The top WordPress plugins are those that have proven to be the most popular of plugins. Many of the best WordPress plugins have been downloaded millions of times.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of some of the most popular WordPress plugins:
Contact Form 7 – With this plugin you can manage multiple contact forms. This allows your readers of your particular site to get in touch with you. They may want to get in touch with you to discuss something further beyond what can be done using comments. Some readers may want to collaborate with you. Others may even want to advertise on your site. So having a contact form is very important. You can customize the form and the mail contents quickly and easily.
All-In-One SEO Pack – This popular plugin will automatically optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. It contains some very key features including Google Analytics support. There is also support for custom post types, advanced canonical URLs, etc. You can fine-tune page navigational links. It comes with built-in APIs so other plug-ins and themes can access and extend its functionality.
It claims to be the only plug-in to provide SEO integration with WP e-commerce sites. It automatically optimizes your titles for search engines, generates meta-tags automatically, and host of other features. This is wonderful for tweaking and optimizing your on-page SEO.
WordPress Importer – This plugin can import content from a WordPress export file. The type of content it will import is as follows: posts, pages, and other custom post types, comments, custom fields, and post metadata, categories tags and terms from custom taxonomies as well as author information. This can be extremely handy when moving from one blog to another or if you happen to have a blog that contains some content you would like on another blog.
JetPack – This particular plugin is by WordPress.com. JetPack allows you to supercharge your WordPress site with so many powerful features. It provides you with simple concise stats with no additional load on your server. In addition it allows e-mail subscriptions for your blog post and post comments. The very handy social networking enabled comment system likes allows your readers to show their appreciation of your posts. Monitor and manage your site’s activity with notifications in your toolbar on WordPress.com in addition it gives you the ability to post your blog from any e-mail client and many, many many any more features. You owe it to yourself to check out the JetPack by WordPress plugin.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Improve your WordPress SEO, write better content, and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plugin. What’s really nice about this particular plugin that other SEO plug-ins are adopting is when you are editing a post creating a post you can actually see what the title is going to look like in the search engines. Also the snippet preview shows you what the description will look like in the search engines.
That is very handy as we feel the description is one of the most overlooked and valuable pieces of content. If you think about it the very first thing someone’s going to see in the search engines it’s going to be your title and right after your title the will see your description. Now is your description just a few words or is it something that’s enticing people to click through and come to your site? Think about that. You can think about writing your description as writing something short like a tweet for twitter.
Akismet – This is a spam control plug-in that protects you against comment spam and it has a lot of different features. You can see the comment status history which allows you to quickly see comments the plugin labeled as spam.This is a very popular comment-spam control plugin with millions of downloads.
Broken Link Checker – This plug-in will check your post comments and other content for broken links and missing images and notify you if any are found. It monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, blog roll, any custom fields. It finds the the text links that don’t work and any missing images and redirects and notifies you. You can be notified either via the dashboard or you can also have it notify you via e-mail.
The plugin prevents the search engines from following the broken links. Another option which is very useful is you can search and filter links by URL, anchor text, and so on making this a highly valuable and very useful plugin.
Google XML SiteMaps – This useful plugin will generate a special XML site map which will help search engines to better index your site. Wth such a site map it is much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site to retrieve it more efficiently.
W3 Total Cache – This is a very dynamic plug-in. Provides easy web optimization using a variety of methods. It claims that is the only WordPress performance optimization framework designed to improve user experience and page speed. Recommended by web hosts like Dream Host, Media Temple, GoDaddy, Hostgator and countless others.
Hostgator has actually recommended this particular plugin to me for some of my very, very busy blogs. W3 Total Cache is trusted by countless companies like AT&T, Matt Cuts, Mashable, LockerGnome, John Chow, etc. The plugin basically again improves your sites performance and hence your visitors user experience.
Advanced Custom Fields – With this plugin you can fully customize WordPress edit screens with powerful fields. It boasts a professional interface and a powerful API and is a must-have for any web developer. It has a lot of flexibility and is not necessarily something that absolute WordPress beginners because of its robustness. It does have a ton of different features and field types to suit most any customization needs.
WP Super Cahce – This is a caching engine for WordPress that produces static HTML files. This plugin produces, as we stated before, 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.
NextGen Gallery – This is one of my absolute favorite WordPress plugins.This is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin and one of the most popular plugins of all times with millions of downloads. Nextgen provides a powerful engine for uploading and managing galleries of images with the ability to batch upload, import metadata, add, delete, rearrange, sort images and thumbnails. You can also group galleries into albums and what’s more it also provides you with 2 front end display choices to showcase your images, either through slideshows or thumbnail galleries. There are a wide array of options for controlling size and effects. With Nextgen gallery I have no doubt that you can create galleries that will take your viewers breath away.
WooCommerce – This is a powerful extendable e-commerce plugin that helps you sell anything. Beautifully transform your WordPress website into a thoroughbred e-commerce store. It is really very powerful and has tons and tons of extensions to expand the functionality of this great e-commerce plugin. For instance, you can include things like real-time FedEx shipping quotes, real-time USPS quotes, coupons, email subscriptions. One super-cool extension is the “review for discounts” extension where you can have visitors review a product for a discount on their next purchase.
WooCommerce is basically the de facto standard for e-commerce plugins.
Captcha – With all of the spam that’s floating around we could use a plugin like this. Captcha allows you to implement security with your web forms and can substantially cut down on form spam,
Google Analytics for WordPress – Track your WordPress site easily with lots of metadata and check out the great features such as automatic tracking of outbound clicks and page views. Basic installation is quick and easy. You also have the option of many advanced configuration options. If you already have Google analytics code you can get this up and running basically in a couple of mouse clicks.
Bulletproof Security – Who doesn’t need more security in this world of people looking to take down sites for whatever reason. This is a WordPress website security protection suite and the plugin that protects you site against XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, base 64 code injection, and SQL injection hacking. It also provides you with login security and monitoring. It’s fast and simple to install with no manual configuration required. In addition to the basic setup there lots and lots of tweaks here if you want to do the more advanced type of settings and customize it even more. Bulletproof Security also has a great login security and monitoring features this is very handy as it displays how many times a post or page has been viewed right there inside of WordPress
Really Simple Captcha – This is another captcha plug-in and it also the most popular. This security plugin is the module intended to be called from other plugins. It was originally created for that Contact Form 7 and in fact it was actually created by the same person that created Contact Form 7.
Those are just some examples of the many, many plugins that can be used to extend WordPress. By the way, each and every one of the plugins that we have just reviewed are free plugins.
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