WordPress is a wonderfully free CMS, but without it’s plugins it’s a bit of a turtle shell without the…er…turtle (analogies have never been my strong point). Our developers like to create their own plugins, so we’re a bit hypocritical by not using some of these, but there are a few fantastic one’s that you simple should not miss. So! here is a quick summary of our top favourites:
10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
If your reader finds one of your posts interesting enough to spend more than 10 seconds on your page, then providing them some other related posts is just a nice way of saying “we’ve done the searching for you, read these”. How nice!
9. Contact Form 7
If you find contact forms a bit of a pain, and just want the work done for you. This is the only plugin for you. Completely customisable, but it can’t animate your contact form into an envelope and seal it… ‘wink wink’
8. NIVO slider light
If you like jQuery carousels, Nivo slider really is the icing on the cake. With loads of different transitions and customisable in every way you need, I dare you to find a better one.
7. Raw HTML capability
If you need to enter raw code into your posts, WordPress makes it very difficult. Remove the difficulty and disable everything!
6. WP-PageNavi
Pagination is essential in keeping your website less than a mile long, and it’s never been easier without this plugin! (although our developers disagree)
5. WP-SWFObject
I love Flash, and that’s no lie. What better way to celebrate it by having an easy way to embed it using the almighty swfObject library.
4. Share & Follow
Everyone loves Facebook & Twitter and all those other social sites that don’t matter as much, so why not have every social icon on the bottom of every single post??? Because that would look terrible. But this plugin does make it very simple to add the social bookmarks that you actually want. Or you could just add them manually…
3. Akismet
Everyone hates spam, although the tinned stuff is under-appreciated. Get rid of the stuff by activating this fantastic default plugin for WordPress. Then celebrate by opening a tin of spam…then probably bin the spam.
2. W3 Total Cache
FAST FAST SO SO FAST!! Honestly, if you want your site to be as fast as LIGHTNING BOLTS then install this plugin, it’s simply genius. Cache your entire site for your visitors, who would have thought?
1. All in One SEO Pack
SEO is some magical voodoo thing that people spend there lives mastering and taming (if it was also like a lion or something) but does Google care? who knows… What we DO know, is if you install this plugin, your site gets optimised to the max. Your keywords / descriptions are altered inline with your pages / posts content which Google thinks is just lovely. Google loves this plugin and so will you.
