WordPress Plugins That Are Essential For All Of Your New Websites
WordPress Plugins are an important component for any WordPress site. They help you to easily extend your site without having to code certain common features from the ground up.
Having led the development of several hundred WordPress sites over the years, I have learned that there are some WordPress Plugins that I simply wouldn’t launch without.
You Gotta Have These On Every Install!
Search Engine Optimization And Readability
Yoast Premium is an important part of all the sites I have developed. It acts as a powerful aid in ensuring all of our sites measure up in terms of Google’s index and analysis. We don’t launch without it.
Yoast not only provides keyword density considerations for posts and pages, but it also supports creating your XML sitemaps. It helps in analyzing your titles, meta descriptions, URL lengths and a lot more. It even provides breadcrumbs you can easily add to your custom theme.
Learn More About The Yoast Plugin
Powerful Website Security
Wordfence offers site protection from WordPress hacking like cross-site scripting and SQL injections, and much more. Properly configured, (knock on wood) my sites have been pretty well protected. Wordfence launched a new service helping customers with clean up of hacked sites. These services in combination make this a must have of WordPress Plugins.
Learn More About The Wordfence Plugin
Best Form Creation And Data Capture Tool
Gravity Forms provides comprehensive form creation for your site. You can easily produce a form and the formatting in the resulting email is amazing! So clean. Gravity Forms is also powerful. You can even purchase a version that includes the capability of setting up a merchant account for ecommerce purposes. Easily the best forms plugin you will ever use for WordPress.
Learn More About The Gravity Forms Plugin
Custom Fields And Dashboard Content Editing
Advanced Custom Fields Pro is a must have plugin if you are rolling your own themes. It provides the power of creating specific content blocks on your web page with matching field controls in your WordPress dashboard. Beautiful plugin with a lot of flexibility and features.
Be sure to grab the Yoast AFC Analysis plugin to cover your custom fields in the SEO and readability analysis.
Learn More About The Advanced Custom Fields Plugin
Effective And Easy Post And Page Commenting
Disqus is a social network in and of itself, really. It is a full-featured comment management plugin that makes implementing comments on your pages and posts simple, clean and rich in every way. It is the gold standard for comments.
Learn More About The Disqus Plugin
Powerful Caching Plugin For Performance
W3 Total Cache is perfect for every WordPress site if PageSpeed means anything to you. W3 Cache is top notch and works wonders for site performance. WordPress is a bit cumbersome out of the box, W3 Cache helps mitigate the weight of the framework.
Learn More About The W3 Total Cache Plugin
Quality Image Optimization Plugin
WP Smush is an image compression plugin. This plugin does a great job with supporting our favorite caching plugin in pursuit of optimal website performance.
Learn More About The WP Smush Plugin
That’s Our List, What do You Use?
We recommend these plugins when you launch your new sites. There are a whole lot of plugins out there for many purposes, so why not tell us which ones you use? Hit us up in the comments and let us know.
