Best WordPress Plugins to Consider

Posted January 15th 2013 Blog - 0 Comments

WordPress is a very popular content management system (CMS) used today, in part because of the ease of use for the layperson. You do not have to have a lot of experience to use this CMS efficiently and there are many excellent plugins available to help you customize it specifically for your site.

Using WordPress plugins can help to enhance your online experience by improving SEO, speeding up your site and saving you valuable time plus so much more. There are many of them to choose from so it’s easy to find something that will truly help you manage your site.

However, that’s one of the great things about this CMS. Instead of being bogged down with a lot of plugins that you would never use, you can customize WordPress by choosing the plugins that you want and need. This makes it easy to customize your site the way you envisioned it.

Here are some of the best WordPress plugins to consider:

• All in One SEO Pack– Using All in One SEO Pack will help you optimize your site for search engines and it supports automatically generated Meta tags, support for canonical links and CMS-style installations. You can use it just like it is or you can fine tune it to enhance its functionality.
• Jetpack– Jetpack is a free plugin from Akismet and it has a lot of features such as grammar and spelling check, custom CSS, embeds, sharing tools and more. You can also buy premium features such as VaultPress that gives you a little more security.
• Google Analytics for WordPress– You can integrate Google Analytics into your WordPress easily using Google Analytics for WordPress. It uses the asynchronous tracking that loads pages faster, it keeps track of page views per author and category and it tracks logged-in users and so much.
• Sociable– Sociable is basically a social sharing plugin. It makes it easy to share you content on the different social media networks and it’s one of the most popular plugins used today.
• W3 Total Cache– Using W3 Total Cache can help to improve your site’s performance and sustain high traffic loads by reducing download times. Having a new, improved site can help to move you up in Google search rankings.
• Google XML Sitemaps– Use Google XML Sitemaps to generate a sitemap for Google Webmaster Tools and to help search engines index your site. It’ll notify the search engines when you create new content and it supports custom URLs and pages generated by WordPress and it does so much more. There’s also a new beta version that will support network activation and dynamic sitemap generation.
• WP-Polls– Using WP-Polls makes it easy to add polls to your site and it has several settings to choose from that allows you to create and manage everything from the way it looks to the dates the poll begins and ends.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin– Not only does Yet Another Related Posts Plugin make a list of the pages related to the entry you’re currently using but it helps you control the way these posts are displayed. This can even help to keep users on your site for longer periods.
• WordPress SEO by Yoast– You can optimize images  titles, content and meta descriptions to sitemaps using this WordPress SEO by Yoast. It also includes but is not limited to RSS enhancements, breadcrumbs and Robots Meta configuration.

When you’re searching for the best content management system available today, WordPress has a lot to offer. Having the freedom to choose the plugins that you want to use makes a difference and it helps to increase the popularity of this CMS.

This is just a short list of the best WordPress plugins to consider for your site; there are many more. When trying to choose the best ones for your needs, consider what you’re trying to achieve and whether or not the plugin would be beneficial in helping you accomplish that task.