you couldn’t live without on your WordPress site? Leave a comment and let me know about it!