Top Ten WordPress Plugins
If you have just installed WordPress and you need to know the most effective plugins for your site, we have compiled a list of our top ten plugins that we use on nearly every site we produce. Although there are literally thousands of WordPress plugins on the Internet, there are only a top few that you really must consider using as a priority, some for ease and others for effectiveness.
Plugins are usually open source extensions for WordPress, some are free and some you need to pay for, but basically they just expand upon what WordPress can do. With so many plugins now available, you can normally find one that will do exactly what you need, with quick ratings and comments so you know exactly which to install and which to give a miss.
Below, we take a look at our top ten essential WordPress plugins.
Contact Form 7 – You will find so many contact form plugins on WordPress, but since we switched to Contact Form 7 this year we really have not looked back. It is so easy to add a new form, duplicate existing forms and add many different field types that you really should be using this plugin if you use or plan to use contact forms on your website.
Really Simple Captcha – Using in conjunction with the above mentioned Contact Form 7, this adds a captcha to the forms that you produce, which helps to stop the majority of the automated spam coming through to your inbox.
Ultimate Google Analytics – By entering your Google Analytics ID, this plugin then puts the necessary tracking code on ALL of your pages, no matter whether they are posts or pages. It’s an ideal plugin because all sites should be running Google Analytics and if you have many pages and frequently add more, this quality bit of kit does the job for you.
TinyMCE Advanced – Although WordPress has got better in terms of making your content look more appealing, this plugin makes the text box more like a word document, allowing you to have far more formatting control with the ability to add tables, fonts and so much more. Just make sure you keep it updated to close security weaknesses.
Google XML Sitemaps – A sitemap is a must for any website in this day and age and this plugin automatically produces an XML Sitemap and then tells all of the major engines about it, including Google, Bing and Yahoo. So easy to install and to run, this plugin is vital and one that you really should be using.
SEO Ultimate – Loads of SEO tools all under one easy to install plugin. It lets you keep track of so many things that you have to see it to believe it, but from keeping an eye on 404 pages all the way through to adding tags and other meta data, this SEO plugin is one of the best we have seen.
AdSense Manager – If you run AdSense modules, then this plugin is fantastic, as it brings together all of your AdSense campaigns and adverts, stores them and allows you to control and add them to any page or post with just a very short insert. It can also be used with other types of third party advertising systems as well.
Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. When your site gets more established and popular you will see a massive increase in spam blog comments on your articles, blogs and posts, but this brilliant little plugin does remove the majority of the bad ones and seems to be very accurate when it comes to its filtering.
WP EzineArticles – As anyone working in SEO will know, content on your own site is the king, but content on decent article websites is also vital to achieve rankings and back links. EzineArticles is widely respected as one of the leading article websites on the Internet, and this plugin lets you automatically submit your articles to your EzineArticles account and best of all it only takes minutes to set up.
Twitter Tools – This plugin just saves so much time its unreal, by automatically tweeting your latest post, blog or article to your Twitter Account. Although it does take a little bit of time to get set up and then connect with your Twitter Account, in the long run this plugin saves you so much time and effort and it even has a URL shorter built in to really make it more effective.