WordPress is one of, if not the, most used platform for blogs and websites to use, simply because it is very clean, easy to use and is an open source platform (with millions of ‘plugins’ available to improve your website). The problem with having such a large choice of plugins, though, is in choosing which ones you should use for your website. Using none and you will limit the features your website will have while installing too many and you can cause problems and slow down your website too. Therefore, with this in mind, here are some must use WordPress plugins everyone with a content mill using the platform should incorporate, based on experience.

#1 Akismet Anti-Spam

When your website starts to gain a large amount of traffic, you will be surprised how many comments bots can produce onto a website. For example, when one of my websites was recieving 100,000 views a month, I was roughly getting 20 spam comments a day I would have to manually check as spam. However, with Akismet Anti-Spam, it automatically does this so the only comments you have to approve are from genuine people.

#2 Similar post-title checker

The problem with content mills is that the number of articles on the website just keeps increasing and increasing and increasing. With this, how can you make sure that you are not writing about something that is already on the website and, if you are, make it different to a previous similar article?
A not-well-known plugin that I have found extremely useful is the similar post-title checker, which checks your post’s title as you type it into a new post, and shows the similar titles for articles that have already been published on the site. From this you can decide to put a twist on your article to make it different or pick a completely new article that has not been wrote about: so the content categories being published onto your website are not being duplicated.

#3 Copyscape Premium

If you have freelancers working for you, you are going to have to put a certain amount of trust with them that they do not copy content from another website. In order to truly know how good the content is from freelancers that work for you and that it has not been copied, the plugin to use for this is Copyscape Premium. What Copyscape Premium does is check the whole internet for content matches with articles on the internet already. If it finds your content is already word-for-word on the internet, it will flag it.

Unfortunately, it is not a nice plugin to have since it provides the view to your freelancing staff that you do not trust them. However, it is always better to be safe than sorry which is exactly what this plugin is about. Yes, it does cost 5 cents per search of an article. However, how much damage could a plagarised article do to a website’s SEO?