Top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins
As you probably already know, one of the best part about Wordpress is that you have able to add additional plugins depending on what features you are needing. Below is a list of the top 10 essential WordPress plugins that your site should have.
- Advanced-Admin-Menus
First Word Press plugin is for the backend to make your interface much easier to use and more professional looking. In today’s world, time is money and every click counts. This plugin creates a very nice down drop down menus where you can get to any backend page with one click. This is a must have plugin, I give it 5 stars all the way. This plugin works best with WordPress Versions under 2.5, it does work for 2.5, but not perfectly nor does it look as professional as it does with older versions. - Top Level Categories
Next Must have Wordpress plugin ONLY NEW wordpress site must have and install before building their site is Top Level Categories. This plugin fixes the biggest problem with wordpress and takes out the /category/ in the URL and puts in the actually category name. This is one of plugins I can’t understand why it was not built into Wordpress from the start, but Filipe Forte did a great job with it. I give it 5 stars all the way. - SEO Title Tag
The next Wordpress plugin every person must install no questions asked is SEO Title Tag, by Stepfan Spencer at Netconcepts. As a Search Engine Optimization Specialists, this is by far the most important and best plugin ever. This plugin gives you the ability to right custom title tags for every page, post, and category. This is essential for Effective SEO. I give it 4.8 stars. - Breadcrumb Navigation XT
The of most over looked important part of a web site is the breadcrumbs. Not only do they help users, know where they are on your site, but most importantly they help search engines spider your site and increase internal linking. This plugin does take a little easily, but once installed, works like charm. I give it 4 stars. - cforms II
This is the best Wordpress form plugin made hands down. The form templates out there, but easily customizable if you can work with CSS. The best part about these plugin is that it is also provides confirmation emails, any type of field format, database backup, tracking and much more. This will save you time and make your site look professional. It is fully customizable and easy to use. I give it 4.5 stars. - Obfuscate E-mail
Everybody in the word Hates Spam. However, little do they know, most people are helping cause more of it everyday and don’t even know it. Most spam starts when unethical people use email extractors to harvest email address to form a list and send spam. What email extractor does is spider web sites on the internet to find email addresses. So if you put your email address on your website and it is not encoded, your email address be taken. An easy way to stop that is install this Wordpress plugin and encoded any email address on your site so that spiders can’t understand it or know that it is a email address. I give it 4.5 stars all the way. - Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
A sitemap is very important to have on every page for your site. Sitemaps helps search engines being able to get to every page for your site within two clicks. Using this plugin will greatly help more pages of your site be indexed quicker. This is the best automatic sitemap generator made. Once you activate the plugin, you can put the sitemap tag on any page you want and you are done. Automatically updates and word perfectly. NOTE: Do not put more than 100 link one on one page. Search engines have ADD and get bored if you have to many links on one page. I give it 4.5 stars all the way. - Google Sitemaps
The next important Wordpress plugin is the XML Sitemap. This plugin automatically makes the site map and will submit it to Google Webcentral, you can always use this sitemap to submit to Yahoo as well. There is a little installation required before it works, but explained in directions. I give it 4 stars all the way. - Akismet:
When you start to get traffic, you will unfortunately start to get spam comments as well. This Wordpress plugin is great and will take care of must it. It does require you to register, but is well worth after a certain about traffic. - WordPress Database Backup
Last, but certainly not least, Wordpess Database Backup. I always say, you only save and backup as much as you can afford to loose. Therefore, if you install this plugin, you can easily download a backup of the database of the site, and better yet, you can have the plugin email a copy of the database ever day, week, or month. This is an essential Wordpress plugin to have and make certain you install this and get the email backup setup before it is tool there is a problem. I give it 4.5 stars all the way.
As you know there are hundreds of other great plugins out there, but those are my top time essential Wordress plugins I recommend. I hope this helps, please let me know if you know of any other essential Wordpress plugins. I would love to learn of any other plugins you think are great and why. I will make certain to review them and add them to the site as well. Thanks for your time.
