Plugins are software components that you can install to add extra features to your blog.. (Was that techy enough for you? 😛 ) Whether it’s decorative or practical, plugins have been essential since I began self-hosting.

Some of them involve things you get to see every day. These include recipe cards, the Pinterest widget at the bottom of my site, and the Facebook popup. Other plugins work behind-the-scenes, making daily tasks easier for me.

The problem with plugins is that there are dozens that claim to do similar things better than all the rest. This makes it difficult to know where to start. And everyone markets their plugin as “easy” whether they really are or not.

The other problem is that having too many plugins can drastically slow down your site. So you have to choose wisely.

After two years of self-hosting, here are my absolute favorite plugins.

1. Yumprint Recipe Card

Confession: The biggest reason I wanted to self-host my site was so I could use a recipe plugin. I have no regrets.

What it does

A recipe plugin is what generates the recipe cards that appear at the bottom of each of my recipe posts. If you create a Yumprint account, you can save your favorite recipes. You can also print a recipe directly from my site.

The reason I use Yumprint over other plugins is because it’s customizable. With most other plugins, you either have to

1. use the Pro version,
2. pay someone to customize it,
3. or be intimately familiar with CSS.

With Yumprint, it’s as easy as clicking a few buttons.

It’s also easy to use. While writing a post, all you do is click on the “Recipe Card – Insert Recipe” button, add all the details and save.

Unlike other recipe plugins I’ve used, you can use regular HTML to insert links. This is handy if you want to link to a pie crust recipe instead of writing it all out.

It also has an option to add nutritional information.

For more information, I wrote up a whole post about it a while back. You can read it here.

Drawbacks

It’s super slow. It loads fast on the site. But waiting on the pop-up Edit box can take a while…especially if the plugin is having issues.

For some reason, once you’ve had the recipe plugin open, you can’t type anything in your post anymore. If you hadn’t finished the body of your post before adding the recipe, you’ll need to save the draft before you can continue editing. Once you do that, you’ll be able to type again. Not a huge deal, but it’s annoying.

The nutritional information is not always accurate. This was more irritating back when turning it off wasn’t an option. People sent me a lot of confused (sometimes rude) comments about incorrect information that I had no control over.

Fortunately, they recently changed the template. So now you can choose not to have nutritional information on your recipe card.

2. Better Click to Tweet

I use this plugin on and off for posts that I know will have something tweet-worthy in it.

What it does

This plugin will insert a little Twitter bird into the toolbar of your visual editor. You click on the bird and type whatever you want wherever you want.

It will show up as a blockquote in your blog post. Readers can then click the, “Click to tweet!” button right below it. It will then tweet out whatever text you inserted, as well as the URL of the post it came from.

This is a great way to get some Twitter juice without much effort on your part.

Drawbacks

It’s a pretty solid plugin and it doesn’t take up much room.

The only annoying thing is that it doesn’t count how many characters the tweet contains. So you won’t know until you save it and view your post (over and over until it’s right) that part of the tweet was cut off.

3. All in One WP Security

This adds all the security options you need to keep your site from becoming vulnerable to hacking and whatnot.

What it does

Normally to add security to your WordPress site, you need to edit the .htaccess file. This file is temperamental, though. Even people who know how to edit them hate it because they break your site so easily.

The perk of this plugin is that you just check boxes next to all the stuff you want it to protect you from. Mine is set to

• lock out IP addresses that try to get into my account and
• block access to files that are vulnerable to attacks (wp-config.php and .htaccess, for instance).

Along with other things.

It also has different levels, like beginner, intermediate, and expert. Basically, it tells you, “Don’t touch this if you won’t know how to fix it later.”

Drawbacks

This plugin writes to your .htaccess. It can break your site if it isn’t getting along with another plugin you have. Which means you need to get into your FTP and backup the file before you use this plugin.

Reverting back to the old .htaccess file and deactivating the plugin are the only ways to fix it. If you don’t know ho to use an FTP, I would recommend hiring someone to handle security for you. As well as anything else technical, since using an FTP is pretty basic in the world of web hosting.

The plugin is also a little bit bloated, for something that could be handled by just inserting code correctly.

4. HelloBar

When you got to my site, you likely saw a big, yellow bar going across the top of the page. It probably had a “Subscribe” button in it. That’s my HelloBar!

What it does

This thing is great. First, I love the pop of color it adds to the page.

But as far as practicality? My email subscriber stats have gone up a lot since I installed it. It’s also pretty easy to set up! You go to the HelloBar website, create an account, and it will explain how to set it up.

Also from the website, you can link the bar to your email list. I use MailChimp for mine. All I needed to do was connect my accounts and select the list I wanted people to be on when they signed up.

You can customize it completely. Make it thick, thin, change the color, change the text, put it on the bottom of the page instead of the top. You can set it to float over the page while people scroll or set it so it is hidden when people scroll.

You don’t even have to use it for an email list. You can use it for social media or for driving traffic.

Drawbacks

Most of the drawbacks have been fixed over the years since I started using it. Sometimes it can look a little strange on mobile.

5. Simple Social Icons

What it does

It’s a set of social media icons. They’re found in your Widgets area and they’re easy to set up. You can change the colors (the color of the text, the background color, the hover color, everything). You can make them round, square, or square with rounded edges.

The selection of social sites is far better than any other social icons plugin I’ve seen. For a long time, I had trouble finding one that would let me add Bloglovin and Tumblr. This one does!

If your theme doesn’t come with social media icons (mine does, so I no longer use this plugin), you NEED Simple Social Icons.

Drawbacks

They’re spaced out weirdly. If you have a lot of icons, like I do, you’ll want to go into the CSS file and change the spacing so they all show up on one line. And you have to do this every time the plugin updates. Which happens all the damn time.

Fortunately, it’s easy to fix. Just go to Plugins, find Simple Social Icons, click Edit. Under Plugin Files click on the one ending in style.css. And then under this line:

.simple-social-icons ul li {

find this part:

margin: 0 6px 12px !important;

Change the 6 to a smaller number (mine is set at 1) and then update the file.

6. WPTouch

I discovered this plugin while reading 10 WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Needs. Of all the plugins she recommended, this one is my favorite.

What it does

It allows you to make your site more mobile-friendly. This is important since Google penalizes websites that aren’t mobile-friendly as of April 2015. This is an easy way to set that up all on your own. However, most themes now come with mobile or responsive themes built-in.

Drawbacks

There, um, isn’t one. I love this plugin. If there’s a theme you love that isn’t responsive, this plugin will fix that for you.

7. Shareaholic Share Buttons

WordPress comes with its own share buttons, which you can set up by going to Settings > Sharing. But it just wasn’t quite cutting it. It didn’t have all the social media sites I wanted and they didn’t stand out very well. I doubt my readers even knew they were there.

What it does

Enter Shareaholic. It has far more sharing options. The buttons are vibrant and noticeable. I can place them on top of my posts, on the bottom, or both!  I can also make them float along the side, which is handy.

Now you can share content on any social media site you want. All you have to do is click on a button.

Also, if you want to add “Similar Posts” to the bottom of each of your blog posts, Shareaholic will do that for you. You can also use it to monetize your site now!

Drawbacks

It’s a pretty heavy plugin. If you want something lighter, try Simple Share Buttons. But I prefer Shareaholic.

8. BackUpWordpress

This has been a complete lifesaver on so many occasions. I don’t know what I would do without this plugin.

What it does

You can set this to work on whatever time period you want (daily, weekly, or monthly). Mine is set to daily. Every morning, BackUpWordpress collects my files and puts them into a .zip folder. As soon as that’s done, it sends me an email with a link to that .zip file so I can download it. (If I ever need to find that page again, I go to “Tools” and “Backups.”)

This means all my important files are safe. So if something goes wrong, I can re-install from the back-up and voila! Day saved.

I like to download my .zip files periodically. Especially when I’m about to make a major change to my blog (like installing a new theme).

Drawbacks

The .zip files do take up a lot of space, depending on the size of your blog. Especially if you have BackUpWordpress set to collect your files daily.

This is an easy fix. Just delete any files you no longer need. You can also set the plugin to auto-delete files after 30 days.

9. Revive Old Post

Revive Old Post lets you set up different social media accounts (Twitter with the free version, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc. come with the pro version) to send out all of your archived posts on social media.

What it does

Once you’ve set up the plugin, the free version will go through the categories you’ve included. It will then pick individual posts and tweet them for you with the URL and a bunch of tags.

This is a great way to automate your Twitter account (work smarter, not harder, you know?). It tweets at whatever interval you set. Though the free version only lets you post every 8 hours. I’m considering buying the pro version because the free version has been amazing.

The tagging has made my Twitter profile visible to more people.

Drawbacks

It’s a bit bloated. Since I got rid of Jetpack, Revive Old Post is the biggest hog in my plugins. But it’s so worth it.

10. Akismet

I feel silly including this since it came with WordPress…but apparently, a lot of people choose not to use it! So let me explain why you should.

What it does

Akismet is a spam filter, which means it keeps spammy comments from showing up on my blog. This is important because if I have too many spammy comments, Google will mark my blog as spammy. Then the search engine will penalize my blog.

Too many spammy comments also reflect poorly on you to anyone who wants to comment. A bunch of spammy comments makes it seem like you don’t care enough to pay attention to your comment section. This can discourage potential commenters.

Akismet collects spammy-looking comments and puts them into a spam folder for you. You can then choose to delete them all. Or you can go through them and look for any false positives (anything Akismet thought was spam, but was actually a real comment).

My Akismet filter has an accuracy of 98.84%, which is REALLY good. Part of the reason it’s not higher, though, is because I have Akismet set to mark any comment with a link in it as spam. Which means if a fellow blogger leaves me a comment asking me to check out their blog, it gets marked as spam. And then I have to label it as a false positive (which I generally do after deleting the link).

Drawbacks

Every once in a while it catches a comment that isn’t spam. So you should check your spam folder every once in a while. Other than that, it works well and it’s constantly learning from what you mark as spam or not spam.

If you don’t use Akismet now, start! Especially if you decide to also use CommentLuv. It seems to attract spam bots.

Others?

I actually went through this weekend and cut down my plugins list. The theme I’m using now made most of them irrelevant. I WAS using 50 plugins, which was causing a lot of performance issues. Now I have a few of the ones above (minus Simple Social Icons and WPTouch) and these:

• CommentLuv — Used to be on this list, but others took priority. I love it, but if I had to give it up, I would.
• The Blogger Network Ads — This is the plugin you need to use if you’re monetizing through The Blogger Network (now called Monumetric) Not much more to say about it.
• Yoast SEO — Not something you need. But if you struggle with understanding SEO, this will help. It also lets you set the title, descripton, and photo for when someone shares your post on social media. This is pretty cool, especially if you want it to be something different than what’s in the post.

Do you have any plugins you absolutely can’t live without? Let me know in the comments!