Are you a digital publisher? If so, you won’t want to miss these essential WordPress plugins for online magazines.
WordPress offers more features and flexibility than any other content management system, but if you’re using the core software without any plugins, then you’re still missing out on valuable functionality. With the right plugins, magazine publishers can enhance the user experience and generally improve the way their websites perform.
WordPress plugins can do everything from improving SEO to optimizing images and strengthening website security. Once they are added to a publisher’s website, they often run in the background. That means publishers can access the extended functionalities without changing the way they manage their publications on a day-to-day basis.
With thousands of plugins to choose from, the WordPress Plugin Directory can easily become overwhelming. To help sort through the clutter, we have put together a definitive guide to the essential WordPress plugins for online magazines.
Top WordPress Plugins for Online Magazines
Starbox
Do you have a team of writers publishing content on your website? If so, check out the Starbox WordPress plugin. With the Starbox plugin, you can create author boxes for each writer who publishes content on your website, so readers know who is behind their favorite stories. Starbox takes the author boxes on standard WordPress websites up a notch, with the ability to choose from professionally-developed themes and landscaping. Add social links to encourage readers to follow your writers on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Each writer can have a different set of social profiles added to his or her author box. Author boxes can be placed at the top or bottom of articles. You can even create special pages for your writers with links to all their most popular stories.
Edit Flow
Is effective team collaboration an issue that you’re working to improve? Edit Flow has a solution designed exclusively for publishers who run their websites on the WordPress platform. With the Edit Flow WordPress plugin, you can collaborate with your writers and editors from within WordPress. Review a team calendar to get a month-by-month look at upcoming content. Define the stages of your workflow with a “custom statuses” feature. Edit Flow supports threaded commenting in the admin for private discussions between writers, editors, and publishers. The plugin can also be used to keep track of important details with editorial metadata.
AMP for WP
AMP stands for “accelerated mobile pages,” and it’s a website publishing technology developed by Google that makes websites lightweight and fast-loading. The AMP for WP plugin automatically adds AMP functionality to WordPress websites. Although a number of AMP plugins are available in the WordPress Plugin Directory, AMP for WP has become popular among online magazines because of the control it gives publishers. For example, magazine publishers who use AMP for WP can still run display advertising on their AMP pages. They can also add analytics. AMP for WP has an AMP themes section with free and paid designs.
Ditty News Ticker
Want a way to let readers know about breaking news on your website? The Ditty News Ticker is a data display plugin that magazine publishers can use to add custom news tickers to their websites. News tickers are added through shortcodes, direct functions, or in a custom ticker widget, and they can be placed nearly anywhere on your website. Ditty News Ticker has three default ticker modes: scroll mode, rotate mode, and list mode. Paid extensions can be added to automate extra ticker modes, like Twitter ticker, Facebook ticker, and RSS ticker.
WordPress Popular Posts
WordPress Popular Posts is one of the essential WordPress plugins for online magazines. Publishers who add the plugin can create customizable widgets that display their most popular articles. They can also setup different widgets with their own settings, which is useful for online magazines with multiple sections. WordPress Popular Posts will rank a publisher’s most popular posts by a number of different metrics, including page views, number of comments, or average views per day. Because similar plugins have been known to hog resources and slow down WordPress websites, this plugin includes advanced caching features and the ability for publishers to delete old views data periodically.
Jetpack – Related Posts
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that you’ll see mentioned frequently in lists of the top WordPress plugins for online magazines. If you are already using the Jetpack plugin, then you’ll want to try out the Related Posts module. The Related Posts module displays related links below the articles on your website. So a visitor who reads an article about a local artist, for example, will see links to other stories about artists that have been published by your writers. Publishers retain full control over how links are displayed on their websites when they use Related Posts.
YOP Poll
Interactive polls are a proven way for online magazine publishers to increase engagement on their websites. YOP Poll gives you an easy way to create and integrate polls and surveys on your WordPress site. Published surveys can be managed from within the WordPress dashboard. YOP Poll stands out among poll plugins for its advanced features, like the ability for publishers to create polls that include both single and multiple answers. Publishers can also customize how they sort poll information and manage results. The plugin includes a widget functionality that ensures polls fit nicely with most existing website themes.
Do you know of an essential plugin that’s missing from this list? Get in contact and let us know what’s on your list of must have WordPress plugins for online magazines.
