Finding the best WordPress plugins for travel blogs is an important step in growing your travel blogging business. If you have a WordPress travel blog, the right plugins will save you time, enhance user experience, and ultimately generate more traffic, comments and likes.
If you want your travel blog to compete, you’re going to need to provide a great user experience. The right plugins will help you get there.
Plugins are easy to install and easy to use. Some of the best WordPress plugins for blogs allow your readers to easily share your content on social media, find related posts, and join your email list. Any many will help you grow your travel blog with some behind-the-scenes magic.
Best WordPress Plugins for Travel Blogs
Here are 10 plugins I use and believe to be among the best WordPress plugins for blogs:
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Google Analytics
This is the most important plugin to help you track your traffic. It lets you see what pages are viewed and where your traffic is coming from. If you don’t have Google Analytics tracking on your website, stop everything and add this plugin!
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Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) is one of the best WordPress plugins for SEO. This awesome plugin allows you to optimize each post for maximum search results. It tells you each item you need to complete to have an SEO friendly article. It incorporates everything from a snippet editor and real time page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.
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Shareaholic
Shareaholic allows you to add several features to your site and blog pages. My favorites are the related content feature that allows you to increase page views, engagement and time on site by highlighting relevant content. I also could not live without their social sharing bare that makes it super easy to share articles from your website to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more.
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Sumome
Similar to Shareaholic, Sumome is a suite of free tools that can be used to grow your website’s traffic. Sumome offer the social sharing buttons, but also offers a pop-up list builder that can convert one-time visitors into lifelong readers and email subscribers.
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JetPack
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Unlike most other plugins, activating it is a little more involved than a single click and you actually need to sign up for a WordPress.com account and activate it. Jetpack is comprised of 35+ “modules,” which you can choose to activate or deactivate as you wish. Modules range from sharing related posts to custom CSS and commenting. It also has some great stat modules.
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Revive Old Post
The Revive Old Post plugin allows you to connect with different social media platforms to automatically send out posts/tweets as often as you schedule it on your old content. It takes the title of your post and attaches a shortened link. It’s as simple as that! It’s Twitter auto-pilot for your old posts.
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Better Click to Tweet
Add Click to Tweet boxes simply and elegantly to your posts or pages. All the features of a premium plugin, for FREE! It’s a great way to encourage your visitors to Tweet specific content or phrases.
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BJ Lazy Load
BJ Lazy Load improves the performance of your site by not preloading all the images in your blog post. So as a reader is scrolling down, the images will load dynamically. In essence this improves initial page load times and makes your site load faster for the reader.
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W3 Total Cache
Your website needs to be fast. W3 Total Cache allows your website to load quickly and perform better. This plugin gives you the ability to take advantage of things like “caching” and “minifying” of your code so that your page can be efficiently delivered to your readers. There is a lot of configuration work involved in W3 Total Cache but I consider this a must have.
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Geo Mashup
Since you run a travel blog, chances are you want to give people as much information about your destination as possible. One great way to do this is to provide a map of your recent visits. You can do this by using the plugin Geo Mashup.
This plugin allows you to insert a customizable map using the Google Maps API anywhere into your site. A must have for those looking to create in-depth destination posts.
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What plugins do you love? Let me know in the comments below!
Hi,
Thank you for mentioning Revive Old Post into your article.
We greatly appreciate it. 🙂
Best regards,
Alexandra
I think I may be gifting myself the HTML5 Maps plugin as a Christmas present to myself. I’m dying to have a truly epic maps plugin on my site! I’ll have to check out some of the others you mentioned, especially ones to help optimize SEO and load time. Thanks for sharing!
I love Revive Old Post too. I used to use SumoMe until I realised that all the ad-blocker plugins and Chrome extensions (I use one) also blog the sharing buttons from SumoMe. So I changed to the trusty old AddToAny Share Buttons plugin that is not blocked by ad-blocking extensions.