According to Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, this CMS is aimed at getting over 50% of market share. It makes one thing totally clear: WordPress is all the rage, and you need to use it efficiently to stay on top of the business.
With so many users out there trying to take advantage from WP, more and more bloggers are seeking for an easier way to handle the essentials. They make their websites attractive, yet not heavy, with beautiful-looking images and stunning visual effects scattered across the page. To hit this goal, users go for numerous WP applications.
But how do they know which out of those 55,000+ plugins are actually worth a shot? If your website is highly visual, you shouldn’t go without apps designed for that specific goal.
To save your trial and error time, we handpicked some of the best WordPress plugins for successful visual blogging. Find them below.
1. Focused Collection
There’s no point in trying to list all advantages of stock photo platforms, as they are really helpful – unless used in the wrong way. Worn-out and meaningless photos cannot but annoy and irritate readers who’d like to see more original and authentic images. If you are not sure which photos can be perceived as weird-looking and resembling 00’s fashion and which really add value, you can go to websites with premium content. For instance, thanks to premium stock photos on Focused Collection anyou can make your blog posts truly effective, infusing them with awesome visual imagery. In addition to that, you can significantly reduce the time spent on visual content creation – which is essential for marketers and content creators alike.
2. Visual Composer
Even if you are not a programming geek, optimizing your website design is a must. But how are you supposed to do that without a profound SEO knowledge and strong programming skills? Well, it is all possible if you use Visual Composer. It is designed specifically for non-programmers.
Capable of working with all WP themes, this popular plugin grants you full control over your web page. In its intuitive drag and drop editor, you can make blog design truly attractive. Just move the elements around, see how they look altogether, deciding which design style resonates with your audience best.
3. NextGen Gallery
Finally, you can enrich your website’s user experience with the vibe of new visual touches. If you are looking for a sure way to create a wonderful visual gallery and let it dazzle across your website, then NextGen is exactly what you should try out.
This is an easy-to-use, yet highly functional WordPress plugin. It allows you to upload images, build photo galleries, and add them at one push of the button to boost visual attractiveness of your website.
Similarly to plugins listed above, NextGen allows you to edit design elements directly from the WordPress console. This saves you tons of time, with an opportunity to add, resize, swap, rotate or delete all pictures/thumbnails on the fly.
4. Everest Forms
No matter how small or big, light or heavy, popular or unknown your website is – ‘Contact’ page is one of its essentials. It incentivizes users to share feedback, give suggestions or reach out to you with new business offers. For this reason, you need to make sure that your contact page is as well-designed as possible.
Everest Forms is a modern WordPress plugin that allows you to turn your contact pages into remarkable, beautiful-looking forms. In its drag and drop interface, you can create a variety of contact forms easily.
Depending on the needs of your business, you may go for a general contact form or a more advanced one. Just make sure that the style of your contact page aligns with your end goal. Remember to do A/B testing with different texts/design styles to see what works best for you.
5. Fancier Author Box
Wanna be a blogger, huh? If so, you need to make your name recognizable. Though writing a compelling piece of content is a major part of a deal, getting your name out there is not less important.
Fancier Author Box is a simple solution for placing a box with your name and a bio at the bottom of the web page. You can use a variety of ready-made author box templates, insert your social links, and experiment with self-presentation a lot.
6. Ninja Forms
When it comes to blog monetization, there’s no source which is more valuable than the list of your email subscribers. Try building it right off the bat – from the day one. If you don’t know how to do it properly – go for Ninja Forms.
This is a stylish WordPress plugin that allows you to build catchy opt-in forms, using which you can get more attention from the visitors. With Ninja Forms, no user will miss out your subscription form. Thanks to a wide range of visual elements available for free, you can boost your email subscribers.
7. Smush
Your website might use the most creative and beautiful photos of the world, but does it really make sense if they are too heavy? No user will wait for your pictures for longer than 10 seconds, sticking around to see them. No visitor will fall in love with engaging animated effects if they take too long to load.
Search engine spiders give preference to pages with highly optimized visual content. That’s why image optimization is what you simply cannot live without.
Using Smush, you can resize, compress, and optimize your images for a quick load. Important to mention, this WordPress plugin uses its own servers for the compression. As a result, your images load quickly, without giving up their original quality or slowing down your website.
Over to you
When your blogging career just starts out, it might seem overwhelming to find your audience and make it fall in love with your content. From image galleries to contact forms and author boxes, there’s so much that needs to be done to build a perfect site!
Given the variety of choices available, it’s understandable if you feel a bit overwhelmed about choosing the best WordPress plugins to go for. Hopefully, the list of the above tools for enhancing visual attractiveness of your site will help you succeed as a blogger.
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