There are many reasons why we use WordPress for an increasing amount of our smaller scale websites. It’s a fantastic open source platform with a huge developer community so the level of security is fantastic. One of the other benefits of this large development community is the huge variety of plug-ins available in order to further enhance your website. Here is a list of 10 of my favourite WordPress plug-ins.
Every one of these plug-ins can be used in most of the WordPress sites we develop and I recommend each one to everyone:
1. Fluency Admin – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fluency-admin
Fluency Admin gives the WordPress admin interface a boost, with a new style and some cool features. It’s much nicer to use than the standard admin interface.
2. WP Super Cache – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache
This plug-in generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. In layman’s terms – this speeds up the page loads so your users can browse your site quickly.
3. Contact Form 7 – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus we can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple mark-up. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. We use this plug-in with a bolt on a captcha and sometimes database functionality where required so you can see a list of who’s been in touch through the admin screen.
4. SEO Slugs – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs
The SEO Slugs WordPress plug-in removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. For example, when you publish a post with a title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”, SEO Slugs plug-in strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plug-in activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.
5. Askimet – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet
Akismet checks your user comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. We use this on every WordPress site.
6. WP-DBManager – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dbmanager
This is a great plug-in for backing up your website yourself. It actually has quite a few functions that it can perform but the best feature is the ability to email the entire WordPress database to you every day.
7. HeadSpace2 SEO – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2
Controls almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including advanced tagging, Analytics, and dozens of plug-ins. The best WordPress SEO solution. It’s even better than All In One SEO that has been at the top of the list for some time.
8. Google XML Sitemaps – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator
This plug-in will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plug-in supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
9. LTW Testimonials - www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ltw-testimonials
LTW Testimonials is a very simple yet very powerful plug-in when dealing with client testimonials. We will be able to separate your client testimonials into an unlimited number of groups which we can then display on different pages on a single blog installation. Even if you have just one product or service, this will help you manage your testimonials much easier and quicker. But that’s not all. We can also customize the look and layout of the testimonials being displayed on the pages.
10. WP 125 Ads – www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp125
Easy management of 125×125 ads on your blog. Ads can be run for a specified number of days, and will automatically be taken down. Track clicks too. Make a bit of extra money from your blog by selling some space and running an advert.
We have developed a range of websites using WordPress, to find out more about whether WordPress is the best platform for your project give us a call on 020 8747 3274 – we would be happy to talk through the options with you.
