The Best WordPress Plugins for Travel Blogger Websites

If you’re starting a travel blog with WordPress and are looking to find the best plugins to help you succeed, this list might be helpful. We visited the websites of the most popular and high ranking travel blogs and checked what plugins they were using and compared them with alternatives to come up with the list of the best essential plugins for travel blogger websites. Depending on the strategy you want to apply for your website, some plugins might be more useful than others, but usually for travel websites, you want to reach  a vast audience, engage them with useful content about the different destinations you write about and hopefully encourage your them to share that content. Some travel bloggers might rely on affiliate marketing other on selling their own products and you’ll see plugins on this list that will help either cases.

We will not include plugins that have a more vast usage and application and are less specific to travel blogging. We still recommend a lot of these plugins, like Yoast SEO, WP Super Cache and Google Analytics Dashboard for WP, since they are also essential, but we won’t include them. We’ll write about plugins that will be particularly useful for travel websites.

This list includes what we consider to be the best, either free or premium plugins.

Social Warfare

Social Warfare is the ultimate social sharing plugin for WordPress. It’s not just another sharing buttons plugin, it contains a lot more features that will help you in the social media fighting ground. Amazing social sharing icons and sharing count with tons of display options, content protection, share count recovery options, Google Analytics Integration and much more. It’s a premium plugin, but once you have this plugin, you won’t need any other social sharing plugin.

A lot of the big players are using this one:

• A Luxury Travel Blog
• Surf and Sunshine
• João Leitão Travel Blogger
• Leave Your Daily Hell
• Man on the lam
• Mummy Musings
• Young Adventuress

Interactive Geo Maps

Used by most of the top travel bloggers, the Interactive World Maps is a popular plugin that helps you display simple maps that can help your users understand where you’ve been and where you’re going to for example.
Interactive Geo Maps is its predecessor, built with better and more flexible maps. And it has a free version!
You can use it to showcase how much you’ve traveled or use it to redirect your users to content about a particular country or city. You can also display maps of individual countries like US Maps, to complement your posts and pages. All travel websites need to have a map and this plugin provides simple vector maps that will look great on your website.

Some examples of top bloggers using it:

• Everything Everywhere
• Nomadic Matt
• One Step 4 Ward
• The Blond Abroad
• The Planet D
• Camels and Chocolate
• I Am Aileen
• Ordinary Traveler
• Getting Stamped

Mailchimp

Having your visitors emails is vary valuable. It’s a lead, a way to bring them back to your website in the future, with a carefully crafted newsletter for example. Mailchimp is an email marketing service that will help you manage your emails and provide you with online marketing tools. Integrating your mailchimp account with WordPress is easy with this plugin. It will provide you sign-up forms which are well designed, user-friendly and optimized for all platforms.

Who’s using it?

• Stuck in Customs
• Lola Akinmade
• Hippie in Heels

Ninja Popups

Getting your users email is great, but what’s the best way to do it? Ninja Popups plugin will allow you to build non intrusive popups and customize them so they fit right in your website. Compatible with MailChimp and other platforms, it’s one of the most popular pop up builder plugins for WordPress. Also great to incorporate contact forms, information for users, social sharing tools and anything else that would require a popup.

Using it:

• We Blog the World

Amazon Associates Link Builder

If you want to monetize your website with amazon affiliate marketing and are part of the Amazon Associates program, then Amazon Associates Link Builder plugin is what you’ll need. It will allow you to quickly find the products you want to showcase and build the affiliate links easily.

Some bloggers using it:

• Stuck in Customs
• Travels of Adam

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Once your users land on an article of yours, you’ll want to keep them in your site by displaying related articules that might be interesting for them. Yet another related posts plugin is one of the plugins that will allow you to display related posts very easily. It’s not the only plugin used by the many travel blogger sites we checked, but it’s the best.

Using it:

• Uncornered Market
• Chris Guillebeau

Instagram Feed

If you’re sharing your travel photos on instagram, then Instagram Feed plugin is a mandatory plugin. It’s a free plugin with simple but powerful features. You can easily link to your instagram account and display your latest pictures on your website. Engage your audience with your pictures and potentially gain more followers on instagram.

Examples:

• Lola Akinmade
• Ordinary Traveler
• Points and Travel
• Hand Luggage Only
• Young Adventuress
• Camels and Chocolate

Slider Revolution

You want to cause an impression on your visitors and Slider Revolution is the best plugin to do it. Create amazing custom sliders, with tons of great options and responsive layouts. Use the power of beautiful images in your favor and place a great slider in your homepage or complement your blog posts with one. This plugin gained notorious popularity in the WordPress community and has raving reviews. It’s a premium plugin, but it’s worth every penny.

Check out some of the slides built using this plugin on these sites:

• Our Awesome Planet
• Camels and Chocolats
• Land Lopers
• I Am Aileen
• João Leitão Travel Blogger

Disqus

Disqus is a blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities. The Disqus plugin will allow you to have Disqus hosted comments on your website, that will get better indexed by search engines and are proven to increase engagement by users, due to it’s many features and social networks integration. Apart from that, it’s also amazing at preventing spam comments.

Who’s using it:

• Our Awesome Planet
• Hand Luggage Only

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