If you feel like you don’t have enough hours in the day (like most of us) then you need these must have WordPress plugins that will help with productivity. We all get the same amount of time each day, but what matters most is what we do with that time every day. If you don’t make the most of it or you get lost in tasks that seem to have no end, your day can get away from you.
How important Is productivity?
Distractions are stealing time from us every day. We need all the help that we can get to stay productive and maintain our ability to get things done by specific times. The world operates on deadlines and that means you have to be productive as much of the time as possible.
It takes an average of about 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption, according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine.
Instead of technology being something that distracts us, we can use technology to get things done. The plugins below help with multiple angles and deal with things that might normally eat up our time. In this case, instead of figuring out how to get more done, we are figuring out how to get more done for us. These tools work to increase our ability to get things done without adding more work to our plate.
1. Broken link checker
Is there anything more boring and time-consuming than checking for broken links? Unlikely. Instead of either putting it off or combing through every page of your site trying to figure out where the broken links are, you can install Broken Link Checker and let it do the work for you.
Broken Link Checker monitors your blog and looks for broken links. If any are found, it will alert you of the problem. Not only can you check links throughout posts, comments, pages and your blogroll, but you can also check through any custom fields that you have created.
It will detect broken links but it also detects missing images and redirects. You can choose to be notified through your dashboard or through email.
If you want to use any of the other options, you can block search engines from following broken links, make the broken links display differently on your site and more.
The hours that you were going to sit there sifting through your WordPress site checking links can be spent on another project or doing something else productive like sitting by the pool.
2. WP-Smush.it
Our websites are filled with images and that can mean spending a lot of time going through and optimizing them so they don’t bog down our websites. Many people do not have Photoshop to use the batch automation and even if you do have it, it can be a total annoyance working with photos.
You can now use WP-Smush.it that runs every image that you load through the service.
3. What does it do?
Strips meta-data from JPEGs, optimizes JPEG compression, converts some GIFs to PNG and strips unused colors from index images. It does all of this without compromising your image quality. You still get the same crisp, clear image, but without all of the extra baggage that weighs it down.
Can you imagine how long that would take you?
4. Revive old post
Have you ever written an amazing piece of content, promoted it, saw how much people loved it and then totally forgot about it? It’s easy to do. We are all focused on new. New theme. New blog content. New plugs. While new is great, why not get some value out of something that you already have?
You can use Revive Old Post plugin to re-share content from your blog or “recycle” it. When you do this, you allow people to enjoy your content again and gain more visitors to your website. If it is a popular evergreen topic, you could get traffic to this post for years. Sharing it will help you keep it alive.
5. Rel nofollow check box
If you have paid ads or affiliate links on your blog, you need to make sure that those links are nofollow links. Nofollow basically means (this link doesn’t count for SEO).
If you do not nofollow your affiliate links or paid ads, you can get penalized by Google.
To do this easily, install the Rel Nofollow Checkbox plugin and you will be able to click a link that adds the nofollow code for you.
6. Easy updates manager
If you have multiple WordPress sites and you need to make sure that you can keep them all updated, you can use Easy Updates Manager. This plugin allows you to update multiple sites that you own in order to keep from having to log into every website and do the updates.
The good news is that you can choose each update that you want to do or unselect the ones that you do not want updated giving you full control over the process.
Conclusion
In a busy world, we need all the help that we can get. The above plugins are great shortcuts for tasks that could otherwise take us hours to complete on our own. If you go through the WordPress plugins store, you will find very quickly that there is a plugin for almost anything that you could hope to find.