12 Plugins That Will Make Your Posts Even More Awesome!

There is no doubt that the default WordPress posting experience is pretty well best in class. There’s already a ton of options available for you to take advantage of in crafting world-class posts. All that being said though, the true beauty of WordPress lies in its open source extensibility. Want more than vanilla WordPress offers? No problem. There’s a host of extensions out there just waiting for you to plug them in.

We’ve reviewed the ins and out of the vanilla WordPress posting experience here on WP Ninjas already. Today we’re going to run through a list of plugins that enhance that experience. Each of them either adds a novel feature to the post editor, or adds something to the posting environment in general. Hopefully you’ll find something fun to play with on your website below!

1 – Yoast SEO

Free!: Yoast SEO is all about improving your Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing SEO is, in a nutshell, how you get your post ranked higher in search engine results. With Yoast SEO you can control how the title and meta description of your post appears in search engine results, but that’s almost the least of what it offers.

Set up a focus keyword for the post, and this plugin will list off a litany of advice related to your post and very specific recommendations for improving it. It also gives you feedback on what you’ve done well and why it’s good. This is an indispensable plugin if you care at all about how much exposure your blog gets.

2 – Social Warfare

$24/yr single-site: This plugin is neat because it does so much more than just add social sharing buttons. The buttons are attractive, well styled and can be reordered and rearranged. Click to tweet snippets can be added stylishly to the body of the post. These are not the features that sets this plugin apart however, even though they are done well. On the post editing screen, Social Warfare adds a whole new set of functionality.

The Social Warfare Custom Options let you control the title, meta description, and featured image that will appear in Facebook when your post is shared. No more Facebook posts with a big blank image box or weirdly abbreviated text! Change your Pinterest image and description as well. Craft a custom tweet to display when shared on Twitter. Step up your social game with Social Warfare.

3 – Instagrate

Free or $35/yr single-site for Pro version: Instagrate allows automatic Instagram integration for posts, eliminating the need for manual embeds. Syncs with your Instagram account and allows you to configure different attributes of the post like image title, body text, and more. A really neat plugin by a pretty awesome developer (full disclosure: author Iain Poulson is a collaborating developer for Ninja Forms also!).

4 – TablePress

Free!: If you’ve ever tried making a table just about anywhere, you know how much of a headache they can be. WordPress’ default table function isn’t bad, but there’s certainly room for improvement. TablePress makes those improvements and makes table building easy. You’ll have a TablePress option in your Dashboard where you can build, edit, name, and save various tables. You can even import/export tables. From your post editing screen, select the TablePress icon in the toolbar, choose your table, and there it is via shortcode. That easy.

5 – WP-Polls

Free!: WP-Polls makes polling your visitors easy! Adding this free install to your WordPress site gives you a Polls option in your Dashboard. From there you can write your question, add answers if desired, and set start/end time and dates. There are also a metric ton of options and setting to toggle to make the size, shape, and general appearance of your poll completely customized to fit your site. It’s added to your post via shortcode from your post screen toolbar.

6 – Viper’s Video Quicktags

Free!: Similar to Instagrate, but for video. Allows for the automatic embed of video from over a dozen sites like YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo, and a variety of file types as well. No more manually copying embed html: just select the website’s icon from the toolbar, copy the url and go! Under Settings in your Dashboard you can select which video sites appear in your toolbar to reduce clutter, and also set width, height, and aspect ratio of the embedded video.

7 – Jetpack

Free!: Yes, Jetpack. They have done a major update that offers some really exciting new improvements for their WordPress.com post editor. It’s now faster, cleaner, and all around a really nice user experience. Right, so that’s WordPress.com… not much use for .org users? Think again. Sync accounts and you can sign in to your WordPress.com account and use their feature rich editor to post directly to your .org site. If you prefer the .com editor to the .org, this one’s for you.

8 – Restrict Content

Free!: One of the many great plugins by Pippin Williamson (full disclosure again, Pippin is a Ninja Forms collaborating developer). Restrict Content adds a screen option to the post editor that displays an option box for you below the content box. You can restrict access to the post by user level (Admin, subscriber, contributor, etc). You can either display the content excerpt in your feed but restrict access, or hide it completely from all but those with permission. There’s also message options under Settings in the Dashboard.

What makes this plugin really cool is that you can restrict selected sections of content using shortcode: [restrict]…[/restrict] as well. Hypothetically you could have varying degrees of access for different users for different parts of the same post. Pretty neat!

9 – Advanced Excerpt

Free!: Like the idea of using excerpts but hate the way WordPress handles generating them? Don’t want to have to fool with making a custom excerpt for every post to work around that? This plugin’s for you. Advanced Excerpt adds an Excerpt option to Settings in your Dashboard. From there you can set a variety of rules that WordPress will follow to auto-generate excerpts alongside other neat options. You can even tell it to play nice with your custom excerpts and just use the plugins extra features too, if you wish.

10 – WP Author Box Lite

Free!: You can find this as its own option in your Dashboard. Choose where to display the author box, its appearance, content, and even toggle social media profile integration. The Appearance setting is especially robust, offering over a dozen different tweaks for background, text, tab and footer visuals. If you’re bored of the minimalist look of the default WordPress author box, this one will keep you busy playing for a while!

11 – WordPress Popular Posts

Free!: This also adds an option under Settings in your Dashboard. At a basic level this plugin lets you display a widget listing your most popular posts as a method of driving page views and letting your readers know what else you’re up to. The plugin offers so much more than it sounds like, however. With 3 full tabs of options, you can format the widget, how the posts are featured, images, and much more. This is definitely worth exploring if the idea of displaying popular posts sounds attractive to you.

12 – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Free! (with Pro version upgrade option): Also found under Settings in the Dashboard, YARPP lets you add posts to a pool sorted by your chosen categories, set levels of relatedness, and tinker with display options. These features give you a powerful means of featuring related content for a reader. There a number of very neat features with YARPP in addition to configuration options: the ability to pull related content from other websites, advert real estate, customizable thumbnails, and more. See for yourself!

That’s the list! I hope you find something there that will enhance your WordPress posting experience. To close, I’d like to point out that these aren’t necessarily recommendations for specific plugins, but more of an awareness thing. There are an abundance of similar plugins that are really great and will do much the same thing as these will. We want you to be the best you can be at this WordPress thing, and man but there is a lot of stuff out there to help you customize, personalize, and really make your blog or website your own. This is here to help you explore options that work for you, and to raise awareness about what all there is out there that WordPress puts at your fingertips. Happy posting!