Stating a blogging site is no easy feat, as it requires knowledge, commitment and tons of hard work. In order to increase your chances of making it to the big time, you’ll want to install some plugins that will give you a helping hand.

All of the successful bloggers – your competitors – are utilizing them, so why wouldn’t you?

Now, we’re not expecting you to automatically know about the best plugins out there, so we’re going to provide you with some to get your started. Here are 4 plugins that you’ve got to install right away:

Contact Form 7 

The biggest element of blogging is connecting with your audience. If you fail to do that, you’re not building a loyal following, but rather seeing people come in and out of the door.

Other than responding to comments, you want to make sure your audience can contact you easily and quickly.

So, by installing the Contact Form 7 plugin, you can seamlessly add a contact form on your site which people can fill out in seconds.

Wordfence

Security is no joke when it comes to the digital world; the multitude of malicious hackers who target innocent sites and steal data shouldn’t be overlooked.

So, even if you feel like you’ve added the strongest passwords in the world, you still want to add another layer of robust security to your blog.

With Wordfence, you have a specialist plugin that will block dangerous networks, scan for any weaknesses and monitor activity non-stop.

Yoast SEO

If you’re heading into blogging, you’ll definitely need to know about SEO. Even if you aren’t an SEO wizard, you should possess enough knowledge to be able to push your site up the rankings.

Without rankings, you’ll struggle to obtain organic traffic. SEO isn’t a simple skill to master, though. That’s why installing a plugin like Yoast SEO, which helps you to optimise your content for the search engines, is so beneficial.

Google Analytics

You need to be tracking the performance of your blog every step of the way. If you’re not, you’ll never know what needs to improve.

By far the best tool out there is Google Analytics, and it can be added to your site through a simple plugin. By checking the plugin information, you’ll be able to spot if your traffic is increasing or decreasing each month. There are plenty more features to the plugin, though.

Without the above plugins, you’re missing out on optimizing your blog and giving yourself the best chance of reaching the top. But, it goes without saying that this isn’t an exhaustive list.

There are plenty more which you can install that will take your blog to a whole new level. So, we thought we’d find an article that not only lists some awesome plugins but explains them in detail too.

Eventually, we came across this post on the ‘Start Blogging Online’ site, which gives you 10 plugins that you must have.