5 Best WordPress Podcast Plugins for 2021
Podcasts could be an untapped channel bloggers need to take their WordPress business to the top.
Similar to video, you can use audio content to help power up your blog posts. For instance, instead of writing about a topic, you can just create a podcast about the episode and write the show notes about it. By diversifying your content this way, you increase your chances of tapping into a brand new audience.
Thankfully, working with podcasts on your blog is made much easier using WordPress. According to WordPress facts and stats, there are other 58,000+ plugins available in its directory. That makes there are thousands of plugins ready to supercharge your blog and increase its performance. And that includes podcast plugins.
In this post, we’ll look into some of the best WordPress podcast plugins where you can host and audio content and serve them to your audience.
Buzzsprout
If you’re hosting your podcasts on Buzzsprout, it’d make perfect sense to promote your latest episodes onto your WordPress site. However, instead of uploading the episodes manually, Buzzsprout’s plugin makes the process easier and much smoother.
The plugin is responsible for fetching all the podcast episodes you have uploaded and plugin on your Buzzsprout account straight to the website. From here, it’s up to you how you wish to feature the episodes. You can create blog posts for each complete with show notes or compile all the episodes in a single place for easy access.
Food Blogger Pro Podcast
However, the real star here is Buzzsprout’s podcast hosting features. Aside from uploading your episodes to your site, the hosting platform will take care of syndicating your podcasts across multiple platforms to extend your reach. You also have access to your advanced podcast statistics to help you understand how your episodes performed over time.
PowerPress by blubrry
PowerPress is Blubrry’s take on a WordPress podcast plugin. Unlike most plugins where it just scrapes the episodes in your RSS feed. PowerPress gives you full control of your podcast as if you’re logged in to your Blubrry account.
Also, aside from its integrated podcast player, PowerPress lets you create a subscribe page on your site that allows listeners to get notifications when you release a new episode.
If you create different podcast feeds from your Blubrry account, you can compile them on your site through the plugin. Showcase to your audience your episodes organized according to category or media format.
Finally, you can create a shortcode for a timestamp in a podcast episode. The shortcodes turn into links when published on your site so visitors can click on them and they will be brought to that part of the podcast without having to scroll to it.
Seriously Simple Podcasting
Seriously Simple Podcasting is one of the few true free WordPress podcast plugins in the market. If you’re hosting your website on a dedicated server, you can use that server to host and publish your podcast – you don’t have to purchase a separate hosting for it!
If you’re hosting your podcast content on a separate podcast host, use this plugin to import and save them into your website hosting. This way, you can cancel your podcast subscription and opt for this free plugin.
For beginners, however, you can sign up to Castos for a paid subscription to seamlessly integrate it with the plugin. You can then create and upload as many episodes as you want to your account regardless of how long they are straight to your WordPress dashboard.
Other features of Castos include episode transcriptions, private podcasts, and individual listeners, unlimited downloading limit, and more!
Podcast Player
If you’re looking for a simple and effective way to present your podcast on your WordPress site, Podcast Player may be for you.
Once you feature your podcast episode on any page of your site, the player has a responsive design that adjusts to the size and screen of visitors. They can also share the episode on social media to help you increase your online reach.
Podcast Player works best with Fusebox, which has free and paid accounts. The former lets you create three shows with a limit of 10k monthly views and a free transcript after upload to your WordPress website manually. The latter offers you more features and options such as powerful filters to give you full control over what to show on the player and add exclusive audio messages in each of your podcast episodes.
Podlove Podcast Publisher
Similar to Seriously Simple Podcasting, the Podlove Podcast Publisher plugin lets you upload and publish your podcast straight from your site’s hosting provider.
It supports a wide range of audio and video codec to ensure that all files you will upload will run using the plugin. Users can then create specific feeds based on the content format among other variables.
Its optimized and HTML5 compatible player supports the most popular audio files so they can play smoothly. It also has a subscribe button that listeners can press to keep updated with your latest podcast episodes.
Structuring your episodes into chapters is easy using the plugin. From the page, you can link to a timestamp on the podcast episode for easy reference.
Finally, you can make sense of your podcast’s performance by viewing the analytics. From here, you can understand the behavior of your listeners on how they consume your content and unearth insights from the data on how you can improve your podcast moving forward.
Conclusion
The best WordPress podcast plugins above should help you get your podcast channel up and running in no time. Even if you don’t have experience in this field, they will get you acquainted with the world of podcasting. More importantly, creating podcasts using any of the plugins above will help you draw more interest to your blog and achieve your goals faster. Good luck!
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