Install these WordPress Plugins right now!
Several month ago i announced to extend the usage of Worpdress as the main CMS for my customers. Since the beginning, i’m experiencing with different kind of plugins. There’s no doubt that it’s absolutely necessary to extend your WordPress installation with plugins. Most of those Top list of plugins contain at least the following items.
This are, from my point of view, absolutely must-have plugins. They provide all-day useful functionality to increase productivity, integrate your WordPress with other (important) services and secure it right from the start. Except two of this plugins they all come at no cost. I personally don’t mind spending a few Euros on professional made and (to me) very useful software. Therefore i won’t exclude this software from the list as others have done before:
Akismet
That’s i think the most-used plugins for WordPress since ever. Akismet is a spam blocker that checks your comments and trackbacks automatically for spam entries and blocks or removes them. It’s based on a collaborative approach and free for personal use. Any professional bloggers are asked to pay 5$ a month to get an professional API key.
Contact Form 7
Most people that deal with WordPress on a professional basis are wondering why WordPress isn’t providing a contact form. The usual answer (‘to keep it simple and stupid’) caused Takayuki Miyoshi to create the awesome Contact Form 7 plugins. It’s a full-featured, out-of-the-box usable contact form that is available in 43 languages. Based on modules for form elements, it’s also very easy to adjust to your personal needs and – for future – also to HTML 5 improvements. It also integrates with Akismet for spam filtering and connects to the reCaptcha plugin that prohibits spoofing.
Google Analyticator
Google Analytics is frequently named as the core of the data kraken. I see it as one of Google’s most usable tools. When registering at Google Analytics, you’ll get some JavaScript code to track your visitors. This plugin allows to add the tracking code right at the header or footer of your website without changing the template files. This is a significant improvement as you just can add any templates you want, use Google Analytics with them, update them and don’t need to re-add the JavaScript code.
Additionally it adds a new element to your dashboard that shows your 30-day visitor development and some key statistics on your site performance.
http://plugins.spiralwebconsulting.com/analyticator.html
Google XML Sitemaps
This is definitely a must-have plugin. A sitemap generator is a tool that creates a full overview of your whole site structure, called a sitemap. This sitemap is made available to search engines and allows them to get to know your site without loading each single page. The Google XML Sitemaps plugins additionally informs the search engines about updates to your sites and generates this sitemap automatically once you update your site. It also allows to customize lots of options regarding your sitemap.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/
wpAntivirus
There have been numerous kind of hacks for WordPress in the past. To prohibit anyone from being incognito in your code, wpAntivirus checks for common methods to conterminate CMS installations. It allows you to configure a daily check and alert for any security breaches.
wpSEO
wpSEO is maybe the most professional plugin for WordPress. It improves WordPress’ functionality everywhere it lacks of options for search engine optimization. Functionality contains generating of titles, meta description and keywords and the ability to prohibit duplicate content. There are plenty of ways to set your own site title, meta description and meta keywords without editing the template files as well as any robot-related options. It also contains a dashboard plugin with a short overview of your Google, Yahoo and Alexa ranks. For personal use one will have to pay 20€ as a one-time fee. To use it in any of your customer installations, you’ll have to pay at least 50€ and up to 100€. From my point of view, this plugin is worth it’s money as it solves you many problems and saves a lot of time.
That’s my personal list of most-valuable and most-necessary WordPress plugins. I can imagine so many more interesting and notable plugins, but this ones are for everyone and every purpose. In the next days i will start adding lists of plugins by topic.