There are many plugins for WordPress, millions in fact, but you should focus less on the bells and whistles and more on what they will provide your visitors and customers. Sometimes the best option is to buy a paid plugin instead of trying 3-6 “free” plugins that may allow hackers in, have no support, or just disappear.
We are going to dive into many plugins that I have found to be exceedingly helpful to my niche websites to help them gather more clicks and more purchases over time. This ends up allowing the plugin to basically pay for itself and gives you better options for many manual tasks.
If you are looking to build your niche site check out our post. We explore the steps you need to take to get a successful launch and why it is a patience game.
One of the hardest things you will find about building a large website is that linking between posts can become very difficult as you may not even remember an old post you wrote.
LinkWhisper is a plugin for WordPress that was built to help you identify other locations in your content that you may want to link to from posts on your website as this helps build up your site.
This is not a free plugin and I feel it more than pays for itself in the time savings that I get from not having to research my own posts to build linking. This saves me hours each week of time that frees me up to generate content for you and my niche visitors. Check out more on LinkWhisper here…
For most websites you will want to have a plugin that can take all your website files, compress them, and serve them with less requests and time. This is why I choose WP Rocket as it is also the most friendly for someone to set up that isnt a web guru.
Where WP Rocket can shine for you though is in the generation of Critical CSS for the above the fold content on your website, this is where you can get some amazing speed benefits that will bring you closer to the Google Page Speed 100/100 score and lower overall time to load.
There are other free options out there but they take hours of time to properly configure and some need a high techie degree of knowledge, anything I can do to shave setup time I will do as content is king choose WP Rocket. Check out more on WP Rocket here…
I would never build an Amazon niche site without having Amalinks Pro installed to help build value for my visitors. Amalinks Pro has a large base of options available to present data in ways to pull a button press from the visitor.
They also have an amazing Table Builder that allows you to build out a list of a few items and show the visitor the best parts of each item. Then they also built in responsive abilities as each theme has different widths so you can set a column to hide or show on each device.
Now with the Version 2.0 release in September 2020 they have added a long list of customizable Product Showcases that allow you to put the product front and center along with all the images Amazon provides via the API!
Unlike other plugins they also have the ability to just pull product images via the API that allows for the only legal use within your content as they aren’t copied and keep with that need to be safely within the Amazon Affiliate TOS. Check out more on AmalinksPro here…
As an affiliate marketer in your niche you will want to start building an email list as soon as you can start getting a decent level of traffic. This allows you more ability to send traffic to specific posts or deals when they occur and not rely on them finding your site in search.
OptinMonster has many options to help get those people to click and sign up, from in content, end content, popup, and many more types of ways to introduce forms to help get them into your system. Check out more on OptinMonster here…
While there are many forms available for WordPress they typically fall into two camps, simple to setup but incredibly ugly, or impressively difficult to setup and still ugly. Both of these also being large in size and load their files on all pages regardless of whether a form exists on the page.
Then I found Fluent Forms which is built to provide you ANY type of form you would need for your site, from a simple contact me to overly complex system setup or configuration emails all with a simple visual interface to build them. Check out more on Fluent Forms here…
For a niche website where I believe the content to be highly shareable I always use NovaShare as it is exceedingly lightweight and provides everything you want in a sharing plugin without all the extra bells and whistles that many of these plugins morph into over time. Check out more on NovaShare here…
For many bloggers you are wanting to be able to check your current stats within your WordPress blog and not have to go to yet another website and choose which data you want to see. If this is you then MonsterInsights is the perfect plugin for you as it shows all stats right there on your home area.
Additionally it doesn’t offer only showing you the data but it also provides you enhanced link tracking that can give you more analytics that you don’t get without a plugin like MonsterInsights. Check out more on MonsterInsights here…
If you don’t go with the MonsterInsights option above and don’t need event tracking then you would like to install a free plugin that is slim and small and speeds up the tracking to keep your fully loaded times down.
Flying Analytics by Gijo is totally free and allows you to inline your Google Analytics to help minimize the impact on your page loading speed where the traditional Google code can let you down.
Another excellent plugin from Gijo is called Flying Pages and it is built to help you start preloading the next page on your site so the change will be perceived as faster by the visitor. This can mean a big difference if you have heavy image pages that may take a long time to load as it is loading while they are preparing to click.
I personally set this plugin to only start a preload on mouse hover to allow page testing toole like GTMetrix to run or they will try to load your entire site and show you some fake abysmal loading time, I would suggest you do the same.
WordPress doesn’t come with a sidebar that features “sticky” positions, a sticky sidebar position means the little item stays on the side of your screen even as you scroll down the website keeping it always in the users view.
One of the most lucrative ad positions you can have on your desktop for advertising is a floating sidebar, this allows an ad to be in view for the entire time someone is reading your post and will add significant income into your ad revenue.
Additionally a fixed sidebar, if you don’t run ads, is a perfect place for you to put your information product or email optin that will follow them down your entire post. This is an excellent way to add to your overall income on your site and to help you build signups.
There are so many plugins it is easy to get lost in the maze while trying to find the best ones for your specific niche WordPress website. The above are the tools I use on almost every project to help me build fast sites and to get the clicks to Amazon and other stores.
I have a membership option that is available to provide access to much more information and niches to help you make a strong start to your affiliate marketing career, check it out today in the upper right hand corner!
This is a core plugin that I run on every site as it increases the ability to keep people on the site as long as possible, you should too!
Scriptless Social Sharing is a simple and easy way to add the main social sharing icons to your blog without causing the hated slow loading.
I get irritated when I link back to my old posts and I get a pingback I have to delete from within comments, this will help you disable them overall.
You can have a simple bar with a call to action without installing plugins that may make your site insecure, instead build on with code snippets.
Adding share icons to your site can be frustrating due to lack of support or the addition of too many misc features, Novashare is built for speed and need.
I think that it can be used to help any affiliate marketer make a solid website that is visually stunning and helpful towards getting those conversions!