August 26, 2014: One of the best things about WordPress is the multiplicity of plugins available for this popular CMS. So we reached out to our friends at Reddit, as well as polling our own experts, to find the must-haves:
Yoast SEO – The Yoast SEO plugin comes as part of the most standard one-click install packages provided by the larger hosting providers. Most know of it, but every beginning webmaster should be familiar with how Yoast operates because it makes on-page SEO optimization as easy as it can be.
WP Migrate Pro – It’s highly recommended that you back up your site entirely on a separate storage method at least once monthly. Although the major ISPs such as 1and1 and GoDaddy have their own backup solutions, we still urge manually backing up your entire site monthly and storing offline if possible. WP Migrate makes this important chore painless.
Contact Form 7 – This plugin lets you create contact forms simply and easily. It uses text matching to jpg files instead of complicated hash-based solutions,which is good for beginners. It also keeps down spam.
iThemes Security – Hackers are increasingly attacking vulnerable WordPress themes, but iThemes Security can serve as a useful backstop. Just run it in a clean install and you can stop worrying at night.
Jetpack – Comment spam is always a huge headache for bloggers, as spammers work hard to hijack blogs with comment spam. Jetpack is a plugin that lets users use various social media logins to comment. Jetpack allows use of Google Plus and Facebook logins for comment identification and tracking. This also lets comments appear on relevant social media services, enabling viral spread of content through the social networks.
W3 Total Cache – This useful plugin speeds up website load times considerably by storing pages in a local cache instead of on the server side. Your users will love you for it. Low load times are increasingly valued by search engines, including Google.
All In One Schema – I wrote about this great plugin in an earlier article. All in One Scheme makes it easy to create rich snippets for your articles, making it easier for the search engines to index your content.
WP E-Commerce – One of the gold standard plugins for e-commerce. Excellent for setting up shopping carts for a variety of products.
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