WordPress Plugins I can’t live without

Plug in

Plug inWordPress is a massively powerful web framework, and the plugin community is nothing short of mammoth. Its unusual for a search for a plugin to return no results! With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of some of the plugins I install by ‘default’ on every WordPress site Im involved with.

All the plugins listed below have been tested and proved working with the most current release of WordPress. In fact, they are all currently helping power this site!

All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Conforming to rich snippets can really help your search engine rankings, although there are countless plugins available to help with this, the all in one schema.org plugin is by far the simplest.

Disqus Comment System
One of the biggest issues with freshly installed WordPress sites is the fact they are almost immediately ‘attacked’ by bots posting comment spam. Rather then spend hours trying to prevent this, it’s best to switch off the built in comment system and use Disqus. Which is an industry leader in comment handling.

Jetpack by WordPress.com
Jetpack is a power users pack from WordPress, it contains some pretty impressive features which no wordpress site should be without in my opinion.

WordPress SEO
SEO is as important to websites as tyres are important to cars.. Don’t underestimate the need for really good SEO – that is, of course, if you actually want your website to receive visitors. WordPress SEO is written and supported by one of the most influential (in my opinion) people in the SEO field Joost de Valk

WP-PageNavi
Wordpress really suffers with ‘poor’ pagination straight of the box, in fact I would go as far as saying a content rich site using the default pagination system is almost unusable. WP-PageNavi adds page number navigation to your site. Which makes surfing round content rich sites far far easier.

WP Github Gist
If you are planning on hosting code snippets in various programming languages, then this takes the burden off of formatting the code neatly inline with any template. Host your code on Github, then use this plugin to display the code in a code window.

W3 Supercache
No body wants to have to wait for websites to load, not even your visitors.. So help make your site load as fast as is possible, by caching content.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
This is another plugin for displaying code on your website. Not all code warrants a heavy code field, so if you would like to display single lines of code or commands then check our this plugin.

Post Connector
There are many related post type plugins and widgets in the Word Press community, however most of them (to me) leave posts feeling too…. Spammy…. If you really care about your linked content, then I’d highly suggest you invest in the Post Connector by Barry Kooij

Ultimate TinyMCE
The WordPress post editor is pretty simple, which is great if you just want to hammer our text without feature rich formatting. However, I always find TinyMCE is a winner when handing sites over to rookie wordpress users. TinyMCE brings regular formatting facilities to the text editor that you would expect to find in most desktop editors.

Easy Digital Downloads
If you plan on selling downloadable content on your website, then you NEED this plugin. Easy Digital Downloads by Pippin Williamson is fantastic. Its really easy to use, and not only that it even comes with a mobile app for iOS to help keep track of your sales.

Easy Digital Downloads – Software Licenses
This is a plugin for the Easy Digital Downloads system, which handles software license key generation of software your make and sell. It’s got a feature rich API and is under constant review and development.

If you have a plugin which you think I should take a look at, get in touch using the comments section below.

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