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| 20 BEST WORDPRESS PLUGINS |
Most Useful
With WordPress being the most popular CMS on the web, it’s a common target for malicious bots and hackers searching for potential easy targets. Add to this that users often make it easier for these bots and hackers by using easy to guess/crack passwords, and you have a bad situation waiting to happen. Did we mention that a lot of plugins with known vulnerabilities never get updated?
These problems can mostly become a thing of the past with Wordfence Security, which takes care of much of the security eff ort. Nothing beats a proper security strategy; a security plugin like this should be part of it.
The plugin is a toolbox of functionality that covers all of the main concerns you need to be regularly checking against. This includes scanning your installation for known malicious code, enforcement of strong passwords, activity monitoring and firewall features to disrupt malicious scans by hackers and botnets.
The plugin can be set to automatically perform security checks on a daily basis, guaranteeing consistency and saving you lots of time in the process. With the saying time is money, this plugin will literally save you lots of time and money from all of the manual checks you’d need to do in order to guarantee high security standards.
While SEO isn’t rocket science, it’s certainly easy to make easy mistakes. Yoast SEO helps you to avoid these traps by providing functionality that checks against common SEO mistakes. It also provides a series of other functionality to assist you in writing better content. After all, good SEO is all about content being king!
In terms of content assistance, there are several tools available to help with specific agendas. These include news content feeds for being picked up by Google News, local SEO to compete on Google Maps placements, and more. The main plugin provides you with a keyword tool that helps you identify whether your target keywords are present in the places you want them to be. This is handy for making sure that keywords are visible to search engines like Google in the context you want them to be. There are also additional content analysis features to analyse the length of your sentences and writing style to improve your content quality for higher Google scores.
Not all SEO is purely about the quality of your website content; some is about the technical architecture. Yoast SEO has features to help with this too, with functionality to provide instructions to crawlers through robot settings, search engine friendly links and more. Two features of Yoast SEO for making sure everything gets indexed by Google are the creation of breadcrumbs and sitemaps – hence providing visible links to everything on your website.
Usability
Easy to set up and allows you to build a cached HTML version of your website. This approach to presenting your website avoids the need for server processing such as database access. Benefits of this include faster loading.
Fully configurable search upgrade, allowing search of specific content areas such as comments and attachments. Search configuration is highly customisable, with the ability to define exclusion rules
Create links to WordPress pages that are easier to share, remember and track. These short links are handy for anything from print and radio marketing campaigns, to managing aff iliate campaigns
Links that don’t work are bad for user experience and can get your website penalised by Google. This plugin helps you avoid this by alerting you to broken links in your website with options to fix them.
One of the usual suspects for slow loading websites is large image sizes. Smush will scan all of your image uploads and optimise them using image resizing and compression to reduce their file size.
The database used by your WordPress installation can get pretty messy after a fair amount of usage. This isn’t good for keeping you website running fast – nor for making backups. Being able to clean up the inevitable mess is a must; hence the purpose of this plugin.
Optimize Database has features specialising in cleaning diff erent parts of your WordPress installation, and is capable of detecting orphaned content, unused tags and spam content that it detects. Orphaned content is possibly most problematic type of content for database clutter, with these items having no trace for regular WordPress plugins and functionality. As a result, orphaned content stays in the database.
The plugin has convenient features to automate database cleaning and log file creation of activities. Both of these features help to ensure that the monotonous task of cleaning is never forgotten, while the details of cleaning are recorded as evidence should anything go wrong.
While WordPress was originally created for bloging,it was intended to present audio content. Fear not – t this plugin solves this by allowing you to host, list and manage any type of audio content in your blog, whether it be pocasts music. Where a website is being used to sell audiocontent, this plugin can also be used to off er previews.
The audio player is highly customisable, with options to change the presentation template and set text also options to specify how the audio is played such at the default volume and whether the audio should loop.
While most people use browsers that support HTML5, the plugin also supports legacy browsers such as
old version of Internet Explorer. File types supported are MP3 and OGG; which are pretty common formats. The plugin allows you to specify whether audio plays immediately or waits for user input.
With the output being entirely a client side component it is possible to use standard CSS to change styling. Additionally, server side PHP can also be used to decide what to output – such as the configurations to use according to specific user and page settings.
An emerging trend with websites is to present call to action content in response to user actions. These actions are often when the visitor scrolls to a certain point on the page, but could also be anything else from looking at target content for an amount of time to hovering their mouse pointer over content in a way that suggests an interest.
The Scroll Triggered Boxes plugin allows you to activate content pop up boxes when the user scrolls to a specified point on the web page. This can be specified as a percentage from the top of the page or as a specific reference a part of the page such as the comments section. The plugin is highly customisable, with the ability to change appearance settings as well as to set rules for pages the content applies to – including whether to turn off for mobile.
With popup box allowing for any type of HTML, there is limitless scope to how you present you call to action (within the scope of what’s possible with HTML, obviously).
This freedom allows you to present anything from data capture forms to option buttons and entire websites through an iframe.
While written content is the primary focus of WordPress, this can’t be said about image management. However, blogs and websites often need to present pictures to support their written content – a picture speaks a thousand words, the saying goes. This plugin off ers a solution for websites and blogs that make heavy use of picture-based content; providing both attractive presentation and the management features for build the content structure.
Photo Gallery is a fully featured picture management tool, complete with ability to manage diff erent sized thumbnails, diff erent gallery layouts and file management. It is also possible to use Photo Gallery as an e-commerce tool for selling images – much like istockphoto.com.
The main strength of this plugin is its vast range of features for presentation. It has too many features to list here, but some of the most impressive include picture search, audio playback, slide show and picture shuff le. Its responsive layout abilities also allows for picture content to be presented in a way to best suit diff erent sized screens – pretty important these days as people could be browsing your site with anything from a smartphone to a large screen smart TV.
Forms are an essential part of websites that require any type of information feedback. Gravity Forms allows you to quickly build forms of any type from a simple enquiry forms to product order forms and detailed questionnaires.
Development of these forms is made easy through the plugin’s form builder tool, which allows you to define how each field should be presented. This includes options for specifying the type of input, available options and validation rules. More advanced presentation can also be defined through conditional logic, allowing forms to show and hide fields based on the user’s input.
The plugin has full management for responses generated by its forms, including abilities to view responses by individual people, make alterations and export responses to CSV.
Notifications can also be configured to be sent via email or to show in the login dashboard in response to form entries.
Whether your website exists to make sales or provide information, being able to identify who is visiting your website is important for building better engagement. Once Leadin has identified the website visitor, it is able to find additional information about them from public sources such as social networks. This information may include details about their location, work history and who they work for. Its ability to find additional information about people engaging with your website allows you to be more focused in closing sales and other goals that your website exists to serve. Leadin provides reporting that reveals detailed insights on how people are interacting with your website, as well as new information it has captured about them.
With Leadin checking interactions generated through page views and form interactions, it is able to build a more detailed profile of each person who visits your website – including anonymous users who are yet to identify themselves.
Events Manager provides everything you need to use your website for event registrations. There are features to make the plugin useful for single events as well as recurring events, including management for tickets, locations and more. Online payment integration, coupon codes and more can be set up with the pro version.
Not only can the plugin allow you to list events on your website, it can also be integrated with website and desktop calendars. This is possible through its AJAX API for websites and also feeds for iCal. They also have a ready made calendar add-on for anyone who doesn’t want to get too bogged down with technical development work.
No registration tool would be complete without management features, and Events Manager is no exception. Details of events and their registered attendees can be managed, along with the ability for user submitted events to be assigned a status of pending or approved.
Flow-Flow allows you to publish an attractive social wall detailing your activities on social networks. Not only does this plugin provide compatibility with all of the major social networks, it also provides support for multiple accounts. This means that you could show activities for multiple people or brands on the same social network.
Flow-Flow is also highly customisable, with it providing the ability to alter the formatting, layout and colours used for wall items. For those who lack time, there are already many professional layouts to choose from. The social wall provides engaging interactivity that enhance usability. Wall posts can be filtered by keyword search, as well as by the social network they come from.
The most noticeable feature is how content expands into a lightbox when selected. These selected items reveal additional options for social media sharing; avoiding the main wall from becoming cluttered with too many options.
Anti-Spam does exactly what it’s name suggests – blocks spam. This plugin is specifically for comment sections, stopping automated spam bots cluttering your pages with nonsense. What sets this plugin apart is that it doesn’t require any sort of Captcha input from the user – avoiding this as an inconvenience.
Nobody likes spam e-mail. However, there are times where you need to publish your e-mail address for real people to find – which is where it also gets found by spam bots. This plugin solves the problem by presenting content in a way that makes e-mail addresses invisible to spam bots, but visible to real people
Surprisingly, the majority of content on the web is hidden from public access. The so called “Deep Web” accounts for 96% of the Internet – which this plugin is ideal for making your website part of. Its purpose is simply to restrict access by password protection and can also restrict by IP address if required.
It’s easy to take your WordPress install for granted – until something bad happens. This plugin allows you to create automated backups of your website, hence avoid inconvenient situations that you can’t recover from. When disaster strikes, it’s simply just a case of rolling back to the latest backup.
Although not technically a WordPress plugin, this tool is still very relevant to your WordPress strategy. If Google has a problem with your website, it will provide all of the details here – so this is a place you want to be keeping an eye on regularly
