Best WordPress Plugins For Your Website

WordPress is one of the most used content management application on the planet. From the Americas to Europe and the Orient, it is used for basic blogging to robust merchant sites. The draw is its open source platform that allows almost any kind of configuration. The other draw is the hundreds of free and paid WordPress plugins that can be added to any WordPress site in a matter of seconds.

WordPress Plugins

Plugins allow a web designer to add features and functionality within minutes. At the same time these same plugins can be removed and the features removed within minutes. Below are a few must-have WordPress plugins.

SEO Plugin

The first plugin is something I use on every site I create. No matter if the theme comes with its own SEO tools, I will turn those tools off and install All-in-One SEO. This by far is the most advanced plugin you will find for your site.

There are many others that are out there, but no matter how many times I go away from this plugin, I have always come back to All-in-One SEO. The plugin works great and does what I need to get my site ranking on the first page of Google.

Cache Plugins

If you have a need for speed, then these two plugins will help increase the speed for any website. The first is Hyper Cache and the second is called DB Cache Reloaded. Both plugins work together. Make sure they are both installed on your site.

What these two do is cache every database query in the history of your site. This means that if your pages and post remain static, your site will not be impacted with consistent calls to refresh the data. What will be served up is a static page. If something is changed on the page or post, then the simple clearing of the cache will create a new cache of data.

These two plugins are easy to install and require no configuration. Just turn them on and walk away. They will do all the work for you. If you change something on your site, add a new plugin, remove a plugin, then simply clear the cache and you are back in action!

Analytic Plugin

With any site there are two things you want to keep an eye on. The first is traffic and the second thing is finding out where the traffic is coming from. If you are using a CPANEL dashboard or one of the other dashboard application, then you can grab your stats from those metric, but to get more detailed data, this plugin can really help out.
WordPress.com stats is a plugin that will display very detailed graphs, keyword search stats, page and post info and links clicked.  I use this plugin on all my websites.

Spam Plugin

Every website needs Akismet. What is Akismet? It is a plugin to help manage spam. Trust me you need it. It will cut down on about 90 percent of the spam that comes to your site. It is very effective and needs no maintenance. Grab a free ID and turn it on. It is that simple.

Post Plugin

Better Related Posts is a plugin that does one great thing. It appends related posts to the bottom of any current post. This is a big SEO boost for any website. Google loves to see links that are both internal and external. Fire up this plugin and let it do its SEO work for you.

Admin Plugin

A great post and page management plugin is called Reveal IDs. Have you ever used a plugin that allows you to show or exclude pages or posts? Plugins run off of IDs. If you don’t know the page, category or post ID, you will not be able to use this feature.

This is where Reveal IDs can help. It will display the IDs for you, so you can go about configuring your WordPress site the way you like.

Sitemap Plugins

XML-Sitemap and a Video Sitemap are two important plugins to have. They create a map for Google to spider and index. The better organized your website the more pages will get indexed and the more traffic your site will receive.

These WordPress plugins will create two xml page files for you. These pages can be added to a Google webmaster tool account, yahoo webmaster account or Bing account. Each search engine has its own rules and guidelines to how the pages are added.

There are two types of sitemaps. There are the XML and the RSS. Yahoo uses the RSS and Google uses the XML. The free plugins will not create both formats. They will only create the XML format. To get more than just the XML page created, you will need to purchase a premium plugin. A plugin like Google Video Sitemap can do both for you.

These are some of the most important plugins you can add to your website. They are lightweight and will not slow your website down. They are also updated frequently. One draw back from using free plugins is the lack of support or updates. All the plugins above are managed well and updated along with any new WordPress patch or update.

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