Technology

Top 5 WordPress Plugins To Increase Engagement With Your Readers

You have built a visually appealing WordPress website or blog and even made it enriched with a regular supply of relevant and useful content. Your website looks great across all devices, and your attention to design elements has given great output. But you still fail to achieve enough traction and user engagement. Still, you can’t generate enough social shares for your content. Or maybe, still, website audit shows shortcomings such as lack of internal links or maybe you need a better mechanism to display “related posts”.

For all these additional features, functionalities and value additions, WordPress platform offers plenty of quality plugins and extensions. For WordPress websites, the plugins and extensions play a crucial role in enhancing usability and ensuring better user experience. Without the plugins, the usability of a WordPress website is likely to suffer. This is why utilizing the right plugins is so essential for a website to enhance user engagement.

When looking for the expert WordPress development services for your new blog or website, you need to make sure the developers have sufficient knowledge about the leading WordPress plugins for different features and functions. While there are thousands of plugins to choose from, here we have picked up some of the most useful plugins to help WordPress websites to improve engagement.

Yoast SEO

Can people find your blog when searching for content on Google? Well, unless people can discover your blog for their required content, there is no relevance to publishing content. You publish the content for the express purpose of helping people discover your blog or website and engage with the content. To help your audience discover content through search engines, the content needs to be optimized with relevant keywords or search terms and other on-page SEO attributes have to be optimized. A great WordPress SEO plug-in like Yoast SEO can help you do all these with the least efforts.

While there are countless quality SEO plug-ins for WordPress users, Yoast SEO stands out for exceptional ease of use, flexibility and for taking care of all SEO tasks that are needed to gain momentum across search engines. Yoast SEO plug-in is available with a free and a premium version. While the free version is pretty effective for small businesses and startups that target a limited number of keywords and search terms, the premium version is more suitable if you need to target a lot of search terms simultaneously.

Better Internal Link Search

As your website grows with content and as you continue publishing content, it requires a challenging task for the search engines to discover content having similar keywords or search terms. Moreover, the audience often cannot find content related to the context or topic that you published earlier. Internal linking is the ideal solution for this. Interlinking of contents based upon the relevance of the context will help search engines to find content easily and boost user experience through the easy finding of contexts.

But linking contents maintaining the relevance of context is often a challenging job. If you want to retain your audience on the website for extended hours, the interlinking of content with relevance to contexts can help a lot.  When a user while reading on a topic like “cycling in the Alps” can click on a link navigating to content on “best mountain bikes for the Alps”, the interlinking actually helps the reader to stay longer in the website and read a few more contents.

While the default WordPress plug-in for internal linking is terribly limited in terms of capability, Better Internal Link Search seems to be the most efficient plug-in for this purpose. This great plug-in helps websites to locate contents by the headline for the purpose of linking one content to another. While linking contents, it takes care of linking scheduled posts as well.

Digg Digg

Social sharing is a must for any blogs or websites primarily focusing on content. Without allowing your users and visitors to share the content instantly on their social profiles and pages, you don’t stand a chance to gain popularity. Since social sharing is a must for achieving better traction, you need to use a social sharing plug-in for your WordPress blog. Dig, the social sharing plug-in and bar taken over by BufferApp in 2011 is a leading plug-in for the said purpose.

The BufferApp plug-in offers all options to integrate buttons of leading social media buttons. For most websites, it is recommended to utilise the leading social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn. The plug-in also allows you to modify it based upon your website design.

Bibblio

Like internal linking, showing related posts is another effective and highly efficient way to optimise user engagement. Often WordPress bloggers or webmasters don’t find enough time to curate content manually and help users to find relevant content based upon their search without actually leaving the website. For them, a plug-in for “related posts” can be highly effective. Bibblio is an intelligent AI-based plug-in that makes it incredibly easier to find related content without much effort.

Bibblio helps with faster and automated “related post” suggestions. The plug-in is tremendously capable for easy implementation besides offering great flexibility for a variety of post types. It helps with suggestion modules anywhere across the website. Moreover, the plug-in offers a variety of design templates and choose the one that perfectly fits your WordPress theme. By continuously generating smarter and intelligent recommendations, it helps to boost website engagement.

Geotargeting WP

Reaching the right audience with the right content is the key to online success now. It is not only important for the product marketers to reach out to the right target audience with the right products, but it is also important for content marketers to reach out to the right audience with the appropriate blog posts and articles. Geotargeting helps bloggers and content marketers to target audiences, specifically in countries or regions for whom those contents matter most.

Geo targeting WP is a highly efficient plug-in that allows you to target the audience on a global scale based upon the character and focus niche of your content. The plug-in can be highly useful for a variety of niches, particularly niches like travel for which targeting global audience is often a necessity. Various features of the plug-in make it ideal for the purpose. For example, the plug-in can automatically redirect content from a multilingual website to the language of the reader.  It can also be useful for marketers trying to target audiences across locations with location-based ads.

AMP

Responsive design for websites and blogs is no longer a fad now, but a must-have requirements now. This is why the vast majority of WordPress themes are now mobile friendly and responsive in character. Being mobile-friendly became the de-facto standard of WordPress design. But websites and blogs further made advance by embracing technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to boost mobile user experience further. The high loading speed that helps to access a website with the batting of an eyelid to optimised mobile view-port for an app-like user experience, AMP offers an array of advantages.

The official AMP plug-in for WordPress websites can deliver all these benefits. This plug-in allows you to integrate AMP technology with a WordPress website effortlessly. With the latest introduction of native theme mode, the WordPress users no longer have to manually develop the AMP enabled pages. The plug-in will automatically fit into the theme and make the pages AMP-enabled without requiring manual design effort.

Live Chat with Facebook Messenger

The online chat has really transformed the way websites and blogs to communicate with their target audience. But while many think that chat boxes are the attributes of serious websites, they are actually becoming common across all types of websites and blogs simply because of the ease of communication and user engagement they are offering. Giving quick replies to your audience is often productive for the website. This is where integrating a plug-in for Facebook Messenger can be helpful.

Live Chat with Facebook Messenger plug-in is a completely free chat solution for WordPress websites and blogs across the niches. Most importantly, the free version of the plug-in comes with all the key and elementary features that you need with an online chat function. You can also customise the chatbox, including icons, colour scheme, language, etc. The plug-in also allows you to customise the behaviour and make use of various features related to automation and marketing. A chat box on your website in spite of causing slight distraction can be utilised as great marketing to reach out to the audience.

Facebook Comments

There is no dearth of comments plugins for WordPress users but often making the right choice from the available options becomes a little difficult. Facebook Comments is regarded by many users as the best plug-in for integrating comments with a WordPress website. The best thing about this comment plug-in is that it makes commenting highly social and thus ensures better user engagement. Most importantly, thanks to Facebook support commenting becomes highly easier and effortless.

Any website or blog willing to take advantage of the social presence and active user engagement through commenting will find this plug-in highly useful. Facebook Comments by far is the best third-party social commenting plug-in that comes free.

WP Quiz

Websites and blogs utilize polls and quizzes to boost user engagement and make way for a conversation that ensures better audience retention. The polls and quizzes are also a great way to derive audience opinions through factual questions. Since people often find quizzes enjoyable, such contents and interactions actually boost the entertainment quotient if the website as well.  WP Quiz is the ideal plug-in that helps in incorporating polls and quizzes easily into WordPress websites.

To make things easier for opinion polling and using quizzes within a website or blog, the plug-in also helps to track users with their IP address or cookies. Moreover, the plug-in can also make use of Google Analytics and a range of email marketing automation solutions such as MailChimp. The plug-in also allows showing ads in between the quizzes and helps the website monetise the interactions.

OptinMonster

Every professional website or blog invariably needs to generate leads. This is one of the key areas upon which business conversion depends a lot. In this respect, the role of newsletter subscription is considered to be crucial. No wonder, most of the professional WordPress websites and blogs utilise some useful plugins to push for newsletter subscriptions. Since newsletter subscription is crucial to boost user retention in the long run, WordPress websites have to give it utmost importance.

The OptinMonster plug-in helps WordPress users with a drag and drop builder along with an opt-in form designed all popular elements such as sidebar forms, floating header, and footer forms. The plug-in can also provide you with a timely display of pop-up forms besides allowing you to use geo targeting, technology for predicting exit intents and subscription forms.

The plug-in offers literally everything that your marketing strategy and effort seeks to achieve through the newsletter. The plug-in which supports as many as 25 different email marketing automation tools, allows writing custom email emails with preferred templates without any difficulties. The plug-in is created to ensure smoother and effortless user engagement with the flexible option of opting out of stringent marketing tactics.

 

 

 

This is guest submission by Atman Rathod. He is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading web and mobile app development company with 13+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship and business. His creative abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well.

Atif Mallo

Atif Mallo is a freelance blogger with huge interest in technology, science, life hacks and health. He loves coffee, cheesecake and chess. Drop a line in comments to leave feedback for him.

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