5 Essential WordPress Plugins
A while back, we wrote about optimizing your website with scripts. Scripts are great for increasing the functionality of your website, and are very handy if you’re looking to do things like blog, set up an ecommerce shop, or host photos.
But one of our favorite scripts is WordPress. WordPress is an extremely popular web application that allows for user-friendly blog posting and commenting on your website. If you want to blog (whether personally or for a business), WordPress is probably the best place to start.
Even so, if you keep WordPress bone stock, you’re missing out on a lot of extra capabilities, which is why we’re here today to tell you about some of the best plugins out there.
Here is a list of our 5 favorite WordPress plugins:
- Yoast. Yoast is probably the most essential plugin that you can install on WordPress. It’s an SEO plugin that includes a number of features, like page analysis, meta and link element customization, and technical SEO. You can visually see how your blog will show up on Google searches, and modify your keywords to improve your SEO.
- WordPress Super Cache. WP Super Cache “generates html files that are served directly by Apache,” which speeds up your blog significantly. Your site will load faster, which greatly increases the user experience for your readers.
- Akismet. Akismet is a spam filter. It filters out your comment and track-back spam so that you don’t have to manually. Once you start writing your blog, you’ll notice that spam is a big problem, and this plugin helps make spam much less of a problem.
- Jetpack. Jetpack is a plugin package that adds a huge amount of functionality to your WordPress blog. From things like a social networking enabled comment system, to added social media widgets, to a much-improved search feature, Jetpack adds a lot of features, all of which help streamline your users’ reading experience.
- BackUpWordPress. Although there are ways to back up your blog manually, a backup plugin can greatly reduce the amount of time that you spend backing things up. This plugin allows you to create multiple backup schedules for your site, and does everything automatically so that you don’t have to.
Short of adding scripts to your website, WordPress plugins are absolutely one of the best ways to increase the functionality of your blog (or website, if it’s built around WordPress). These 5 plugins make it easy to get everything that you want out of your blog, and we recommend them to anyone using WordPress.
What’s your favorite WordPress plugin? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.
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