Everyone knows WordPress is the most popular blogging and content management platform. It is open source and comes for free. That’s not all to its popularity, you can extend its usability by installing add-ons and plug-ins to personalize your website and have a unique identity over the Internet. WordPress development being open source it has a developer community that continuously comes out with new and powerful codes that add features and functionality to WordPress. There are thousands of plug-ins available out there and you can even create your own and distribute them. Here are the 10 most essential and popular WordPress plug-ins that are a must for any blog or website:
1. Akismet
Akismet is a very powerful comment filter that checks each comment against the Akismet web service to see whether it looks like a spam and caches them under the “Comments” admin screen for you to review.
All in One SEO Pack is a one-stop-destination for all SEO related functions. You can optimize your site with this plug-in as it has fantastic features like:
- Advanced canonical URLs
- Fine-tune page navigation links
- Built-in API to accommodate other plug-ins to extend the functionality
- The ONLY plug-in that provides SEO integration for ecommerce sites built on WordPress
- Nonce security
- Automatic title optimization and META Tag generation for search engines
- Avoids content redundancy
Broken Link Checker monitors your blog and checks for any broken links to bring them to your notice on the Dashboard. It detects redirects, missing images, modified links, and links that don’t work very efficiently. Each link can be modified without manually editing each post individually. This saves a lot of time and effort.
4. cforms II
cforms is a powerful and feature rich form plug-in for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.
For the best results using FeedBurner with your self-hosted WordPress site, the FeedBurner FeedSmith plug-in is the best and most popular choice (originally authored by the legendary Steve Smith). The plug-in will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.
Google XML Sitemaps plug-in generates an XML Sitemap for search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com and thus better indexing of 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.
7. WordPress Automatic Upgrade
WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows the user to automatically upgrade to the latest WordPress version provided by wordpress.org. This plug-in backs up all the files and the database before installation and provides a link to download it later. Downloads the latest files from the Internet, unzips them, and puts the site under the maintenance mode temporarily until the installing will be successfully completed. This is an intelligent plug-in that remembers to re-activate each plug-in that it had deactivated prior to the upgrade installation. The complete process is smooth and hassle free for the user.
The WP Super Cache plug-in helps in reducing page load time by generating static HTML files from your dynamic blog. This HTML file is cached on the web server and rather than loading heavy PHP scripts, the browser swiftly loads these light weight static HTML files. Hence your server won’t remain busy as before and will serve more visiors.
9. WP-DB-Backup
WP-DB-Backup, as the name suggests, is the plug-in specifically designed to save backup copies of your WordPress database including the tables and the forms. One really appealing feature of this plug-in is that you can store database tables other than your WordPress blog’s in the same database.
10. WP-PageNavi
WP-PageNavi add a more advanced paging and navigation feature to your WordPress blog. Travelling between web pages was never before easier and more fun.
Tags: Open Source CMS, WordPress
Thanks for sharing, I found this story, while googling for some free downloads and ran across this site, useful comments and good points made.