Best WordPress Plugins for Craft Bloggers
As a craft blogger, you’ve already made a great decision by using WordPress to power your new and growing website. However, there are also hundreds of plugins you can use to more effectively grow your site and add new features without any additional effort.
You put the time and effort into building your website to share your passion with the world, and help people become better at their own DIY crafts. Below we highlight a few of the most useful WordPress plugins for craft bloggers that’ll help you increase your traffic, cultivate a community, and build a tribe of followers.
Categorizing Your Craft Blog
You probably have dozens of different categories for your craft blog and different kinds of projects you’re showcasing. Instead of making your readers dig through posts that aren’t relevant to them you can easily categorize your posts, so your users can select the kind of content they want to read.
1. Category Thumbnail List
This plugin will add featured posts and associated thumbnails based upon the category of your current post. These will display at the bottom of each post and encourage readers to continue reading different posts on your site. A plugin like this can help reduce your bounce rate, as people will read multiple pages on your site, which helps to improve search engine rankings.
2. CataBlog
This plugin allows you to create catalogs and display them as beautiful galleries in your existing posts. You can upload images, along with titles, descriptions, and links. This can be a great way to spice up your posts and highlight the different supplies you use for your craft projects.
Improve Social Sharing for your Craft Blog
Building a social presence is a great way to improve traffic to your craft blog. The plugins below will make it easier for your readers to share your content, and more easily embed your existing social media accounts into your site.
3. Frizzly
This plugin lets you add social sharing buttons to your website. One of the more useful features of this plugin is the ability to add social sharing buttons on top of your images, making it easy for your readers to share your images to sites like Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
4. Simple Social Icons
This is another plugin that lets you enable social media sharing across your site. It gives you a customizable set of icons that show up next to your blog posts. This plugin allows you to customize the social media networks you want to share, and there are over 20 options available.
5. WP Socializer
Yes, another social sharing plugin! This plugin is highly customizable and gives you countless options for adding social media buttons to your site, including floating share bars, selected text share bars, mobile share bars, and more.
6. Instagram Feed
This plugin lets you embed your Instagram feed into your existing website. If you have an active Instagram account then this can be a great way to encourage your website readers to follow you. You’ll be able to display your latest photos, your favorite craft projects, photos from a certain location, and more.
Get More Traffic and Subscribers to your Craft Blog
Chances are you didn’t start a craft blog to write for an audience of zero. The plugins below will help you improve your search engine rankings, build an email list, and more.
7. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the best SEO plugins out there. It will help to optimize your existing posts and pages to better show up in the search engines. This plugin is great for beginners as it will help educate you about SEO, while you’re optimizing your site.
8. Sumo
Sumo (formerly Sumo Me) has a great set of tools for helping your site get more traffic, and turn that traffic into email subscribers. The free version of this tool has things like pop-up email forms, social sharing buttons, analytics, heat maps, and much more. This tool is really like 20 different tools in one, and a must have for craft bloggers who want to increase their traffic levels.
Hopefully, the plugins above will help you transform your existing craft blog. Any plugins we forget to mention in the list above? Please share your favorites in the comments below.
Kevin Wood writes about technology and human potential. You can find him at his virtual homes Wooden Writing and Counter Culturist.