5 WordPress plugins to keep your site more efficient

I am all about efficiency and workflows, throughout everything in my life. They keep me sane with how many wheels are in motion everywhere.

When it comes to my WordPress sites, sites I manage for friends and family, and even the Imagely site, there are things I do by way of specific plugins that keep my efficiency nice and lean.

So today I am going to share 5 WordPress plugins to keep your site more efficient.

Many of which are through what I like to call semi-automation.

The first, and most obvious to many, would be Yoast SEO.  These days, with how fast Google and other search engine algorithms change, you need to be using the best of the best.

Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for a reason. Yoast works closely with Google to ensure its feature set is ideal for every WordPress site.

But also - it allows you to create pre-configured settings for every post, page, category, tag, author, and other taxonomies. You can pre-configure images for social media and much more.

By taking advantage of this, it means you do not always have to remember to search and create a manual meta for every single item on your site. You can effectively semi-automate this process.

Speaking of social media - At Imagely and for my photography business, Buffer is my go-to choice for social scheduling. By using the WP to Buffer Pro plugin I can connect my site to Buffer and in turn, automatically post immediately, and schedule a post to Buffer.

You can basically create a month of queued up content in your Buffer account based on 1 single blog post, or a page.

An extra cool part is the re-buffering feature inside the plugin, allowing it to re-post content after a specific calculation is made. For example, after 90 days add to the bottom of your Buffer queue with a specific re-sharing message.

This is social media efficiency at its best.

Remember this is semi-automation so you still have to reply to comments and whatnot manually. Plugins cannot and should not do this for you. 

Staying in this trend is a similar plugin for something Buffer doesn’t currently integrate with: Google My Business. This is super important for SEO these days and for mobile browsing in general. Google My Business allows for posts and announcements with images and video.

This too can be semi-automated using a plugin.

Post to Google My Business Premium is a plugin that can automatically send an excerpt of your new post to your GMB profile. That way your new post is instantly at the top of a relevant search query on Google and it will send your Featured Image over.

It can even re-post historical content in the same way WP to Buffer Pro can to social media.

The next plugin is one that will save you time and headaches, especially if more than yourself creates content on your site. Optimizing images for the web can be a hassle, especially if you are uploading a lot.

We know all about this at Imagely since our plugin, NextGEN Gallery, is designed to manage and display thousands upon thousands of images. Images can be quite large - and if not optimized before uploading, you or your site users could easily be uploading 15 MB images and not realize it.

Plugins like ShortPixel and Imagify come in real handy to not only reduce the pixel dimensions of an uploaded image but also compress it with one of three levels of compression quality.

This could effectively bring a 15 MB image down to 115 KB depending on what is being done. That’s space saving and that’s site speed optimization fully automated.

The last of the 5 plugins I want to share is less about automation and purely time management. If your site is like Imagely’s then you have a lot of content in the queue. Maybe they’re drafts, pending or scheduled posts.

If you are like me, who is a content manager and hates looking at the standard post screen then check out Editorial Calendar.

It is extremely basic with only one function - manage your content queue in a drag and drop calendar view. With it you can move posts around to different dates and even choose the time to post right there without leaving. I can’t imagine how much time and sanity this has saved me over the years.

There are so many additional plugins and alternatives to the plugins I mentioned, which can make you more efficient. To recap, I strongly recommend considering:

• Yoast SEO
• WP to Buffer Pro
• Post to Google My Business Premium
• Either ShortPixel or Imagify
• WordPress Editorial Calendar

Give out the free versions of the plugins today.