7 Essential WordPress Plugins for News Publishers

Whether someone is running a niche blog focused on a specific industry or a major media outlet delivering breaking news to millions, WordPress offers the versatility and scalability to meet the varying publishing needs of almost every news publisher.

Central to WordPress is its extensive library of plugins. These plugins add functionality and enhance performance, making it an invaluable asset for every news publisher. While some plugins can be considered good to have for news websites, for news publishers, certain plugins transition from being optional to becoming absolute must-haves.

Choosing the Best WordPress Plugin For News Publishers

When it comes to WordPress news plugins, not all are created equal. However, they typically offer several key features:

• Live news ticker: Latest news and real-time updates on your site.

• News widget: Highlight headlines in widget areas.

• News importer: Bring in content from external sources.

• Scrollers: Professionally display news updates.

Before you choose, consider your site's needs. Do you want custom layouts or templates for grids, sliders, and carousels? 

Also, please consider the fact that the news space is highly competitive. So you’ll want to ensure your news site is optimized for search engines.

Best News Plugin for Media Publishers 

When managing a news website, having the right tools can make all the difference in delivering timely and engaging content to your audience. There's a vast array of WordPress plugins out there, but for news publishers, one category stands out: news plugins. 

These specialized news plugins are designed to cater to the unique needs of news websites, offering features such as article categorization, breaking news alerts, customizable layouts for featured stories, and integration with social media platforms. 

Let's explore the top 7 WordPress Plugins that every news publisher should use to enhance their website's functionality and user experience.

Live News

The Live News plugin generates a static news ticker that a news publisher can use to broadcast breaking news, financial news, weather alerts, election results, sports results, and so on.

The news ticker displays two sections by default: Featured News in red and Sliding News in black. In terms of content, the website administrator or users with other preset roles should manually add the news.

The Pro Version of Live News allows news publishers to:

• Automatically generate news based on the posts
• Automatically generate the news based on a specified RSS feed (E.g., Your own RSS feed, the RSS feed of a TV channel )
• Automatically generate the news based on a specified Twitter account
• Controls the speed and the delay of the sliding news with advanced options of the news ticker

The Live News plugin is highly customizable and comes with 46 options per news ticker, 4 options per featured news, 9 options per sliding news, and 4 general options.

The price for one Regular License with unlimited updates, six months of support, and all Pro Features is $29.

WP News and Scrolling News Widget

For news publishers, the most crucial aspect is the performance of their website. WP News & Scrolling Widget is one of the most effective ways to improve the dynamics of the online web space by incorporating news archives, scrolling news widgets, and thumbnails. It also allows news publishers to add, manage, and remove news sections from their CMS.

The best part? This plugin uses shortcodes to allow you to simply display news anywhere on your website. WP News & Scrolling Widget also adds a News tab to your admin panel, where you can enter news items just like ordinary articles.

WP Optimize

Among the most Popular WordPress Caching Plugins for News publishers. WP Optimize is our top pick.

Over 1 million WordPress websites trust WP Optimize to improve user experiences and Google SERP rankings. This incredibly successful WordPress Plugin has everything a news website will require to keep its website fast and fully optimized. WP-Optimize is a ground-breaking all-in-one plugin that cleans the database, compresses large images, and caches your site.

WP-Optimize configures itself automatically for WordPress sites. All you have to do is enable it with a single click and fine-tune its settings. The cache preloading feature replicates a site visit, which means cached files are provided immediately, speeding up your site from the first visit. Its GZIP Compression feature sends HTML, CSS, and JS files to the user's browser as smaller, compressed files, cutting page and style sheet sizes by up to 90%.

WP-Optimize offers a free version as well as premium plans. WP-Optimize premium plans cost $49 per year for up to two sites, $99 per year for up to five sites, and $199 per year for unlimited sites.

PublishPress Series 

PublishPress Series allows you to organize posts into issues or series. This is perfect for magazines, newspapers, or anyone who writes multiple posts on the same topic.

Newspapers, magazines, and publishers can use PublishPress Series to create issues based on topics or periods:

• Collect posts into monthly issues for a magazine.
• Group together newspaper articles on the same topic.
• Organize chapters into an overall story.

When you’re writing a post, you can easily add a post to an existing series, or start a new series. You can also add a new post into the middle of an existing series, and the plugin will adjust the order.

The Pro version of PublishPress Series supports custom post types, multiple series, extra tokens, shortcodes, and more. It is priced at $69.00 for one site and $129.00 for five websites.

Sucuri

In today's online world, where information is everything, securing your news website isn't just an advantage; it's a necessity. If you are looking for some of the top WordPress security plugins to help protect your news site from hackers, Sucuri is our pick. 

Sucuri stands out as a highly acclaimed WordPress Security Plugin, catering to businesses and publishers alike. This plugin offers comprehensive insights and control. Key features include WordPress core integrity checks, brute attack protection, malware detection, and anti-spam tools.

The basic plan for Sucuri starts at $199.99 per year for one website. It also offers custom pricing for enterprises with 24/7 service support. 

Easy Table of Content

If you’re a news publisher posting content on your website using WordPress, we have listed the best table of contents (TOC) plugins that will help you auto-generate TOC for content at the site level and increase your content readability.

Easy Table of Content plugin allows news publishers to add aesthetically rich TOC to different types of posts, such as blogs, templates, landing pages, etc. The plugin is also compatible with Gutenberg, Classic Editor, Divi, Elementor, WPBakery Page Builder, and Visual Composer page editor. 

It offers complete customization capabilities that allow you to change the TOC position, alignment, size, font color, background, broader color, sticky toggle, etc., without coding.

Key Features of Easy Table of Content

• Compatible with popular SEO plugins such as RankMath. 
• Customize TOC style without any technical or coding knowledge. 
• Offers both floating (on Pro plan) and sticky TOC options. 
• Create and set default TOC design to maintain uniformity at the site level. 
• Provides shortcode to insert default TOC in just a click to any page on the editor. 
• Options to hide heading tags and change list format between decimal, bullets, and Romans. 
• Comparatively offers TOC addition to multiple post types for the free users.

Easy Table of Contents in priced at $49 for a single website, and $69 for Multiple websites.

Rank Math

Every day, thousands of new websites compete for the top spot in search engine rankings. This is where SEO WordPress Plugins for publishers can make all the difference.

As a blogger or publisher, WordPress SEO plugins help you discover your audience, and get more traffic. It also helps you master on-page SEO tasks such as meta tags, titles, and more. These plugins also simplify technical SEO tasks such as page speed optimization, redirects, canonicals, and halfling. You can also gain deeper insights into your audience and the traffic sources with SEO plugins.

Rank Math's plugin will do basic tasks such as automatically generating sitemaps and adding the target = “blank” attribute to your links. The 404 monitoring feature helps redirect a dead page which helps you engage with your audience better.

The paid version of Rank Math offers a keyword rank tracker, custom schema builder, video and news sitemap, Google Analytics, Google Trends connection, and more.

The Rank Math Agency plan is priced at $49.99 per month and is billed annually. 

The digital age demands innovation and efficiency, and these seven WordPress plugins deliver exactly that for news publishers. 

By leveraging these WordPress plugins, news publishers can streamline operations, captivate readers, and thrive in a constantly shifting media ecosystem.