Top 10 WordPress plugin articles are written left and right but you hardly ever see plugins that are geared towards businesses. Most plugins people talk about are one’s for improving blogging websites. Here at iPoint, we try to place as many clients on WordPress as possible because of it’s powerful content management system and not so much because of it’s blogging. Here are the Top 10 WordPress Plugins for business websites that will improve performance and useability.
- All in One SEO Pack – All in One SEO Pack is a powerful suite of SEO options for your website. It allows you to customize description tags and title tags to better suit Search Engine Optimization. To date it’s had over 9,600,000 installations. In addition to allowing you to configure each and every post or blog, it has general settings to do global optimization on the pages you don’t customize. Install it today!!!
- Web Ninja Google Analytics – Installing and configuring Google Analytics manually is a thing of the past. Web Ninja Google Analytics will configure your entire site with your Analytics account. Now you might be thinking… great, there are plenty of other Google Analytics plugins out there that do the same, true however, Web Ninja Google Analytics brings the reports to your dashboard. No more logging in to Analytics to see how your website is doing, this will show you a global overview of how your entire site is doing and, when on the page view of WordPress, it will show each pages Analytics so you can quickly and easily determine what’s working and whats not.
- Page Tree – Is one of my favorite plugins for large business websites that contain a lot of pages with good page structure. Normally, it can take a few minutes on a large site to find what you are looking for if browsing through the default WordPress pages list; now with page tree, it gets ride of a lot of the WordPress bulk and makes a quick and simple list supporting page hierarchy of the pages you currently have, making it a breeze to find what you are looking for.
- Filter Rewrite Rules – Not widely used, and maybe that’s because of it’s name or people aren’t exactly sure what it does, but from a tech point-of-view, I think it’s a must have. Filter Rewrite Rules changes the way WordPress stores the page URL’s. By default, WordPress creates large bulky databases to store this information when most of it’s not needed. This plugin reduces the size of your database immensely which is important for any website that needs to be transferred or plans to be busy. When your database is smaller, your website tends to run faster. In addition, one of my biggest issues when transferring the site is that these URL’s create problems when important and exporting SQL. This plugin fixes all those little issues you may have.
- Contact Form 7 – This is a must have plugin for anyone who wants to take their business seriously. With out a method to contact you via the web, what would you be doing on it? Contact Form 7 is the easiest contact form software I have found to setup contact forms. We use this plugins for every contact form on our website. It’s highly customizable and granted, there are contact form plugins you can customize even more than this one, but no where near the simplicity this one has to offer. It works great with Really Simple CAPTCHA which will reduce the amount of spam you’d normally get.
- Inline Editor – Looking to see how your content looks immediately with out having to save the content as you type? Now you can. Inline Editor allows you to edit pages from the page its self. You no longer have to use the control panel to edit page content. We found most our client prefer to use thing plugin because it makes every page editable and you get a WYSIWYG editor built in to the pages. Sometimes this plugin can be slightly buggy, but for the most part, it makes editing your pages fun and easy, even for the most non-tech savy person.
- Google XML Sitemaps – You’ve probably heard this time and time again, but if you haven’t I’m glad to be the first one to tell you. Google XML Sitemaps are one of the most important things you could have to let Google know about your website and where all your pages are located. Using this plugin, it pings Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and other search engines every time you add new content and the plugin updates your sites XML. This insures you content gets added to the search engines faster than any other method. I’d recommend getting a Google Webmaster account with this plugin so you can link the two.
- jQuery Colorbox – One of the most annoying things you can do on your business website is link to an image and it opens a new browser window or goes directly to the image removing the rest of your site content. Using jQuery Colorbox, it will make sure all your images open in a new on screen window so the user doesn’t leave the site. It has the ability to open other websites, videos, and more all with in your site in a popup feel effect. All the user has to do is click off the screen and the content disappears. See our Portfolio for a great example of how this plugin is used. Use this plugin to keep your website looking sharp.
- Quick Cache – This is another must have WordPress plugin. With about 250,000 current installs, it reduces your website load, increases performance and speed. It has many options to save parts of your website to the users computer (cache) and some raw files to the local server so it doesn’t need that many database queries. If you read above, database queries can slow your site down, so by reducing the database queries and saving images and other cache objects to the users computer, your site will run much faster. This is a great plugin for any type of website, business or not.
- Disable Updates – Many of our clients get annoyed by WordPress always notifying them of new updates for themes, plugins, and core software. With Disable Updates installed, it will shut off all notifications. Now some people may think this is a bad thing however, many times when updating plugins, core functionality, or themes, it may break a lot of the features on your existing site. If you have anything customization from your developer, this can be a very bad and costly thing. The website developer may turn this off every few months to see if he/she would like anything upgraded. This plugin goes great with the idea of, “if its not broken – don’t fix it” thus – don’t update it.
Information Point uses many other plugins both custom and public. We feel the one’s listed above will get your business off to a great start. Are you looking for a custom plugin or need help with your WordPress site? Give us a call, we have great rates to help improve your site and online presence.