A website is only as good as it’s plugins. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration – truthfully, a website is really only as good as the person behind it. But whether you’re a fashion blogger, or you’re doing what I did and starting up a clothing brand online, having the right plugins is SUPER important.
Plugins are all about giving your visitors the best possible experience on your site. Since you’re trying to sell online, it’s pretty safe to say you need your visitors to like you. Don’t neglect the plugins!
For WordPress users, these are the best WordPress plugins for fashion bloggers, and clothing brands (and many of them… honestly… are important plugins for EVERY website owner).
1. All In One SEO Pack or Yoast
These 2 free plugins provide you just about the same thing. So just pick one. But you absolutely need a comprehensive SEO enhancer on your website!
If you’re not abundantly familiar with the term SEO, this stands for Search Engine Optimization, and essentially means making Google, Yahoo, and Bing like you. A lot. By maintaining proper formatting and design on your website, your site will gain better and better approval with search engines, and this will result in your being found for the many different keywords people are searching.
All In One SEO and Yoast give you a kind of backdoor to each of your posts, keeping track of how well your content matches Google’s standards, and how you need to tweak things. You can also easily add those intimidating technical parts like meta tags and sitemaps right in the plugin. Just select it in WordPress, in the back door of your website, and scroll through the plugin. You’ll find all the necessary SEO tweaking options.
A Google friendly site, and a profitable site, aren’t separable after all.
2. Social Warfare
One of the MOST essential things for a website of any kind is its shareability. Social shares give your content credibility, reach, and traffic. The more your content is shared, the more you make sales and expand your influence.
I knew from the start that I needed social sharing capabilities on my WordPress site – all the best blogs had it! – but I’ll admit, it was a nightmare trying to find a good one. The problem is that most of the social share plugins on WordPress dramatically slowed down my site. I was horrified to find that my load time was lagging multiple seconds longer, and then when I removed my old social share plugin… my website suddenly sped back up.
Luckily, a fellow blogger from the incredible Wealthy Affiliate community gave me a tip while I was lamenting my situation online, and they introduced me to social warfare. It’s all I use now. Social warfare has both a free option, and a paid one (it only costs $29 yearly, so it’s not a rough investment). It provides not only a wide range of social share buttons for your site (Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, etc.), but it also provides social proof (displaying how many shares you’ve had to build credibility), customizable tweets that you can even paste in your blog content to emphasize your quotes, customizable pins for your readers to share, and the whole 9 yards.
The best thing about Social Warfare is that they take site speed VERY seriously. It’s a plugin that’s designed to not slow down your site. That’s the only kind of plugin I would ever recommend to you guys, and the only kind I would ever use.
3. MiloTree
Speaking of socializing your website – just as Social Warfare is perfect for making your content shareable, MiloTree makes you followable. Building your following is practically more important than getting traffic. By turning your website visitors into consistent followers, you establish free advertising.
MiloTree is a plugin that creates a pop up, which you can customize with words and images to invite your website visitors to follow you. It may be an invitation to sign up for your email newsletter (with a free e-book to give them some extra incentive), but it’s even easier to build a Pinterest and Instagram following with MiloTree.
MiloTree costs $9 a month, so it’s not a bank breaker, and it gives your website exactly what it needs to grow a following.
4. EWWW Image Optimizer
Remember that word optimization? Here it is again. NO one in internet marketing can ever forget it. EWWW Image Optimizer is a free WordPress plugin that automatically optimizes every image that you upload to make your website stay SEO friendly.
Images done wrong can slow down your site, make it look sloppy, damage your mobile friendliness, and create a whole slew of other disasters. EWWW is a passive little plugin that helps by switching every image into the ideal format for you, reshaping where necessary, and generally maintaining good imagery on your website.
I love it because it takes the stress out of image optimization for me, which is tedious stuff without a good free plugin like EWWW
5. PROOF
Back to the importance of making your website social. Social Warfare helps people share your content. MiloTree helps people follow your content. PROOF is the perfect completion.
PROOF is a little startup innovator from Silicon Valley, California, and they’re changing the present and future of marketing tactics. Social proof is the most subtle, but most powerful psychological marketing in existence. PROOF is a plugin that casually informs your website visitors when other visitors are reading or purchasing. It’s the most powerful endorsement you can get. When a webstore visitor sees that other visitors are liking your stuff enough to buy it, it reassures them that buying is worth it.
On top of this, human beings are (for better or worse) very drawn to conformity. We want to be a part of a community. We want to fit in. And as a result, when people can see that other people are purchasing something, or following something, they also want to follow.
This is the effect that social proof has on marketing, and has been tested to boost sales with incredible consistency. Check out PROOF. It may give your fashion blog or brand a boost straight to the moon.
Give Your Website An Edge
Plugins are a funny thing. They seem like the smallest, most insignificant things. I forget mine are there a lot of the time, and just work on my content and my social media presence. But my WordPress website would be nowhere without my plugins.
I had a lot of guidance in Wealthy Affiliate, and a lot of help from YouTube videos, but I also had my share of plugin fails that slowed my website back to the stone age. So it’s EXTREMELY important you pick the right plugins for your website.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments – I’ll get back to you!
This is a very helpful post. I use about 4 of the plugins you mentioned in your post. I love the all in one SEO. It makes putting the meta title and meta description so much easier. I also use the social warfare and I absolutely love the look of that plugin on my website. I wish I would have known some of these plugins before because I wasted a lot of time searching for good plugins. I appreciate your time for putting this article together. Very helpful and to the point. Thank you for sharing! keep up with the good work.
Hello Hong, thanks for commenting! I’m glad you found it helpful.
Also excited that you’ve found some of these plugins! Social Warfare was totally a life saver. Or more like a bandwidth saver. My website was running horribly for slow for a couple of WEEKS before I found Social Warfare.
All In One SEO is also fantastic because of how it consolidates the meta titles and descriptions in that way. It also makes linking to Pinterest, Google Search Console, Bing, and others much easier.
After reading your article I have to say that I’m really interested in this Social Warfare plugin you’ve got for your WordPress setup – it’s the type of thing I’ve been looking for for quite some time now.
I currently use a free social buttons plugin that sort of floats at the side of the screen (and tends to need updating once a week for some reason!).
Anyway, I’ve noticed on other people’s sites that they have a social share counter on/above their buttons – makes the whole site seem more professional and successful.
If I opt to go for the fully paid version of this plugin – would they also offer support included in the $29 price?
Hey Chris, thanks for dropping by!
Social Warfare was an exciting discovery for me too! It’s the only social share plugin I found that didn’t slow down my site brutally. My last one made my site drag.
The pro plan is a good investment, it gives you that support, it allows you to add other share buttons beyond the usual 6. Reddit, Tumblr, Email, etc. And it has social proof, and allows your website visitors to turn any of your website images into pins for them to share.
To be honest my website is not a fashion blog but I found your article extremely helpful. I have been using some of the plugins you recommended and all of them are superb. You have mentioned Proof and the way you have described it is just mind blowing. I think this is the thing my website has been missing and I will definitely install it. Thanks for the great post and be sure I will be back for more
Hey Larry, I’m glad you found it helpful!
PROOF blew my mind too when I first discovered it. It’s actually worked on me before, while shopping someone else’s products, so I got to be my own example.