These are a few of my favorite WordPress plugins. Some plugin features come standard with premium themes, but many of my clients prefer to use free themes, which makes many of these plugins necessary. These plugins I use myself, for my clients websites and I recommend. None of them are affiliate links, and they are all free – while some offer premium versions for a nominal fee. Each plugin is fabulous is it’s own way, and here’s why:
Broken Link Checker: This plugin does exactly what it says, it monitors your site for broken outbound links (which are bad to have). When a broken link is detected, you receive an email giving you the option to leave as is, modify the link or remove the link.
cforms: The best form plugin I have come across, and it happens to be free! Create forms with check boxes, radio buttons, dropdown menus, required fields, groupsets, or a combination of several fields. Easy to change administrative options and also the ability to modify form styling.
CommentLuv: This is simply a plugin to give back to the visitors who comment on your posts. When commenting, a link to their last blog post is left on the comment. Comment Luv also provides a directory of websites that use their plugin.
Exclude Pages: Many themes have page exclusion as a standard option, but for those themes that do not, this plugin is recommended. This plugin gives the site the ability to have pages within which are not shown in the main navigation bar. Simple, yet important.
Insights: WordPress has somewhat integrated this into it’s updates, but this plugin is much more in depth. From a page’s or post’s edit mode, Insights allows you to search for content from your entire site, or Google, and create a link to that content, with one click.
NextGEN Gallery: There are really too many reasons to list for this plugin! This is essentially a beautiful and extremely customizable photo gallery plugin. A few of my favorite options are the ability to change the order of photos in a gallery and that you are able to specify the exact image thumbnail size. These galleries are also visually pleasing to browse through.
Quick Cache: This one helps with page load time by caching your content. You may disable caching for the administrator logged in, you can also clear the cache at any time.
Tweet old post: Through the settings you can specify how often you would like your blog posts to be automatically tweeted for you. Choose the tweet verbiage, how often and even which posts you would like excluded from the queue. This plugin helps your twitter visibility without effort.
Ultimate Google Fonts: Hundreds of beautiful web fonts for your website. You have the option to specify fonts for the paragraph content and all of the headers – choose the same font or make each different. As you can see, my post title is a different font, as are the headers on my right sidebar.
Add This: Social sharing is a must and this plugin is great because of it’s compact size, options and it’s pretty. There are several options for displaying the buttons, their website also provides code for many more options. See it in action below, share the post to see how user friendly it is.
What are your favorite WordPress plugins?
