Best WordPress Plugins

WordPress Plugins Used By Web Designers

WordPress plugins add new features and functions to a website. Plugins can make a website easier to build. However, you can spend countless hours trying and testing different plugins. In this post I will share some of my favorite plugins.

How I Choose A Plugin

Always research a plugin before downloading and activating it. Some plugins may contain viruses or just bad code that can cause coding conflicts or worse crash your site.

    • Word Press PluginsRatings – Always check the rating of previous users. I will never consider a rating less than 4 stars
    • Number of Ratings – This is more important than rating themselves. A five star is meaningless with less than 50 ratings.
    • Details – I always look at the details for a description and screen shots. Make sure it does exactly what you are looking for.
    • Number of Downloads – The number of downloads should be much higher than the number of ratings. Any problems are likely to be reported with at least 10,000 downloads.

FREE Plugin or Paid Plugin

There a number of great premium plugins out there but I rarely purchase one without first trying the free or “lite” version. There are thousands of plugins to choose from and I have found free plugins for nearly everything a business could need.

The Best List of WordPress Plugins

These plugins are listed randomly as I remember them, not in order of preference.

WordPress SEO Plugin

This is an awesome plugin for SEO. The free version is great for optimizing most sites. Yoast also offers additional plugins for local SEO and Video SEO.

W3 Total Cache Plugin

Every website needs a caching plugin. W3 is a very popular caching plugin because it does a great job at caching.

Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

Sitemaps are critical to making sure search engines find all your pages for ranking and placement. Google XML Sitemaps does a great job of this.

Fast Secure Contact Form Plugin

What better way for viewers to contact you than using a contact form. Fast Secure Contact is very easy to customize and advanced features like scheduling appointments.

Exclude Pages from Navigation

This plug is great for when you don’t want a page to show in the navigation bar. Easy to use, just unclick “Include this page in lists of pages” when creating a post or page.

Shareaholic Social Sharing PluginSocial Share Plugin

Features include – share buttons, analytics and related content boxes. Choose headlines, position, layout, size, and more.

Additional Favorites

Column Shortcodes, Easy Pricing Tables, GZip Ninja Speed Compression, Master Slider, My Page Order, Pingler, Simple Google News, Speedy Page Redirect, Tweetily, and WP Smush.it

Warning: If a plugin is not operating properly or messing up other plugins on your web site – deactivate it. If deactivating it fixes the problem I recommend deleting it all together.

According to wordpress.org there are currently over 32,900 plugins and over 719 million downloads. Choose wisely.

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