The essential WordPress plugin’s you need for a great website…
WordPress is an amazing blogging and content management system and as WordPress developers, we will always try to create a web design using WordPress as its platform. One of the things that we love about WordPress the most is the ability to add plugins in order to make your WordPress site so much better. Of course, what that means is that that we have a few ‘must have’ plugins for every WordPress site which we thought we would share with you…
Headspace
This is my number one WordPress plugin as it makes on page search engine optimisation (SEO) so easy. I can add all of my title tags, page descriptions, tags, read more etc in either one place via the meta-data page or on each individual page or post. You can also have global settings for each page if you want, very smart!
W3 Total Cache
A must have for large WordPress websites as it serves up static HTML files rather than the standard PHP pages which are a lot heavier in size. Installed this on my own site and reduced the server load speed by over 5 seconds, very impressive plugin!
Yoast Breadcrumbs
You have got to love Yoast! This simple plugin adds a nice breadcrumb on each page or post that you add the code to. Great for SEO as it gives a nice path for the spiders to follow and great for helping the websites user’s navigation round the site. Love it…
Google XML Sitemaps
This is another must as it creates a nice Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask compatible Sitemap for the search engines spiders to follow. It even updates every time you make a change to a post or page within WordPress admin, lovely!!
Akismet
Ok, this comes with a standard WordPress installation. It’s a must though as it helps to stop dodgy spam comments from getting through which is always a good thing. If you don’t use it, I recommend getting your Akismet API key and using it now.
Robots Meta
Another Yoast plugin and one that really helps with one of the main challenges of having a blog, duplicate content. This plugin allows you to set commands to your robots.txt file so that tag, category and archive pages are not indexed by the search engines. This stops you from having the duplicate content that the search engines frown upon.
FormBuilder
For me this is the easiest form building plugin that I have tried. Makes it incredibly easy to set up multiple, versatile web forms whilst also giving you the ability to save all web form submissions to your WordPress database, simple and easy!!
We would love to know if you use any other WordPress plugins on every WordPress site that you design or use. Leave a comment now…