Best 10 Useful WordPress Plugins
After the release of WordPress 3.0, WordPress has achieved the status of a full-fledged content management system. The major advantage working on this CMS platform is its range of extensions and plugins. You don’t really have to be experienced to use WordPress on your website. Nowadays most of the hosting companies provide the ability to install WordPress on your site at a single click of the mouse. After WP came in to being, CMS web design became a huge trend. Now there are other CMSs available like Joomla, Drupal, Modx to name a few!
WordPress developers incorporate all the WP plugins to make the client’s website interactive and interesting. With a few added tweaks you can bend WordPress into a fully customized CMS for your site. In this post, we would be providing you with a showcase of best 10 useful WordPress plugins that might go a long way to help you managing your website/blog.
1- WP Super Cache
A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. These static files will be provided to the maximum of the users. But as the users details are added in the comment box, these requests are handled by the legacy caching engine.
2- All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is the best and most widely used by the web masters which automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for search engine optimization (SEO). It supports for custom post types, automatically optimizes your titles for search engines and avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs. With this, you can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
3- Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will help search engines to better index your website. It again helps your blog/website from SEO perspective. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With the site map generated by it, it becomes easy for the crawlers to see the complete inner structure of the website and hence retrieving it properly.
4- Simple Fields
This plugin extends the scope of customization. Basically it acts as replacement to custom fields and adds textboxes, text areas, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, and a file browser to the post admin area to make it easier to use.
5- Multiple Content Blocks
With this plugin, you can use more than one content “block” on a template. You only have to insert one tag inside the template, so it’s easy to use. When you want your clients to edit the content themselves without screwing up any code. This is where our plug-in comes in.
6- WP e-Commerce
If you have chosen to build your E-Commerce store on WP platform. Then, it is really important that you use this plugin to enhance the effectiveness of your store. WP e-Commerce is a free plugin but if your store grows and you need more special features you can buy them as modules at a low price.
7- Smart Youtube Plugin
Today, there is a trend of inserting videos. Because people like both audio and video to better understand the topic. Smart Youtube is a WordPress Youtube plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists into your post, comments and in your RSS feed. The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources.
8- Light Box2
Presentation of the content is very important. Lightbox 2 allows you to present images in a slick window, while darkening the rest of the page. It makes your site look professional, and adds very little to page load times. It does not require any browser plugins to work, and works on just about every web browser out there!
9- Next Gen Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. It makes the look and feel of the blog/website more interesting and interactive. You can add custom templates for your theme. Each gallery has a author. You may use any available popular image effect : Shutter, Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide. You may use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file. It is a great advantage to WordPress designers to design their websites with the presence of these functionality and add-ons.
10- Easy Adsense
Easy AdSense manages all aspects of Google AdSense for your blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box. It is an easy way to generate revenue for your blog/website. It enforces the Google policy of not more than three ad blocks per page. It provides control over the positioning and display of AdSense blocks in each post or page.
The beauty of WordPress as a content management system lies in its ability to extend the scope of customization. Hope you liked the post. Social bookmarking and comments are always welcome as ever. If we’ve missed out your favorite plugin, then kindly write in the comments below!
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