10 Most Important WordPress Plugins for Travel Blogs

As a travel blogger you don’t want to lose much time on every single thing you want to do in your blog.

If you are using WordPress as content management system (CMS), then you are lucky. Because even if you don’t have enough website design or development background, WordPress has founded great way to help you which is: WordPress plugins.

After you’ve learned how to start your journey with travel blogging, you’ll definitely want to customize your blog and apply the changes you want according to your needs.

WordPress plugins can help considerably and save your time and effort. At the same time, almost ALL WordPress plugins are easy to use.

Currently, WordPress has more than 25,000 plugins.

But don’t get confused. ?

This post will offer you a list of most important plugins that every travel blogger should has on his blog, with enough explanation about their functionality.

However, this still doesn’t mean that they are only for travel bloggers. Almost every blogger can use these plugins if they find that they need that.

But keep in mind that having lots of plugins on your blog might slow down your site’s load time. This is something you don’t want, because it will lead to less traffic.

1. Yoast SEO:

 

No matter what kind of websites you have, every website needs Yoast SEO.

80% of all websites today consider Google the most important source for traffic.

Social media is, no doubt, another significant source for traffic. But SEO is still the most important factor for a website’s growth.

If you ignore doing SEO in your blog could lead to losing big amount of visitors/traffic.

Yoast SEO does a lot of SEO work for you. You don’t even need to learn SEO in details, this plugin will get your back.

This plugin offers you recommendations on how to improve you writing as well as reminders if anything is missing, like page title and meta description. This will allow you to optimize the site map and readability of your blog and all in one place.

Yoast SEO also has a Google search result snippet preview. You get to see this preview when you fill out meta information. It shows you exactly how your article will look when someone searches for it on Google.

Yoast SEO comes with a lot of other features. For example, when you choose a focus keyword, Yoast SEO will analyzes the post content against that focus keyword and gives it a score (green, red, yellow etc) to let you know how good is it.

 

2. Akismet:

One of the most used WordPress plugins out there, and for great purpose.

We all know that spam is a nuisance. Akismet helps you to block spam comments on your blog (that could be hundreds in one day).

This will reduce the time you spent on deleting spam comments that can literally be hours when you have really big blog.

Spammy comments could be really harmful to your blog, because they could lead your website to be penalized by Google. In that case, your website could be removed from Google’s search results, which is something that you definitely don’t want.

Akismet work is to prevent that and remove the spammy hyperlinks and comments automatically. That’s why it is really important for any blog.

Installing and configuring the Akismet Plugin is easy. It will take less than 15 minutes to be finished.

 

3. W3 Total Cache:

W3 Total Cache has more than 1 million active installs with over 3,194 five-star ratings till now.

It is the most famous caching plugins for WordPress.

Bloggers utilize this plugin in order to ensure that their websites can deal with huge loads of traffic without crashing.

So, what is caching anyway?

Every time someone visits a website, the browser save data like images, CSS files, JavaScripts, etc in a temporary folder to enhance the website experience. That means: the next time someone visits, they don’t have to wait for internet to load the content. It will already be cached/saved in the browser.

This plugin contains 16 pages of settings. See this beginner’s guide on how to setup and configure W3 Total Cache. This will give you clear and detailed instructions.

4. Geo Mashup:

Geo Mashup helps you to give more information about the destinations you write about by creating placemarks on a Google map.

So, if you are a travel blogger who create in-depth destination posts, this plugin would be very useful to you.

Geo Mashup offers you the ability to add some geographical data to your WordPress posts, as well as create a customizable map using the Google Maps API anywhere into your site.

Popular features of Geo Mashup:

 

5. Editorial Calendar:

WordPress Editorial Calendar is a way to gives you an overview of your blog posts and when each post is scheduled to go live.

It is just the right solution publish articles on a strict schedule on your blog and let your followers know exactly when they can expect new content.

Why this is important?

Because Google rewards websites for being predictable.

That means, your website will get more traffic/visitors with time, which, in turn, means higher ranking on Google.

Editorial Calendar features includes:

 

6. CommentLuv:

CommentLuv is a blog commenting platform that allows commenters to link to their latest blog post on their website once they’ve written a comment which also drives traffic to their website, as well as to yours.

Besides the possibility of drawing more traffic to your blog, CommentLuv encourage visitors to comment.

How could this be beneficial to you?

The answer comes again from Google ranking factors.

There is a fact that says: blog comments generate more search traffic.

Neil Patel has published some data about that. He used Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to prove that approx. 26.7% of the keywords that were ranking in Google were from the comments section.

 

7. Shortcodes Ultimate:

Shortcodes Ultimate is one of the most used and highly rated free WordPress plugins.

If you want to dress up your blog by inserting tabs, rows, colored boxes or fixed buttons, then this plugin is made for you. It comes with over 40 free shortcodes which do all that and even more.

After you install and activating the plugin, you can go to Shortcodes > Available shortcodes. Here you can see an overview of available code that you can use in your posts and pages.

For example, I clicked on the tab: content, so I got all content-related shortcodes like this:

If you click on any box, you will get the code (like below) that you can even use separately – if you already have background about that.

 

8. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (by ExactMetrics):

Google Analytics tracking is an essential task to do if you are thinking to grow your website, and you definitely do.

So, if you don’t have an idea about it, we would suggest you check out Analytics Academy Courses by Google.

In fact, it is important to learn and understand what Google Analytics is about, because it is really easy to get confused if you don’t.

This plugin brings you deeper insights from Google, like who’s visiting your site, where they are from, what was the average session duration, what kind of device type they used, what demographic they are, if they’ve visited before and much more.

Moreover, you get all this info without affecting your website speed or WordPress security.

 

9. WP Smush:

As a travel blogger, you might need to upload many large photos. This can slow down your website and increase page loading time.

Therefore, to speed up load time you need to optimize your images first then upload them to your WordPress blog. WP Smush will do this mission for you.

This plugin will compress your photos automatically on upload. But not only this, it gives you the ability to batch compress previously uploaded photos saving up to 70% of the hosting space.

WP Smush does all that without losing image quality, through a feature called: Bulk Smush.

After you install and activate the plugin, you can go to Smush > Dashboard. Bulk Smush tab will let you know how many images/attachments you have that need to be optimized:

Make sure to read the functionality for each option in the settings and know exactly what they do – before you choose to activate or deactivate them.

You can see the difference in website speed after you use WP Smush by testing it with Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

 

10. WP Hide Post:

WP Hide Post plugin helps you to hide posts from selected pages in WordPress such as homepage, category archives, search results, and more.

Many travel bloggers need this feature, because they create some kind of content that doesn’t need to be seen by all of the readers.

This plugin even helps in keeping the structure of your website clean as you divide the posts between visible and invisible as you want.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you will see a new ‘Hide Posts’ section in the right column of the WordPress editor:

WP Hide Post can help your blog to earn money as well. If you want people to lick on a certain link (for example product pages, online course selling page, etc), it will be great to use this plugin to organize that.

Which plugins do you also suggest?

We make sure to update this post with new information regularly, so as each post on this blog.

If you have any suggestions for other plugins that that you think could be useful for travel bloggers, please let us know in comments section below.