The Top 30 WordPress Plugins and Why I Like to Use Them

The Top 30 WordPress Plugins and Why I Like to Use Them

WordPress is a powerful CMS system just on its own out-of-the-box! But you can extend its power and functionality with a plugin, or plugins. Every WordPress plugin does something for your site that can extend its use and functionality for your sites visitors and users. Here I want to quickly talk about some of the best, most popular WordPress plugins and why they are popular and useful for your WP powered site.



Here's 10 WordPress Plugin and why I like to use them.

1. All in One SEO Pack
The WordPress All in One SEO Pack (AIOSEO) optimizes your WordPress site for the Search Engines. It has had over 30,000,000 downloads to since 2007. With tons of features for tweaking virtually every part of your site, from performance, to XML sitemaps, Social Media meta, and much more. It's no wonder it's the worlds most popular all in one SEO plugin!

2. Akismet
Akismet is a great plugin for stopping spam comments on your WP blog. It checks the comments that are placed against its database and marks any that appear to be spam for you so they don't get through. You'll still have to manually review held comments but chances are, if Akismet stopped them, it's likely a spam comment.

3. Google XML Sitemaps
Something that WordPress doesn't come with out-of-the-box is an XML sitemap. It does have a sitemap but it's more of an RSS feed. The Google XML Sitemap creates an XML sitemap that Google can read which can aid with Search Engine crawlers like Google/Bing/Yahoo etc, be able to crawl and index your site better.

4. Contact Form 7
Of all contact form plugins you can use on your WP site, Contact Form 7 is my most popular and preferred choice. Simply because you can customize the form to your hearts liking and use multiple contact forms on different parts of your site and use them seamlessly. It also supports a powerful Ajax style Captch for stopping spam contact submissions.

5. NextGEN Gallery
The NextGen Gallery plugin is an awesome plugin that handles the uploading of many different images to your site. With batch upload, and meta data importing, the ability to add/delete/rearrange and sort images and even edit the thumbnails of them and create gallery groups, albums and more. It makes uploading bulk images a pleasure and a joy over the standard WP image tool.

6. WP Super Cache
Another thing that WordPress doesn't come with out-of-the-box is caching ability. So that's why you want to install and activate this bad boy plugin that can cache your sites files and serve them to people instead of serving them with fresh versions of it each time. Thus, speeding up your site and reducing the amount of server load so that your site runs faster.

7. Google Analytics for WordPress
If you want to see and know what your sites visitors are up to then you need the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. It lets you track your WP sites visitors easily with lots of meta data, views per author and category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and page views etc all from your WP admin dashboard.

8. WP Touch
Most WP themes are responsive today, but if you're using a theme that isn't, then you can install the WPTouch plugin and convert your non-responsive WP theme into a fully responsive one! WPTouch converts and optimizes your WP site for mobile device users/visitors. It makes use of Ajax loading articles and smooth transition effects when people that are using mobile devices like iPhone, iPod, Android, Google phones etc and more.

9. WordPress Importer
The WordPress Importer comes in very very handy sometimes. If you ever need to import posts, pages, custom fields, categories, tags and more from an export file, you'll need to use the WordPress Importer tool.

10. Jetpack
Jetpack lets you turbo charge your WP site with a ton of features that WP doesn't have on its own. It makes use of the cloud power of WordPress.com. Quite simply, Jetpack simplifies managing WordPress sites by giving you visitor stats, security services, speeding up images, and helping you get more traffic.

Okay that's 10. I'll do another 10 later on as I have about 30 plugins I like to use. I'll post the rest later on and why I like to use them too.

Do you use any of these WP plugins? If so why?

What's your favorite plugin on this list?