10 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Travel Blogs

If you’re a travel blogger or a travel agency owner, you might know that almost eight percent of travel planning is done online these days. 

Travelers use blogs and vlogs to plan trips online, making travel blogging more popular but competitive, so having the right tools is key to standing out.

If you’re using WordPress, you should consider using the right plugins to give your visitors a better user experience and easy access to your content. 

There are a handful number of WordPress plugins that will make your travel blog more lucrative and engaging. And the best part is that it will help you drive more traffic and boost your conversions. 

To help you choose the right plugins, we have made a list of 10 must-have WordPress plugins for Travel blogs. 

Now, let’s dive into the details of these plugins. 

1. Ultimate Blocks

Ultimate Blocks provides a variety of essential blocks, which makes it a must-have plugin for any WordPress blog. From table of contents to image slider, from content filter to click to tweet, it has everything you need to make your blog posts more lucrative and engaging.

It has more than 20+ custom blocks and many more blocks in the pipeline. It’s lightweight; you can enable or disable any individual block according to your needs. It’s also optimized for better SEO. 

However, the main feature of this plugin remains its blocks. One of the unique blocks is its schema-enabled Review block, which provides you a way to add a review box which in turn will help you to get rich snippets in Google Search. You can also add a Star Rating block to entertain your needs. The Content Filter block will let your visitors filter out any specific content according to their choice. 

Apart from these, Ultimate Blocks offers some essential blocks like –

Image Slider 
Table of Content
Click To Tweet 
Social Share 
Call To Action
Countdown
Testimonial

Key Features

Includes option to enable or disable blocks
Highly optimized for SEO
Fast and Lightweight
Schema Optimized
Compatible with Gutenberg
Schema-enabled review and FAQ

2. Rank Math

Rank Math is an all-in-one solution for your travel blog to rank higher in search engines. It has all the SEO features you need and will make it easy for you to optimize your content for SEO. 

It will help you by automatically running 30 favorable SEO tests to ensure your website has been configured appropriately. The plugin features an automatic, easy-to-setup process that, after installation, will verify your website’s settings and recommend the best-suited settings for your website. 

It will also help you to configure the site’s SEO, social profiles, webmaster profiles, and other SEO settings. It will help you to improve your post’s SEO by highlighting important information. It provides a preview of how your posts appear in SERPs, previews rich snippets, and will give you an idea of how your posts will look when the posts are shared on social media. 

Rank Math ensures its top-notch performance by continually introducing new functionalities now and then, and its team provides quick and accurate support to resolve the users’ issues.

Also Read: 7 Best WordPress SEO Plugins & Tools to Skyrocket Rankings

Key Features

Clean and Simple User Interface
Provides Complete Control via the Modular Framework
Optimized for Fast Speed
SEO Analysis Tool
404 Pages Monitoring
Rich Snippets Support
Compatible with Gutenberg and Classic Editor

3. HTML5 Maps

A travel blog should have directions on where your visitors might visit. HTML5 Maps provides a colorful interactive map to embed on your WordPress blog or website. 

HTML5 Maps has several high-quality predefined maps for you to choose including the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, etc. It also continually adds new maps and regions for you to use.  If you want your website equipped with more geographically-related content and an effective navigation system, you should think about HTML5 Maps.

This plugin is very responsive and easy to set up. You need to add the shortcode provided by the plugin to any page and find your desired maps on the website within a few seconds. You can also add popups and international side panels near the map.        

Also Read: 7 Best Interactive Image & Mapping WordPress Plugins

Key Features

Responsive and Color-customized Region
Interactive Maps of a given country and region
Clickable Regions
Customizable Landing Page Links
Shortcode
Popup Windows to show selected regions

4. Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon is an easy, fast, reliable, and effective way of boosting your website’s social media following. It embeds your social media feeds on your website and displays your content from your social media platforms on your website. 

Smash Balloon provides a way to integrate with four of the most prominent social media giants: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. With Gutenberg editor support, it comes up with the easiest ways to set up customized social feeds on your website within a few seconds. The customization option for your social feed is impressive. You can choose to design the feed with built-in styles and layout options. You can also let the plugin match the style of the feed with your current theme. Also, with a robust backup system and innovative issue-reporting alerts, it will reduce your worries a bit.  

Smash Balloon also minimizes external requests and locally optimizes images, which helps gain lightning-fast loading speed. And in terms of improving your SEO, Smash Balloon will do it with its dynamically embedded content. 

Also Read:

Best WordPress Facebook Feed Plugins
Best WordPress Instagram Feed Plugins

 Key Features: 

Feed Creator Wizard. 
Utilizes Local Images. 
No Restrictions on the Number of Channels.
Improved Social Engagement. 
Easy GDPR Configuration. 
Leverages Social Media Proof to increase Conversion. 
Drive Sales by Shoppable Feeds.

5. Social Snap

Social Snap is an all-in-one social sharing plugin that can increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.

Travel bloggers love to capture tons of photos and share them on their blogs. Sharing those photos on various social media platforms will draw more attention to your blog. Social Snap offers social share buttons for your website’s integration with almost all the big guns on social media platforms. This plugin is beginner-friendly, super easy to set up, and ensures that everything runs fast and smoothly.

Social Snap doesn’t only help you to share your content on different social media platforms; it will automatically display follower counts, provide analysis about how your audience is interacting with your blog, and automatically share and reshare your new and old posts to social media.   

Also Read: 7 Best Social Sharing WordPress Plugins

Key Features:

Social Sharing Buttons
Integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram. 
Social Follower Counter Widget
Social Media Login
Highly Customizable

6. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is an easy, fast, and powerful plugin that provides the best way to build a beautiful gallery for all the photos you took during your travel days. It has been highly optimized for speed and responsiveness and has all the SEO-friendly features. 

Envira Gallery features an easy Drag & Drop Builder to create a beautiful image and video gallery within a few minutes. After completing your gallery, you can customize your gallery with the built-in templates and layouts or create your own.

It also helps you to organize your photos in albums, sort those photos with related custom tags and choose a cover photo for the album. This plugin also features a social media button to share your pictures on different social media networks. And not to forget, while sharing your photos on social media, Envira Gallery ensures the copyright of your content by adding watermarks to it. 

Envira provides options to import pictures from Instagram, Dropbox, and various other sources and also comes with eCommerce integration, deep linking, pagination, and much more.  

Also Read: 5 Best WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins

Key Features: 

Easy Interface with Drag and Drop Builder. 
Default Customizable Templates.
Provides Albums and Custom Tags that match your content. 
Social Media Integration and Social Share Buttons. 
Supports Protection via Passwords and Watermarks. 
Deep Linking and Pagination for Large Galleries. 
eCommerce support through WooCommerce. 

7. Smush

Visual contents help a great deal to spice things up on any blog or website. So chances are, you will upload many images and videos to your blog. But this might lead to a slow loading which will make the users annoyed, driving low traffic and poor profitability. And this is where Smush comes in.

Smush solves your problem by optimizing your images and improves your page or site speed by compressing your photos without a notable drop in quality. This plugin will scan all the pictures on your blog and then remove all the unnecessary data and scale them for you before you add them to your library. Smush features a “Bulk Smush” tool with which you can resize and compress up to 50 images simultaneously without compromising the image quality of any of them. 

Smush is also compatible with most plugins you might use for your media library. It features an option to detect the wrong-sized images and highlight them by notifying the photos that need to be scaled. Smush has a built-in lazy load option that will speed up your page by only loading the images being viewed and delaying the others. You can also make your preferred settings the default configuration setting and apply this setting to other sites. 

Also Read: 7 Best Image Optimization Plugins for WordPress

Key Features: 

Keeps the image quality intact. 
Lazy Loading.
Taylor-made smush configuration. 
Detects incorrect image size.
Easily integrate with different page builders, themes, and media plugins. 
Supports Gutenberg editor. 
Optimize images from any directory.
Provides bulk smush in just a click.

8. Travelpayouts

Travelpayouts is an exceptional solution for travel bloggers, agencies, and travel-related websites. It offers a roadmap for site visitors to find appropriate and cheap flights, hotels, car rentals, tours, etc. 

Travelpayouts provides widgets, tables, and forms, all of which can be installed within a few seconds. It is equipped with 11 different customizable tables for flights and two tables for hotels, and many more.

With the help of this plugin, you can place widgets right in your posts that will help your visitors book favorable flights, hotels, and many other services. Not to forget, your happy and satisfied client will draw more travel traffic which in turn will be rewarded by the Travelplugins affiliate program. With the help of this plugin, you might earn up to 70% of the commission for each sale. The plugin will display your earnings in the dashboard as they provide scheduled, automated, and monthly payouts.  

Key Features: 

Eleven customizable tables for detailed flight information. 
Two customizable tables for hotel information. 
Popular flight destination widget.
Low-price flights, hotels, and calendars.
Supports 45 languages and most currencies. 
Provides search forms.  

9. Thrive Leads

When you are a travel blog or website owner, you might not want to lose your visitors after a while. What you wish to do is convert your abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers. Thrive Leads is the lead-generating WordPress plugin that will help you to resolve this matter. It is so good you might think of having your list-building and conversion expert by your side.

Thrive Leads provides an easy drag-and-drop builder to create the desired design easily. It provides all the necessary opt-in forms according to the content of your posts. It will also help you to achieve a conversion boost by showing relevant and highly targeted offers to your visitors. Easy personalization and targeting will let you display different content for different visitors and generate more outstanding leads.

Its powerful A/B testing feature will let you test the effectiveness of different form types, triggers, designs, and contents. Thrive Leads will also provide an accessible overview to understand how the opt-in forms are performing over time and where the vital traffic is coming from. 

Key Features: 

Drag and Drop Form Builder
Hyper-targeted and Profitable Lists
Advanced Targeting Options 
PopUp lightbox above your content. 
Sticky Ribbon to scroll down with the page.  
Shortcode to add In-Line forms. 
Reporting tools that analyze the performance of the opt-in forms.  

10. Fluent Forms 

Fluent Forms is user-friendly and one of the best contact form plugins for WordPress. This fully responsive plugin will give you fast performance and offer various unique features. 

Fluent Forms offers an easy drag-and-drop builder to start creating forms and design them with dozens of tailor-made templates. It also provides a way to start conversations with your customers through proactive web forms.

This plugin is fully responsive across various screen sizes and will make you feel safer using Akismet, reCAPTCHA, Honeypot, and others. You can also generate PDFs from the submitted entries and later export the PDF for your use or send the file as an email attachment. Fluent Forms will ease your payment collection or donation process through its robust solution by using its integration with Stripe, PayPal, Coupon, and dynamic calculation. 

Also Read: 7 Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins

Key Features: 

Simple interface. 
Drag and Drop editor. 
Conditional logic and confirmation message. 
Multiple premade templates. 
GDPR friendly. 
Notification via email or SMS  
Offers connection with CRM tools.
Provides safety against spam 

Conclusion

Your website’s performance is mostly dependent on the content you provide and the plugins you use to exhibit them. For specific purposes, you should choose the plugins that are specialized for those specific jobs.

So, choose the best plugin that meets your needs perfectly. Hope we have helped you to find the right one. Also, don’t forget to share your thoughts with us through our comment section.

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