The Top 10 WordPress Plugins That You Should Be Using

Whether you a complete newbie, or seasoned expert with coding, SEO and design, WordPress is a great CMS to use. This blog uses it!

WordPress offers a simple and easy to navigate user interface, but best of all, there are thousands of plugins available.

After WordPress installation, you should really make the most out of what we consider to currently be the top 10 WordPress plugins:

#1 WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is among the most popular WordPress plugins of all time. It has received over 4,400,000 downloads and continues to improve every single year.

The current list of features includes:

• Check out the feature list:
• Post titles and meta descriptions
• Robots Meta configuration
• Canonical
• Breadcrumbs
• Permalink clean up
• XML Sitemaps
• RSS enhancements
• Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
• Clean up head section
• API Docs

#2 Akismet

Internet spam is a pain and ongoing. Akismet is a quick and easy way to delegate spam management! It’s a one click install and Akismet will then monitor your blog for spam 24/7/365!

Once Akismet is installed, it will monitor comments, track and pingbacks. It is a great time saver. They cross reference requests using their own web service to determine which are spam items and which are not.

#3 Shareaholic

We all know the significance that social media has in business today. If you actively promote sharing your pages and posts, you’ll see your social media exposure increase.

Shareaholic does that for you. It allows users to go directly to the social media site they use and share the page or post that they are reading. Here are some of the features:

• Analytics
• Recommendations for related content; increasing page views
• Share counters
• 15+ languages

#4 Simple 301 Redirects

With Google algorithm updates having a huge impact on sites across the globe, a lot of companies are focusing on restructuring their sites. Of course, the downfall of this is that link juice from old pages is going to be lost, or is it?

Using Simple 301 redirects, you can setup a redirect from one page to another. Link juice and page rank is preserved. So, if you are avoiding restructuring because of the current weight in search engines, Simple 301 Redirects could be the answer.

#5 Contact Coldform

Contact Coldform is one of the many contact form WordPress plugins that are available. Not only is this extremely easy to use, it actually blocks spam requests.

Features include:

• Customisable using coldskins or custom CSS
• Custom confirmation, error and spam messages
• Works without JavaScript

#6 WP Affiliate Platform

Blogs can be a huge source of income. Some of the top bloggers in the blogosphere make a full time income from affiliating with other websites. They can be huge sources of traffic and revenue for businesses, that only payout, when the referrer makes a sale. If you want to create an affiliate program, then WP Affiliate Platform is going to be your plugin of choice!

#7 Google Analytics For WordPress

From the creators of WordPress SEO, Yoast, comes a great Google Analytics plugin. If you are looking to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, then this is certainly going to be the quickest and easiest way!

#8 Exclude Pages

If you have a WordPress website that is similar to ours, then you might need to exclude pages from being visible. This is a great plugin that allows you to do that quickly and easily.

Once the Exclude Pages plugin is installed, you’ll see the “Exclude Page” or “Include this in lists of pages” on the right hand side of your WordPress backend for that particular page.

#9 WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart

Using the WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart means that you no longer needs to spend thousands on custom coding for your online store. This plugin allows users to add and remove items from their cart in one click. All payments are then processed via PayPal.

#10 WP Super Cache

Having a speedy blog doesn’t just help with SEO, but also with conversions. With so many websites out there, readers aren’t going to stick around for more than a few seconds to wait for a page to load. WP Super Cache avoids using PHP scripts by generating HTML files, speeding up your website considerably.

So there you have it…10 of the best WordPress plugins available; plenty to get you started with!