5 Free WordPress Plugins That’ll Improve Your Blog’s Usability

In one of our previous articles, we talked about the best recipe card plugins to use for your Foodica-based website.

But what if you want to extend the functionalities of your website with other awesome features that will increase shares or boost your subscribers list?

Fortunately, WordPress lets you choose from a really large variety of plugins intended to make the life of a blogger much easier. And we can definitely say that a plugin in need is a plugin indeed.

Scrolling through some of our customers’ websites we found a bunch of plugins that proved to be super compatible with Foodica.

Read below to learn some tricks on how to improve your website with some simple and free WordPress plugins.

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Top 5 Free WordPress Plugins

1. Social Warfare

Social Media is a very important platform these days, where you can interact with your subscribers and promote your posts.

Use the Social Warfare plugin to add a sticky bar with social media share buttons on all of your posts. This way, the readers can share your article to a various amount of social media networks and at any point in the process of reading.

We’ve got this trick from the Kitchen Swagger blog and it seems to perfectly work with Foodica. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be very invasive and definitely doesn’t meddle with the reader’s experience.

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2. Hello Bar

HelloBar is a platform that helps you improve the effectiveness of your website by showing the right message at the right time to your website visitors.

This service is designed to greet your readers with some attention grabbing bars or pop-ups, thus converting them into subscribers or even customers. The HelloBar plugin allows you to easily add one or several HelloBar features to your WordPress blog.

See it in action on Nathalie’s Food and Health blog. Notice the sticky Subscribe bar at the top of the website, the Follow Me popup that appears on the right while scrolling and the Subscribe popup window when you keep scrolling to the bottom of the website.

If HelloBar didn’t convince you, feel free to use an alternative like SumoMe. It also has a WordPress plugin available and it’s free. The plugin supports popups, a highlighter to ease up the process of sharing quotes from your website, an integrated image sharer and real-time visitors tracking. Many other goodies are also included.

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3. Responsive Vector Maps

The Responsive Vector Maps plugin is perfect for travel bloggers. It allows creating responsive vector maps for any WordPress site and linking specific parts of a map to categories or single posts.

This plugin is very flexible and any website owner can make a good use of its responsiveness — as it adapts to any device — and zoom capabilities. It has a customizable look and includes shortcodes that can be added within posts. There is also a widget available to add maps in any widget area from the website. Foodica includes lots of widget areas like homepage, sidebar, footer and even on single posts. No wonder these two work like a charm together.

We absolutely love how Amanda from the Amanda Viaja blog used this plugin on her Foodica based website. She added the vector maps instead of the main slider thus conferring the website an attractive and original look. It makes you want to click-click-click on it, doesn’t it?

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4. Shortcodes Ultimate

With Shortcodes Ultimate  you can easily create tabs, buttons, boxes, different sliders, responsive videos and much more.

For example, here is how Irini from IriSpiti blog added some specific icons to her recipes description by combining them with the built in Foodica recipe shortcodes.

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5. myStickymenu

Sticky menus very popular among our customers’ requests. This feature can be enabled in Foodica with the myStickymenu plugin. It will make your menu or header sticky on the top of any page, after a desired number of pixels when scrolled.

Also, it has proven to increase the usability and page views of the website since the menu is always sticked to the top of the page.

See it in action on the DiversaMenteLatte blog. Since this plugin is very customizable, the sticky menu looks just like the native Foodica menu.

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These are the plugins that cover the basic extended possibilities for your blog. We really think that the above recommendations will spice up your blog. Just install the ones that winked at you and see the difference. Also, make sure to share with us your opinion afterwards!

If you have a favorite plugin that proved to work very well with Foodica and made your blogging life much easier, share it with us in the comments below.

Happy blogging!

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