Design your way

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Plugins transform WordPress into a completely functional site. There are lots and lots of plugins to choose from and some are not so easy to pick.

Choosing the best WordPress plugins could mean the difference between your website being bogged down or making your website soar. There are several things that can help you choose one.

Look at the last time it was updated, if it has been updated recently, it means the developer is trying to make it better. Another thing to look at is how many stars it has and how many downloads.

In this article you will see essential WordPress plugins that you need to consider adding on your website. These are the most popular must have WordPress plugins and they deserve your attention.

Search Engine Optimization

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is a WordPress SEO plugin to automatically optimize your WordPress blog for Search Engines such as Google.

WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin 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 plugin 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.

SEO Ultimate

This all-in-one SEO plugin gives you control over meta titles & descriptions, open graph, auto-linking, rich-snippets, 404 monitoring etc.

WordPress Cache

WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

W3 Total Cache

Easy Web Performance Optimization (WPO) using caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

Ecommerce

WooCommerce – excelling eCommerce

WooCommerce is a powerful, extendable eCommerce plugin that helps you sell anything. Beautifully. Transform your WordPress website into a thoroughbred eCommerce store. Delivering enterprise-level quality and features, backed by a name you can trust.

eShop

eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features.

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart allows you to add an ‘Add to Cart’ button for your product on any posts or pages. This simple shopping cart plugin lets you sell products and services directly from your own wordpress site and turns your WP blog into an ecommerce site.

WP Easy Paypal Payment Accept

Easy to use WordPress plugin to accept paypal payment for a service or product or donation in one click. Can be used in the sidebar, posts and pages of your site.

Security

Wordfence Security

Wordfence starts by checking if your site is already infected. We do a deep server-side scan of your source code comparing it to the Official WordPress repository for core, themes and plugins. Then Wordfence secures your site and makes it up to 50 times faster.

iThemes Security

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.

BulletProof Security

WordPress Website Security Protection: Firewall Security, Login Security, Database Security… Effective, Reliable, Easy to use.

Sucuri Security

Sucuri Inc is a globally recognized authority in all matters related to website security, with specialization in WordPress Security.

The Sucuri Security WordPress Security plugin is free to all WordPress users. It is a security suite meant to complement your existing security posture.

All In One WP Security & Firewall

WordPress itself is a very secure platform. However, it helps to add some extra security and firewall to your site by using a security plugin that enforces a lot of good security practices.

Contact

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Contact Bank – Contact Forms Builder

Contact Bank is a WordPress Plugin loaded with 200+ Features and designed to create simple but powerful contact forms easily and hassle free within few seconds.

Contact Bank provides you with powerful Control Panel and Shortcode Manager make getting started super easy.

Custom Contact Forms

Custom Contact Forms enables you to build forms the WordPress way. User experience is at the top of the list for this plugin. Build forms in the media manager instead of going to separate areas of your site.

Live previews of your forms are generated on the fly making your life much easier. Custom Contact Forms is a legacy name. The plugin is built for much more than just contact forms.

Contact Form to Email

The main purpose of the Contact Form to Email is, as the name indicates, to create contact forms and send their data email addresses.

In addition to that basic feature it also saves the contact form data into a database, provides printable reports and the option to export selected data to CSV/Excel files.

Comments

Disqus Comment System

Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.

Facebook Comments

The Facebook Comments WordPress plugin makes it easier for you to setup, administer and customise Facebook comments from your WordPress site.

Comments Evolved for WordPress

Comments Evolved ( formerly Google+ Comments for WordPress ) makes the comment section tabbed seamlessly adding tabs for G+ Comments, Facebook, Disqus, WordPress Comments, and Trackbacks

Akismet

Akismet checks your 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.