Last year, I posted the what I considered the best plug-ins for WordPress. After creating multiple sites in WordPress, my list has changed. WordPress is great by itself but the power lies in plugins, so I put together a list of plugins that I use and suggest to others they would want to consider.
SEO Plugins
- All-In-One SEO - Last time, I was suggesting Headspace 2 SEO. While in many ways Headspace is a superior but configuration and usage is more cryptic for you average user and AIOSEO has better automation.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Auto creates XML sites maps for submission to Google, Yahoo and Bing
- SEO Friendly Images – For properly setting alt tags on images
- SEO Slugs - Remove common words such as a, the, and form permalink slugs
- Google Analytics from WordPress – While its hard to go wrong with analytics plug-ins. This is just my favorite.
- Dagon Site Maps – Not to be confused with XML Sitemaps. This create a navigable site maps that you would place in the footer.
- Robots Meta - Set index, follow, no index, no follow on each post and site wide.
Administrative
- Maintenance Mode – locks down the site while your making edits and create a 503 Service Unavailable alert.
- WP-SpamFree – prevents spam of any sort on the site.
- WP-Super Cache – speeds up the rendering of the site.
- WP -Minify - reduces duplicate code by consolidating redundant css and html code rendered.
- WP-DB Manager – enables backup access to MySQL & Automates DB Backups
- Broken Link Checker – Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
- Redirection – 404 Redirects for broken links and
- TGC! Memory Usage - Great Site Administration Tool
Commerce
- Advertising Manager – Control and arrange your Advertising and Referral blocks on your WordPress blog.
- WP-Commerce - Commerce solution for the WordPress. Very powerful but not for the faint of heart.
Integration
- Social Media – A complete integration between your WordPress blog, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.
- Gravity Forms – Full featured form plug-in (Unfortunately this is a commercial form processors)
- Free alternatives are cFormsII (Full featured) or Contact form 7 (Simple to Use)
- Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
- SimplePress – Well integrated WordPress Forum Plugin.