11 Must-Have Plugins for Your Freelance Writer Website

Very often, once people have installed WordPress or a bunch of plugins, they don’t update them at all. Doing this poses a huge security risk and can also slow down your site.

Keeping all the plugins and WordPress is easy. And with a little help from Easy Updates Manager, this task becomes even easier.

I have used this free tool on this blog, and I love it. It helps me to keep my plugins and my WordPress up-to-date with little effort.

You are probably thinking the same way I did before: “My web host already takes backups for me. So why should I bother with a backup plugin?”

Well, the level of backups and the user experience of working with backups depends on your web host. 

For instance, do they only backup your database but not files? Or, how easy or difficult is it to restore data from your backups?

Picture this scenario:

If your site crashes, and it takes 45-minutes to get a hold of the customer support, you could be losing money.

Can you afford that?

With a backup plugin, you could define your backup schedules and where to store the backups. Restoring the files (or even a website) would happen much faster than with the help of a web host. 

The backup plugin I’m currently using is the free version of UpdraftPlus. There is also the premium version of the tool, but I haven't invested in it (at least yet).

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You don’t want your website to slow down in front of potential clients because, in that case, you are driving them away.

But there are some ways to tackle this issue.

First, you should invest in a web hosting company with high performance. My recommendations are SiteGround or WPX Hosting.

Once you have the necessary infrastructure in place, it’s time to look at your website and what you can fix there.

One great way to improve the performance of your website is to use a caching plugin like WP Rocket. 

You may also want to consider installing an image optimization plugin. This application may help with website performance, especially if you have a lot of images on your site.

After testing a few image optimizers, I chose the premium version of ShortPixel. Although I wasn’t keen on subscribing to yet another service, I’m happy that I did so.

With the help of WP Rocket, I was already able to improve the performance of my site:

Website security comes at many levels.

The first thing is to invest in a web host <aff link> that provides a secure environment for your website. That’s a great starting point, but it’s not enough.

You also need to secure your website, too. This task is easy to do with this simple yet useful plugin: WordFence.

If you have enabled comments on your blog, you need a plugin to prevent comment spam. And the best tool that does this is Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.

I noticed that as soon as I started my blog, the number of comment spam exploded. And let’s be honest; I have better things to do than managing spam comments.

A portfolio page is one of the most important pages you can have on your freelance writer website. It helps you to showcase the best work you have done, and it improves your credibility in front of potential clients.

There is no one stopping you from creating a portfolio page without any plugins, with HTML and CSS. But why make things harder for yourself?

Instead, why not display your stellar content pieces with a plugin instead? You can do this, for instance, with WP Portfolio.

WP Portfolio enables you to show the websites you have published blog posts on. 

The plugin also supports the Shrink The Web integration. With this feature, it can generate the thumbnail of a website based on the URL you have defined in the settings.

On top of a portfolio page, what’s another high selling point of your freelance writing services? The raving testimonials from your clients.

One way to add testimonials to your website is by using a plugin called Strong Testimonials.

With this plugin, adding and managing testimonials is easy. 

Writing high-quality content on your freelancer blog may come easily for you, but great content is not enough.

Why?

Because if no one can find the content your content, it’s almost the same as if it didn’t exist. That’s why you need to optimize your content for search engines.

I have used a couple of SEO plugins before, but the one I like is RankMath. It’s an application that makes your SEO efforts simpler. 

For instance, it shows all the different points you have to address with your posts with red icons. The items that are Ok are shown in green:

If your freelance writer website has a blog, you want to install a social sharing plugin. This tool helps you to spread the word about your content, with the help of your readers. 

The social sharing tool that I’m currently using is Grow. 

It’s a lightweight plugin, and you can add beautiful sharing images on your website easily. You can also decide where to place those sharing images.