Probably our most-asked-about plugin is the one we use for our email capture slideup. Drumroll please … it’s Dreamgrow’s Scroll Triggered Box.
The email capture box slides up from the bottom right-hand corner of the page whenever a visitor scrolls down 60 percent of the page’s height. If a visitor closes the box, they won’t see it again for 30 days. The box itself can be completely customized with whatever HTML text you want; we chose to sync it with our MailChimp list.
And all these numbers and options can be completely customized—scroll percentage, days hidden, position, width, colors, and more. You can even choose where the box is visible, e.g. frontpage, posts,and/or pages.
Price: Free
2. Digg Digg
There are a huge number of different plugins you can use to display social share buttons on your blog post. We’ve got a rooting interest in Digg Digg.
Digg Digg was built by our Buffer engineers a couple years back, and it’s been a staple on the Buffer blog ever since. What we’ve found most helpful with Digg Digg integration is the flexibility of where you can place the share buttons: floating to the left or right of the article (see our Open blog), pinned to the top or bottom of a blog post (see this Buffer Social blog), or manually wherever you wish inside your theme.
(While I’m thinking of it, I should mention that we’re often asked about the plugin that powers our author bio sections. Believe it or not, we don’t use a plugin for that! Our theme designers built the bios right into the template code.)
Price: Free
3. WordPress SEO by Yoast
Many SEO experts would recommend you grab an SEO plugin for your WordPress blog. Our go-to plugin isWordPress SEO by Yoast, which handles just about every element of SEO you could think of.
The most direct impact of this plugin on us writers is the SEO box beneath every post. Here we can choose our keyword for the post—a great tactic for staying focused on a topic—and add a custom title and description. The plugin will also show you in bright green/red text how your post stacks up based on the keyword you’ve entered.
Price: Free
4. Hello Bar
You’ve likely noticed the bright, orange bar welcoming you to the Buffer blog every morning. That’s the Hello Bar, an amazing tool for A/B testing different CTAs and power words—and a pretty great tool for collecting email addresses, too.
Via HelloBar, we collect over 400 email addresses each week on the Buffer blog. Along with the slideup, those two sources account for over half of our new email signups each week.
The WordPress plugin for Hello Bar is as simple as it comes: Simply download, install, and paste in your Hello Bar code. You can also signup for a free Hello Bar account and grab the embed code yourself. We found the plugin to be the easier way to go.
Price: Free
5. Disqus comments
One of the easiest (and prettiest) commenting systems we’ve found has been Disqus. The powerful Disqus system works right off your standard WordPress setup, allowing you to manage all comments neatly and quickly through the Disqus admin area or straight from the comments section on your blog.
We’ve run into a spate of comment spam on some of our old blog posts recently, and turning off comments for individual posts is as simple as two clicks on a drop-down menu.
Price: Free
6. WP Engine
We host the Buffer blog through WP Engine, and we get a lot more goodies from them beyond just hosting. WP Engine creates daily backups and one-click restores of the blog, manages all our major WordPress updates automatically, and provides security features to keep our blog safe.
While it’s not technically a plugin, WP Engine does add a little menu item to our WordPress sidebar, and we can quickly check there to see error logs, change some advanced settings, or log in to our WP Engine dashboard.
Price: Starting at $29 per month
7. Pin It Button for Images
Here’s one people seem to love: the Pin It Button for Images. This plugin adds a Pinterest Pin It button overlay on top of any image that appears in your blog post. Simple as that!
We’ve installed the plugin on the Buffer blog, and we’ve changed the settings so that the Pin It button only shows up when you add a specific CSS class to an image. You can also change the settings so that the button only shows on images on single posts, pages, index, category, and more.
Price: Free
8. Editorial Calendar
When Courtney and I were getting into the groove of posting to the Buffer blog, we found it helpful to stay organized with an editorial calendar. The Editorial Calendar WordPress plugin seemed to do the trick just fine. It grabbed all of our scheduled posts and drafts, and it placed them on a neatly organized calendar so we could see at-a-glance what content was coming up.
Perhaps my favorite feature of the plugin was the cool way you could drag and drop different stories around the calendar, and it would update not only the calendar but the post itself. It was a huge help for keeping all our content organized and our team in sync.
Price: Free
9. WP Hide Post
Most likely our least-known WordPress plugin, WP Hide Post does exactly what it says: It hides posts from the blog.
Of course, these posts are still visible if you navigate there directly. However, they won’t show up in RSS feeds or on the main index page of blog posts.
We use this plugin to publish marketing materials (case studies, interviews, etc.) that we might want to reference later with our outreach efforts or promotions. These materials typically don’t fit the content strategy we have on the blog, so we hide them from our standard publishing streams.
Price: Free
10. MyTweetLinks
Another plugin we keep in the toolbox (but you might not have seen lately) isMyTweetLinks. Think of this plugin as a soundbite source. You can enter a soundbite or quotable via the post editor, and this plugin will create a list of tweets to share and buffer at the end of your published post.
Price: Free