Two of the most frequent questions I am asked are “Have you ever worked with such-and-such plugin?” and “What plugin do you recommend to do XYZ?” Considering that there are 18,153 free plugins available on the WordPress plugin codex site, and an untold number of premium/paid plugins for WordPress that are available only through their developers’ websites, it makes sense that people want to cut through the clutter and use what others, especially professional WordPress site developers, use.
I’ll admit upfront that I am not a plugin junkie like a lot of people can be. In fact, when I’m in the process of developing a site, I will incorporate as much functionality as possible without the use of plugins because the more plugins you use on your site, the bulkier and heavier it becomes which increases the time it takes for the site to load and decreases the speed with which the site responds to a request from the visitor. I like my sites to be as clean and efficient as possible, so I only use plugins when they are really called for.
That being said, I do have a fairly decent library of plugins that I use on a regular basis. Not all of the plugins in my library are appropriate for every site, so I won’t attempt to list them all here. Instead, I’ve boiled my list down to 9 plugins that I use on practically every site I build.
First, a dynamic duo that offers site security and backup:
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Login Lockdown — This plugin can be your first line of defense in warding off hackers. In many cases, hackers gain access to the back end of a WordPress site by simply guessing a username and password in brute force fashion. (By the way, here is a quick security tip for you — if your WordPress account has the username of ‘admin’ or ‘Admin’, you should change it immediately. Those are the two most common usernames and will make your site ripe for the picking should a hacker come along. But I’m digressing …) Login Lockdown thwarts these would-be brute force hackers by limiting the number of times a login can be attempted before the person is locked out of your site for set amount of time. This feature is intended to frustrate the hacker so that he/she either bores or tires of your site and simply moves on.
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WP DB Backup — This is absolutely the very first plugin I install on every site I create. As the name implies, WP Backup creates a backup of your WordPress site. Actually, to be very specific, it creates a backup of your pages and posts but does not create a backup of your other plugins or your site’s theme; this is a very important distinction to note.
Next, a trio of plugins to improve your site’s SEO heft:
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Google XML Sitemaps — This plugin creates an XML-based sitemap of your entire WordPress site. These sitemaps are absolutely “yummy” for Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.Why does your site need a sitemap? A sitemap is a very easy way to tell the search engines all about each of the publicly-available pages and posts (i.e., all pages and posts that aren’t password-protected or set to a private status) on your WordPress site. By having a sitemap on your site, you are making it very easy for the search engines to discover everything there is to know about your website, including your primary topics, what you write about most often, your keywords, etc. It also gives the search engines the exact URLs to each page and post on your site which allows them to properly index and rank not only each page/post, but also your site as a complete entity.
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Robots Meta — This plugin allows you to make any page on your WordPress site a “no-follow” page. This means that the search engines won’t index or save the page in their memory banks, so the page will not show up in any search results.Why would you want to do this? The answer is that it’s basically a quick and dirty method for protecting your content without going the full-blown route of requiring a username or password. So, if you want to offer something special to people who opt-in to your email list, but you don’t want to make that content easily accessible to anyone else, Robots Meta can make that happen.
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All-in-One SEO Pack — This is a true powerhouse of a plugin. The All-in-One SEO Pack optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines like Google by performing tasks such as automatically optimizing your blog post titles for maximum search engine rank. In fact, All-in-One SEO will even help you select the best title for your blog post. It will also automatically generate META tags (the embedded information within the source code of a web page that search engines read in order to learn more about the subject matter of that page) for each post which means that each post can have different META data and will therefore rank particularly well for a particular set of keywords.
And lastly, a nice quartet of plugins to encourage interaction with and amongst your readers:
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TweetMeme Retweet Button — There are other plugins that perform the same function as the TweetMeme Retweet plugin, but in my opinion, this plugin is the easiest to configure and install on your pages. TweetMeme makes it easy to add a re-tweet button to your blog posts and website pages which allows your visitors to quickly and easily share your content with their Twitter followers. TweetMeme also makes it a snap to change the position of the button on the page and also configure which pages it should not appear on, if any.
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WP Facebook Like — Similar to the TweetMeme plugin, there are many other plugins that will add a Facebook Like button to your pages, but I have found this particular plugin to be the most stable of the plugins as well as being a very easy-to-use plugin. Again, as with the TweetMeme plugin, WP Facebook like also allows you to change the location of the Like button on your page with a click of your mouse.
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Disqus Comment System — The default WordPress commenting system does little to promote interaction on your site. While it does allow for one-way communication because you, the site owner, will know when someone has posted a comment on one of your posts, it does not communicate in the reverse by notifying a visitor when you have replied to their comment. Disqus (pronounced “discuss”) is a third party service that tracks comments and will send a notification to the commenter (if they have enabled notifications within their Disqus account) when you or anyone else replies to their comment on your website. This is a great boon for communication because it will encourage your visitors to return to your site and continue the conversation, all the while boosting page views and page activity which will improve your site’s authority and search engine rank. This plugin replaces the default WordPress commenting system with the Disqus commenting system.
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cforms2 Contact Form — Although not the easiest of plugins to configure, I consider this to be the gold standard for creating contact forms while still using a free plugin. The cforms2 plugin is an incredibly versatile piece of software that allows you to create as many forms as you like, and each form can be set to behave differently and look differently from any other web form on your site. I appreciate the integrated captcha functionality that eliminates most spam, and I enjoy having complete freedom to be creative in the type of information I want the form to collect. Another very unique feature of cforms2 is its ability to create multi-page forms, meaning that, for example, you could create a very long questionnaire that spans multiple pages on your site, and cforms2 would then link one page of the form to the next so that the visitor is smoothly taken from one page to the next, and when complete, all of the information from all of the linked pages is transmitted to the site owner as one package of material.
P.S. — See those little “ReTweet”, Facebook “Like” and LinkedIn “Share” buttons at the top of the page? I’d love it if you’d give a nice, big click on those buttons and share this post with your friends and colleagues! (In case you were wondering, yes, those ReTweet and Facebook Like buttons are generated from the TweetMeme and WP Facebook Like plugins.)
