My Top 10 Favorite WordPress Plugins

Posted February 9, 2015 by Julie S. in Featured Posts, On Blogging / 26 Comments

I really enjoy using WordPress as our blogging platform – one reason being all the amazing plugins we can use to enhance our blogging experience. I thought I would share some of those with our readers. Should you choose to try these out (if you haven’t already) just search for the title in the add new plugin section (for the freebies). I included an affiliate link to the only one that is a purchased plugin. Should you choose to purchase the plugin using that link, I will get a small percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you.

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

Favorite Book Blogging Plugins

  • The Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin. This one is the only plugin I have paid for, and it is worth it! If you’re a book blogger and on WP, I really recommend you look into this plugin. It helps organize reviews by searchable fields (author, series, title), it puts thumbnails of recently reviewed books (and upcoming reviews, and currently reading if you set that up) in your sidebar for easy finding, and it even looks up book details for you!
  • Rating Report. We use this to help us come up with an overall book rating. It lets you pick 5 categories and then you rate a book on all the applicable categories. We picked the following: Plot, Characters, Writing, Romance, and Narration (for audio books). Then we select the appropriate rating for each category, and it displays the details and average rating with our review.

Favorite Commenting Plugins

  • Comment Reply Notification. We love to reply to comments and it helps when the comment author actually sees our reply.
  • CommentLuv. A plugin that shares a link to a recent blog post with their comment (if applicable). This is a great way to share some link juice love.
  • Akismet. This plugin helps keep the spambots away.
  • Top Commentators Widget. I like to reward the people who take the time to comment, especially if they do so often. So we display a list (linking back to their blogs, if applicable) of our top commentators.

Favorite Blogging Plugins

  • Easy Content Templates. This plugin is great for posts that follow the same format – such as features. We have a template for our Chat Between Chapters posts, our That’s What He Said Thursday Meme posts as well as other memes we participate in occasionally, we even have templates set up for reviews (so we don’t need to search for our avatar icons). It is very nice to just pick a template, load it, and proceed with writing the blog post.
  • Shareholic. This plugin includes sharing buttons to various social media at the bottom of our posts so people can easily share our content if they are so inclined. Sharing is caring, right?
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. One great blogging tip I always hear about is link to other great posts. Well, this plugin selects posts that are related (and you can choose how related you want them to be in the settings) and displays them at the bottom of your post.
  • Google Analytics Dashboard for WP. A quick glance at our stats, so useful!
  • WordPress Database Backup. A plugin that emails me monthly with our database backup, so I don’t have to worry about doing it myself. Always back up. You never know what can happen and you don’t want to lose it all.

So there you have it, my top 10 favorite WordPress plugins that we use.

Which plugins do you love? Feel free to recommend some blogging-life-saving plugins you’ve come across.


Note: Some posts may contain affiliate links. Should you choose to purchase a product, we will receive a small commission for the sale at no additional cost to you. Chapter Break is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

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Posted February 9, 2015 by Julie S. in Featured Posts, On Blogging / 26 Comments

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26 responses to “My Top 10 Favorite WordPress Plugins”

  3. Hannah Mums' Days

    Some great plugins there, very useful to see. I think I could do with the Easy Templates one!! Another plugin I like is Yoast, fab for Seo 🙂

    thanks for linking up to #TheList love! Hxx

    • Julie

      I think all the SEO plugins I’ve tried have not been intuitive and seemed like a lot of extra work to write in the same stuff in various places.

  7. Shannon @ It Starts At Midnight

    Such a great list! I seriously don’t know how I functioned before the UBB plugin. How did I get anything done?!I use most of these myself, Comment Reply Notification, CommentLuv, Shareaholic, Akismet, Google Analytics, and Easy Content Templates. (The Templates one is another one that has been an absolute time saver!) These are really, really great to share with people, I have found them to be so incredibly helpful, and I’m glad you did too 🙂
    Shannon @ It Starts At Midnight recently posted…Books I’m Never Going to Review: Part Three

    • Julie

      Glad you’re enjoying these awesome plugins too. Seriously, some of these are such huge time savers (and therefore, blog savers).

  8. Vlora @ Reviews and Cake

    Wow, this post gets an A*** for helpfulness. The Easy Content Templates plugin will save me so much time and hassle in the future! I also installed Shareaholic because it looks prettier than the plugin I used for social media share buttons before, the related posts plugin and Google Analytics Dashboard stats because it’s way easier than going to the GA page every time. Thanks!

    I’m already using CommentLuv as well, and it’s one of my favorite plugins. I also like WP User Avatar to have custom user pics for commenters and for comment reply notifications and things like that I use Subscribe to Comments Reloaded.
    Vlora @ Reviews and Cake recently posted…Talk to Me: Blogging Communities

    • Julie

      Aww thanks 🙂 🙂 Ooh, WP User Avatar sounds like a good one to try out. Otherwise people without a Gravatar (like you) just have the basic icon.

  9. Amanda Matheny

    There are a few on this list I use. I have some others as well. Probably the two I would definitely say are must haves are All-In-One SEO pack, which is especially great for people who are less SEO savvy because you can just add things like meta title, description, and tags right from the post editing page and it’s super easy.

    Another one I swear by is Revive Old Post, formerly known as Tweet Old Post. This post periodically tweets old posts at random, and you can set how old the post has to be. You can also set how often posts are tweeted. This is great for getting attention on old posts and several people have rread my posts through it. It’s also good for tweeting at different times of day, even when you’re asleep or away from home, which has the potential of the post being seen by people in other parts of the world. That’s great for me because while my readers are mostly American, my blog is not geared towards Americans only, so if I can reach other countries too, that’s awesome!

    One final one I will add is WPShopCart. It’s free, but I paid for the pro version, or more accurately, my ex boyfriend bought it for me, to help support my site. It makes it so you can have a store on your site, and it’s very easy to use. Unfortunately nobody has purchased from my store yet, but I am hoping that as my traffic grows, interest will as well, and once things are not so hectic around here for me, I hope to put up more items to choose from. All of my store items are handmade needlepoint crafts.

    So out of all the plugins you mentioned and the ones I use, these three are the ones I would add to the list.

    • Julie

      I tried an SEO plugin, but it was more confusing than useful to me heh. I’m awful at SEO. Maybe I should try the one you mentioned, I used a different one. Ooh yes Revive Old Post is awesome – we use that as well. I also started using a Buffer posts plugin so it shares on all the social media I have connected to my account. We don’t really have a product to sell other than ad space but that sounds like a very useful plugin if you have a store. Thanks for sharing your suggestions!

    • Julie

      Ha! I am by no means a plugin expert, but I do know my way around a good few. I think my co-bloggers probably feel the same way you do 🙂

  11. Bec @ Readers in Wonderland

    UBB is AMAZING. It makes blogging so much less time consuming. As does Easy Content Templates. And all those comment plugins are great because they help encourage conversations throughout the blogosphere. I don’t really know any plugins other than those haha

    • Julie

      Ooh good point that they help encourage conversations. That’s one of the things that makes blogging fun 🙂

    • Julie

      I like that plugin cause it quickly shows us who interacts the most. You can set it so it excludes you, and resets monthly or however often you want.

  13. Sarah

    I didn’t realize that there were any book specific plugins, but I’ve been writing about books a lot more recently, so I will be looking those up! Thanks for sharing!

    I just started using the template plug in and I absolutely adore it because it lets me keep the code for “facebook” likes and my comment policy right at the bottom of the post without copy and pasting all of the time. My comment policy plug in stopped working when I added Disqus 🙁
    Sarah recently posted…Responsible Blogging: Cite Your Sources

    • Julie

      Copying and pasting all that can’t be fun, glad to hear you’re also using the templates on a regular basis. If you decide to use the UBBP, it is best to start early before you have too many book posts, because then it takes a lot of time to edit each post to utilize the plugin effectively. We had to edit 60-some review posts after we bought the plugin.