10 Essential WordPress Plugins for Writers
For a long time writers have been described as “chosen ones” whose inspiration came from Muses, unexpectedly. But as time changes, so does the writers’ role and position. Today, writers are far away from a traditional definition. As important team members of many companies, writers create various types of content and regularly publish their works on different online platforms. Beside exceptional talent for words, writers need a helping hand to thrive among the constantly-growing writing community. Fortunately, these days there are many useful tools especially made for writers of any kind. From modern, easy-to-use writer WordPress themes, powerful plugins and proofreading tools, to writing platforms & free books. To help you increase your online visibility, reach a large reading audience and regularly share your texts with ease, we created a list of the 10 best WordPress plugins for writers and tools you might find helpful.
Turn your passion for words into stories that inspire with WordPress themes created especially for writers:
1. Boost Your Website Traffic
No matter how original, interesting and easy-to-read your writing is, you won’t get far if your content is invisible to search engines. Thanks to numerous WordPress SEO plugins you can prepare your pages and blog posts for the endless internet ocean. As for the features and ease of use, Yoast SEO is our favorite. Even if you don’t have any previous SEO knowledge, this plugin allows you to upgrade your texts with the best SEO practices. For starters, it will help you optimize your pages and posts for the important keywords. Also, you can adapt your title for search engines and even get a readability check to understand if you need to break up paragraphs or change something. Another great functionality writers will love is the detection of duplicated content on your page or post.
2. Schedule Your Posts With Strive Content Calendar
If you want more traffic, you’ll need to publish new content frequently. With WordPress, managing a regular publishing schedule is difficult because there is no visual calendar, and that’s where Strive comes in.
The Strive Content Calendar plugin adds a beautiful and responsive visual calendar right into your WordPress dashboard. You can see all of your published and scheduled posts monthly and quickly rearrange them via drag and drop. Even better, Strive adds four posts statuses to your site for tracking your progress, and the posts in the calendar are color-coded by status.
It also lets you create a custom checklist for your posts and displays it right in the post editor. This way, you can check off items while you write and ensure that every post comes out perfect. Strive also includes the ability to create private revisions of published posts, so you can take your time updating outdated content. Then, once a revision is ready for publishing, you can schedule it just like a regular post.
Overall, Strive is a full-featured plugin for content creators and a good addition to any serious writer’s website.
3. Add Author Box
As a writer, you need a place on your website where you can display bio or share links to social profiles. That’s why adding an author box to your blog or website page can give a significant boost to your credibility. Depending on your needs you can choose an Author box plugin that will help you share your bio information in style.
We recommend you to pay attention to Simple author box plugin. What we like most about it is its simplicity. It automatically inserts the author box at the end of your posts. This how you can show the author’s name, add the avatar or include a short bio. You can also, include the author’s website or social networks.
4. Add Social Sharing Buttons
Catchy headlines and compelling content are the starting point for attracting new readers. But even if your blog is rich in quality content, it’s not always enough for boosting the traffic. Luckily, there are a few simple things you can do to change this. If you write and publish regularly, make some effort to reach your readers. For example, you can manually share your content on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Another step forward is to encourage your readers to do the same – by hitting a LIKE or SHARE button. Although, this can work fairly well, there are some great tools to help make this easier for you. Thanks to social media sharing WordPress plugins sharing content is a breeze. Just find your favorite and implement it on your website. Our recommendation goes to Sassy Social Share plugin. It allows a lot of customization – you can pick between three button styles: rounded, square or rectangle. Button positioning is also highly customizable. Also, you can opt for fixed buttons at the parts of the page you prefer them to be.
5. Attract More Readers with Related Posts
Once readers have found read an article on your blog, it would be great to catch their attention with other similar texts. In a case your WordPress theme doesn’t come with related posts widget, you can go with related posts plugin that best fits your needs. Related Posts for WordPress is a good option. It not only supports thumbnail and textual display of related posts list, but it’s very lightweight. It’s very fast and won’t slow down your website.
6. Create Amazing Galleries
So, you have finished your new article and can’t wait to share it with the world. But, before hitting the Publish button, make sure your text is equipped with beautiful images. You can even go one step further and create separate galleries. This is perfectly suitable if your blog focuses on your personal adventures and experiences like traveling. With so many WordPress gallery plugins it’s hard to make a mistake.
For instance, if you use the Elementor page builder, you can install powerful Qi addons for Elementor. As it comes with 150 widgets made to cover everything you imagine, this plugin is ideal for anyone who wants to style websites with ease. Most importantly, it offers tons of image gallery features and layouts you can use to present your works and arts. From Image gallery, Image slider and Dual image with content to Masonry image gallery and Pinterest image gallery – Qi plugin covers essential image gallery styles and functionalities.
7. Use Social Media Scheduling Tools
Running a blog with success requires focus, dedication and careful planning. This means you need to think a few steps in advance. In other words, it would be great to plan which article will be published next week, and the week after. This is where content calendar enters the scene. In a nutshell, a content calendar helps you assign specific dates to certain blog topics, and schedule the content of your posts. Thanks to the calendar you will be able to get ahead on your blog posts and plan publishing more effectively. If you have doubts about which plugin to use for this purpose, we recommend you to check out Editorial calendar plugin. It allows you to edit posts right in the calendar. In a case of need, you can drag and drop to move posts.
8. Keep Your Website Safe
If your blog has grown to become a favorite online place for everyone who enjoys quality content, you don’t want to lose it because of hackers? To make sure your blog is safe and secure from viruses, hackers and any other malware, use WordPress security plugins. The options are numerous. They not only scan your website to identify the issue, but send you the results, clean up and resolve the issues as well. Our recommendation goes to Sucuri scanner plugin. Easy-to-use, yet feature-rich, this plugin has all you might need to keep your website secure.
9. Spamming Isn’t Cool
Keeping spammers away from your blog and articles can be challenging at the times. They frequently target comment section and usually leave generic messages which other readers can find annoying. Fortunately, there is a Jetpack plugin. This WordPress plugin helps in spam filtering, malware scanning, and brute force attack protection. As a writer, you have a helping hand in keeping unwanted intrusions away. JetPack will also send you the notifications and emails with important information (website downtime for example). Moreover, this plugin is also useful if you want to monitor various website data and statistics of different websites.
10. Create Contact Forms
Building a strong bond with readers is important for many things. By sharing their thoughts on your work, your reading audience can even inspire you to write a new text or to improve the one you have already published. Comments are a great place for interaction with readers but if you want a more intimate interaction, ad contact forms to your blogs. This how the readers might be more than eager to contact you to ask you some questions about your writing. Try Everest forms plugin. Besides the user-friendly interface, the plugin integrates drag and drop fields you can use to easily modify your forms depending on your needs. The plugin is fully responsive and translation ready. In the end, if you don’t have time for designing your own contact form, choose from the existing templates Everest forms plugin comes packed with.
11. Allow Users to Register
If you want to start a creative writing workshop, it would be great to add registration form so anyone can join. Also, you can send important information on your events and meet-ups via emails. Use User registration form plugin to create a registration form that fits your website’s design within minutes. With it, you can easily modify the form fields – use its drag and drop interface to do this with no effort.
Let’s Wrap It Up
Being a writer is one of the most interesting professions out there. It’s creative, sometimes challenging, but always worth every moment you invest in it. Nowadays you can use the power of the online world to delight readers and show your talents. Thanks to many WordPress plugins for writers and WP themes for authors, you can make sure your blog has all it takes to get noticed.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
