One of the biggest advantages of a website powered by WordPress is the massive amount of plugins available to optimize it, extend its features, and keep it secure–and many of the best plugins are free, like WordPress itself.
Last week we listed some essential security plugins that can help protect your site. Now for the bells and whistles–here’s another short list of plugins that provide the features most sites can’t live without:
Yoast SEO
This is the #1 plugin for optimizing your website for search engines, making it super-simple to edit page titles and descriptions, and giving you tons of useful tips for honing in on your focus keywords. (more)
Google XML Sitemaps
With this plugin, your sitemap gets automatically updated every time you make a change to your website, keeping your search engine listings relevant and up-to-date. (more)
Broken Link Checker
Nothing is more frustrating to site-owners, end-users, and SEO specialists than a link that suddenly and unknowingly goes nowhere. This plugin monitors your site for bad links and sends you an email as soon as it finds one. (more)
Soliloquy
Animated sliders are still one of the most common homepage features. Soliloquy makes it easy to create responsive, SEO-friendly sliders that can include both photos and videos. (more)
Contact Form 7
Form building doesn’t get much easier than this. Type in your labels, select your input fields, create a notification email, and simply drop the resulting short code in your page. It works simply, and it simply works. (more)
WP Retina 2x
Retina and other super high definition screens require images with 2x or 3x the pixel density of regular displays. With this plugin, your site will automatically create and serve the images optimized for the end user’s display–just set it, and forget it. (more)
If you have questions about this topic, or any other questions/suggestions about website development, brand development, or digital marketing, please send an email to [email protected]. We appreciate your suggestions, and enjoy helping you make the most of your brand and your online presence.