Do you use WordPress to manage your or your company’s blog? It is the most popular content management system used for such a purpose. With all its popularity, few blogs look and act the same. We’re not talking about just changing the colors of the template here. Besides managing the graphical design, how customization is done is through the use of WordPress plugins. A plugin is software you add to your site that extends the functionality of the site. There are more than 32,000 plugins available to customize your site. With so many plugins available, it is easy to pull up the WordPress Plugin Directory and be totally overwhelmed. Here’s a list of 10 plugins that are essential to having a successful site.
Spam is something you hate with email. While you can’t get rid of the forum trolls, forum spam is something you try to avoid on any blog. Use Akismet to automate the identification and flagging of forum spam.
You can write the best content for a blog, but if nobody finds it, then nobody reads it, and your site has no traffic. The All in One SEO Pack plugin helps to optimize your site for search engines such as Google. The All in One SEO Pack plugin has an application programming interface that enables other plugins to extend. In addition to the main plugin, look for other additions that might prove helpful for your needs.
Does your site provide a contact form? This plugin lets you customize the form and what is submitted. It even includes Akismet spam filtering. Other features include multiple form support, multilingual functionality and Captcha support.
You may or may not want this plugin. If you started your blog on WordPress.com instead of self-hosting, you’ll have run across the different parts of the Jetpack plugin. It originated as a set of plugins available within the WordPress.com environment that offers spell-checking, support for posting to your blog via email, and some social media integration. If you didn’t start at WordPress.com, you can still use Jetpack; you’ll just have to discover all its elements on your own.
If your site needs to do anything more than show single images, the NextGEN Gallery is a must-have. It offers options to upload images from ZIP files and via file transfer protocol and web forms, as well as options for autoscaling images and many other options to optimize image usage and improve image search engine optimization handling. All this started as a better way to configure the display of image galleries.
The name kind of says it all with this one. WP Super Cache is a caching engine, speeding up the fetching of repeatedly requested, unchanged pages. If you’re a low-traffic site, this is probably overkill, but if you have the potential to have large spikes in traffic, use WP Super Cache to keep your site responsive. Something like Nginx (not a WP plugin) would be overkill for caching, unless you have truly high-traffic needs that might even need some load balancing across multiple servers.
Formerly known as Google Analytics for WordPress, this plugin enhances the Google Analytics experience, so you can better track the users visiting your site or blog. Need to know where people are going when they leave your site? The plugin includes outbound link tracking, too.
Not everyone needs this plugin, but if you want to sell anything through your site, this plugin is the best of the bunch. It provides a shopping cart for the catalog of products you provide. Similar to the All in One SEO Pack plugin, WooCommerce provides an API that can be extended by other plugins, such as for importing your product catalog from a CSV file and dynamic pricing.
Do you have a backup strategy for your site? If your blog is managed on a server that you do not own, you need to have a plan in place that you can control for backing up your site. While your hosting company might and should be backing up the site in case of disaster, UpdraftPlus can also be used as a complement backup strategy that will let you backup to Google Drive, Dropbox and several other places.
There are many plugins that offer live chat options within WordPress. If you want a free, self-hosted option, Formilla is probably the best of the bunch. If you’re considering any of the other options, be aware that Quick Chat hasn’t been updated in more than a year. The list here is just 10 of the most useful plugins that WordPress offers. Depending upon your specific needs, you can easily find another 10 or more useful plugins. When going through the directory, you may even find some you didn’t even know you needed. Just make sure the plugin is being actively maintained and hasn’t been abandoned with some earlier WordPress release. Finally, we also covered other interesting topics related to WP such as what are Wordpress Widgets, how to select a Wordpress theme and how to install Wordpress! We hope those additional resources will help you!