The great thing about working with an open-source platform like WordPress is that it is well-supported by an enthusiastic, passionate, and forward-thinking community of developers, designers, and users. From this community spawns, among many things, a truck load of plugins that everyday users can download and install without breaking a sweat. These plugins help publishers make the most out of WordPress’ basic functions and optimize theirs and their visitors’ user experience.
Every new WP site we build begins with the activation of a number of key plugins. Many of these plugins would be really helpful to those of you running WP sites of your own, so I thought I would outline our list of essential WordPress plugins. Enjoy!
All-in-One SEO Pack - A great plugin to help you optimize your site titles, descriptions and keywords. A must-have for anybody who remotely cares about search engine optimization.
cforms II - This powerful AJAX-enabled plugin helps you build multiple custom forms for you to embed onto your pages. We use cforms to run the contact form on our Contact page.
Feed Count - If you’re tired of the FeedBurner chicklet and want to try your hand at customizing the look of your feed count, then this is the plugin for you.
Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin dynamically builds and updates your sitemaps to help search engines index your content more accurately.
Robots Meta - Another search engine friendly plugin that allows you to adjust your nofollow, noindex settings on a post-by-post and page-by-page basis.
Simple Tagging - Because WordPress’ native tagging function isn’t perfect yet. My biggest gripe against the native tagging function is that you can’t see a current list of tags that are already in-use. This plugin takes care of that in a very cool way.
Subscribe to Comments - Keep your commentors in the conversation by allowing them to subscribe to comment updates for any particular post.
WP-PageNavi - A great alternative to WordPress’ native pagination function that lets users browse content by page number.
Got more plugins that you consider essential? Tell me about them by leaving a comment.