Whether you are a musician or a producer, it is important to have your own website to showcase your creations to the world. Having a website enhances your global presence and the best WordPress plugins makes it easy and fast to build your website and reach out to masses.
How to make a music website with WordPress?
WordPress offers tons of accessibility and flexibility to musicians and bands who want to make a bespoke website of their own. Wordpress music plugins plays a huge help in establishing desired buttons to the website. Wordpress is super powerful on its own. It was not created specifically for the music world alone. Here is a list of recommended WordPress plugins for musicians and bands to add some missing features to their existing or a new website.
These are some of the wordpress plugins for musicians that can help them make a bespoke website of its category-
- Audio Album: This WordPress plugin will help you to embed a customizable music player on your website.
- Event Espresso: is a tool with which you can manage gigs and sell you music shows tickets online. No doubt enabling this plugin can turn revenue out of your music.
- NextGEN Gallery: Music is impossible if not displayed with images. NextGEN Galleray helps to display lots of images on your website which helps musicians to bind and relate with the images. It surely has your back.
- WooCommerce: As the name suggests, it is helpful to sell merch, albums, and digital files via an easy-to-navigate online store of your creations.
- wpDiscuz: It is one of the best wordpress music plugin which is useful to bring your fan base together and develop a strong music community.
- Add to Any Share Buttons: The world is going digital so has the music industry. Right from music creation to shows or to market your music into masses, digital stream has been a boon. Using a social sharing plugin makes it easy for your audience base, fans and music community to promote your music content to many and expand your reach organically.
WordPress in-built Audio Feature
WordPress has a unique built-in audio player which enables developers to display and play the audio files on your website. It can be embedded into your posts. WordPress music player plugins help to place an audio player in your blog, which can easily be placed anywhere on the website, depending on your requirement. The process involves various steps to plugin the music player plugins on wordpress.
Following are the steps to add an audio player into your wordpress music player blog post-
- Click the Add Media button at the top of your New Post page.
- Press Select Files and upload your audio file.
- After adding to the Media Library, customize the Attachment Details and then click the Insert Into Post button.
Know the best WordPress plugins used for websites that suit the bands-
1. Jetpack
Jetpack is a useful wordpress music plugin used on WordPress account that gives access to several modules that are helpful in giving your site more visibility and interaction. While it has some functionality that is better handled by other plugins, it can help you excellently for deriving site stats, detecting spams, enhances security of the website, has a photo gallery, social sharing, contact forms, widget visibility and other engaging features.
In case your website is running an older non-premium theme which is not mobile responsive, Jetpack plugin can be a saviour and provide a module which automatically generate a basic mobile version for your site. It is also helpful for tiled photo galleries and simple contact forms which are mobile friendly.
2. Spam Destroyer
Unfortunately, Spam comments are a tiring when you have a WordPress site. Prevent spam comments on your articles by disabling all of the discussion functionality on your website. The best way to do is installing Spam Destroyer. It helps and prevent automated spam messages coming on your website. All you need to do is setup a simple plugin and activate it from the WordPress directory. Spam Destroyer helps to prevent unwanted messages without asking commenters creating nuisance on the website unnecessarily.
3. Image Widget
Images play an important role in your music website. It’s not super easy to add images to the sidebars and widget areas in WordPress. The Simple Image Widget allows you to change image size, add text, or create links on the music website easily. With simple image widget plugin, you can add an image, set the size, insert a link, and add text, all from your WordPress dashboard.
4. Yoast SEO
This powerful wordpress music plugin from Yoast focuses on search engine optimization. Yoast SEO helps to grade each page and post included on your music website, by letting you know how it will perform during a search for particular targeted keywords. It guides you through the appropriate way to make your website more search engine friendly. It is something that you can spend a lot of time trying to understand, without truly getting a grasp of how to effectively optimize your site. Yoast SEO gives the step-by-step setup wizard and excellent documentation which are helpful for the musicians.
It has the ability to determine a specific image and craft special excerpts for the major social media platforms. It enables the user when he/she interacts with the blogs written on the website on their social media handles. The proper image and verbiage is displayed when someone interacts with the social media channels.
5. Simple page ordering
Change is the law of nature. In case you have to reorder your blog posts manually, it is a time-consuming activity. Simple Page Ordering plugin is a simple yet effective plugin that allows you to change the order of your pages and customise your blog post by dragging and dropping them into the desired order. The plugin integrates directly with the pages and posts admin screens, saving you even more time. It also helps to create a custom order for your AudioTheme Records and Videos archives placed on your website.
Apart from all these above WordPress music plugins, Soundcloud is one of the most popular pieces of software use for sharing free music. It’s a great place to find music easily and listen to what’s trending. Often called as YouTube of music, it is crucial to have the best music player wordpress plugin for your WordPress site. That too when you frequently use Soundcloud. With appropriate SoundCloud plugins, you can easily share your preferred music or audio files with WordPress.
Platforms like Facebook don’t allow you to share music unless you use a trick or two but that takes time. Sharing music with WordPress is very simple with the best Soundcloud WordPress plugin.
6. SoundCloud Search
SoundCloud is the one of the most popular platforms which is helpful in sharing free music. One of the excellent place to find out new and interesting music, SoundCloud is popular for exploring the soundtracks. Display some of your favorite tracks in your WordPress website then you will need specialized plugins for the purpose. There are 5 best plugins to add SoundCloud to WordPress:
1. SoundCloud Ultimate Plugin – If you are a podcaster, musician or any other musician, display your latest tracks from SoundCloud in WordPress, through SoundCloud Ultimate Plugin. If you use oAuth2, the plugin establishes a secure connection between your website and the SoundCloud website.
2. SoundCloud Is Gold – With native support for Soundcloud’s official player, SoundCloud Gold is an excellent plugin for integrating your website with SoundCloud. It comes with a custom widget which could be used to display random or the latest tracks from a playlist, a user or multiple users.
3. SoundCloud Shortcode – SoundCloud Shortcode plugin for WordPress does not offer a lot of options but a covenient solution to add a single SoundCloud track or a playlist in your posts or pages.
4. ToneDen Player Shortcode- For a fresh new look for the official player, ToneDen Player Shortcode comes handy.
5. SoundCloud Master – SoundCloud Master is developed especially to integrate SoundCloud with WordPress in any widget location. You can display a full music playlist or a single track with its installation. Select the color scheme, player width and height, auto-play, artwork etc. of your choice and get going.
7. ZoomSounds (Premium)
ZoomSounds is a complete premium audio plugin for WordPress which allows you to build great audio players and playlists of your choice. With this, you can engage with your audience with some awesome features like Trending, Likes as per your branding needs. It comes with a customizable design and great colors solutions to add spunk to your website. With its nine skins to fit in each brand, multiple layouts for the wave skin, and one format required to function, ZoomSounds is the perfect choice for an audio player.
8. Modern Audio Player
Modern Audio Player for Wordpress is a powerful audio player that comes with lots of adjustable features.
It supports self hosted audio files along with some other external music services like Soundcloud, Podcasts, Google Drive Storage for a better experience. You can create unlimited number of playlists and players. The Playlist can be mixed with any kind of music type namely mp3, podcast, soundcloud etc.
And it comes with detailed admin statistics of song plays, likes and downloads with ability to create custom playlists from that data.
This plugins further can be added into any post or page area using shortcodes.
9. SoundPress Plugin
Soundpress plugin is a simple and easy to use plugin that allows you to embed audio from SoundCloud to your sidebar or directly inside your blogs/posts! All using a SoundCloud URL straight from the browser!
You can Control height, (width is responsive to fit all devices), Choose to auto play your audio track once page loads, Show/hide artwork, Show/hide username (does not work with all tracks) and get going with the features. To update an existing SoundCloud track to your post, by simply clicking on the SoundCloud track to select it (in “Visual” editor), then click the “Add SoundCloud” button again.
10. Sticky Audio Player
You can add background music to your website with Sticky Audio Player WordPress Plugin. It will ensure a continuous and smooth playback across your entire website. It gives you a leverage to customize this html5 audio player by changing the player color background, volume slider, timer, buffer, seekbar, song title, playlist background, playlist font and playlist item line separator and much more.
11. Foxy shop
One of the most common storefronts on music website plugins is Foxyshop plugin. It connects to their hosted shopping cart service (if any) that enables and auto manage your inventory from within your WordPress dashboard of your music-making website.
What Makes the WordPress Audio Player Plugins best in all of the wordpress music plugins?
What could be better than inserting an audio file through your media library and getting a serviceable audio player. WordPress has a native audio player that works similarly. All you need to do is press play, and the audio starts playing. Above all these, you need something a little more robust to make Wordpress audio player plugins best in its own. It should possess something that has all the flair and features.
If you’re using it for podcasts, music, transcription, or something else, the best audio player plugins for WordPress share some of the following traits:
- Supports playlists
- It plays on mobile devices and tablets
- It should allow file/track downloads
- Should give you customisation option to make it match your branding.
- Should give access to analytics and statistics for each instance of the player
- On/off toggle for automatic playing
- Widgets that display multiple players in different areas embedded on your site
WordPress and see how they stack up not only to this list, but to each other as well.
After taking a look at the features of one of the wordpress music plugins above, you can’t make wrong choice considering the features of a wordpress audio plugins. If you’re a musician or a podcaster or just need a little website ambience, there’s a WordPress audio player for each one of you. With a simple play button that gets your sound out there ASAP to a fully customizable, dark-mode enabled, ecommerce-integrated audio player, you can place the right choice and solution for your music website.
As an established and experienced musician, you make most of your money by selling music or by playing virtual live shows. However, a good amount of your income can also come from your website by merchandising sales through your website. Most of the stuff is usually sold at the booth of your live shows. But you can still sell some of your goods online, like a pen, cap, earplugs, bottle, pen drive etc.
There are plenty of WordPress plugins available for musicians which they can use to sell their merchandise to those fans who desperately want a goodie with your latest song release or album cover.
Wrap up
A strong online presence and having a website for music artist is essential now a days – whether well-established or just starting out. Using WordPress as the base for your website will help you add a wide variety of additional features. WordPress music plugins to embed social media buttons, embedded music players, and even event registration or ticketing software. Should you need any assistance in creating your website for you as a musician, feel free to get in touch. GrooveNexus can help you build your music website and spread the word to masses.