There’s good reason why WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It’s easy to use and has tons of great features. But what’s really made this open source software excel is its passionate community. Yes, WordPress has lots of features built in, but it doesn’t have everything. The WordPress community fills this need. It’s full of talented developers that are constantly creating plugins to extend the features and make it even better.
There are many WordPress plugins out there, but in this article we’re focusing on the most essential. Below is a list of 10 plugins that every WordPress website could use.
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. Some key features include:
- Advanced Canonical URLs
- Fine tune Page Navigational Links
- Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
- ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
- Nonce Security
- Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache generates 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.
Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps generates 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.
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.
WP-DB-Backup
WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.
WP-PageNavi
WP-PageNavi adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.
WordPress Automatic upgrade
WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the WordPress installation to the latest one provided by WordPress.org using the 5 steps provided in the WordPress upgrade instructions. It automatically does the backups and provides links for downloading.
cforms II
cforms is a powerful and feature rich form plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.
Broken Link Checker
This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Some key features include:
- Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
- Also detects redirected links.
- Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
- Link checking intervals can be configured.
FeedBurner FeedSmith
This plugin 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.