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Top 10 Popular Must-Have WordPress Plugins in 2014
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WordPress is one of the popular go-to publishing platforms launched in 2003, downloaded more than 60 million times and is the trend-setting framework for most websites. What makes everyone from Huffington Post to Mashable to TMZ to NFL to use this blogging service? – Well, the most obvious answer would be “WordPress is easy and flexible to set up.”
Anyone can use WordPress and that fire up its popularity. On a gross 409 million views over 14 billion pages every month. Further, users have access to the number of feasible plugins to enhance their WordPress Plugins.
WordPress Plugin– A simple program or set of programs used to complement the core installation of WordPress platform. A plugin mostly focuses on improving user’s experience on WordPress because it can manage certain aspects that WordPress cannot.
With the popularity of content management systems, a rich plugin ecosystem is able to improve a site’s SEO, handle comments, spam, enhance articles, and much more. WordPress plugin are products from the developers who want to optimize the WordPress experience of the users without altering the original WordPress code.
Currently, we have more than 30,000 plugins. Such a wide array choice makes it difficult for the users to choose the right one. Therefore, after testing a number of good and bad plugins, Team Unified has selected the top 10.
We consider it as one of the WordPress essential, as it happens to be the pillar of your Search Engine Optimization. With this plugin, your page can have an SEO friendly title (shows up at the top of the browser), homepage description (appears beneath the URL when people search for it via Search Engines) and topic related keywords (stay aware of keyword intensity).
Here are some special features apart from their 20 features:
- 1. Fine-tune page navigation links
- 2. Advanced Canonical URLs
- 3. Only plugin that enables SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
- 4. Nonce Security built-in feature of the All in One SEO Pack
Often a website has to pay a price for spam comments. More the traffic more is the number of spam comments. Akismet is a plugin that allows you to check spam comments and trackbacks. It has more than 21 million users. The plugin checks the comment left on your blog or website and decides whether they are spam or not by running the comment in Akismet service.
Let us look at the special features of Akismet latest version:
- 1. Get comment status history to view the comments caught and cleared by Akismet
- 2. Links stay highlighted in the comment body
- 3. If your web host fails to reach Akismet servers, the plugin will retry after getting the connection
A solid contact form is must for business websites. And for that, WordPress users get access to one plugin that is customizable and has 17 million downloads – it is none other than Contact form 7. The plugin is immensely popular due to its flexibility and can help you manage more than one site. Contact Form 7 also supports CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and Ajax-powered submitting to deal with bots and online troubles.
No doubt, WordPress is an excellent content management system, but it is not able to schedule the posts in a sensible manner. To help the author view posts in a calendar view WordPress Editorial Calendar comes to a great use.
Check out some of the updated features of version 3.1.1
- A. It facilitates users to drag and drop the post within the calendar to reschedule events
- B. Quick edit post titles, contents, and schedules
It is essential for your website to rank in the popular search engines such as Google, Bing or AOL. It is no big deal to many of us, but it is tricky to have search engines index your blog. Thanks to Google XML Sitemaps, it is no longer a big issue. This plugin will crawl your entire website, and have a sitemap to help search engines easily index your site. This plugin supports WordPress generated as well as custom URLs.
If you want to boost your self-hosted WordPress site, then Jetpack is the ultimate plugin. Installing Jetpack will stop you from using too many plugins at your website. Comes with more than a dozen of features, we will share the special ones which sets them unique.
- 1. Get email subscriptions for your blog posts and comments
- 2. Notifications in the toolbar help to manage your site activity
- 3. A comment system supporting social networking platforms
- 4. Customize your site design with CSS editor without modifying the themes
- 5. The mobile themes streamline the site for visitors from mobile
Twitter Cards, launched in 2013 enable you to tweet including media. This is a relatively new plugin and has 58,000 downloads to date. They allow you to include the videos and images from your blog posts in your Tweets to link your content. When people clicks on your tweet, it will display the content title and a short summary, Twitter account and source link.
Recording audio files of your blog posts is easier these days, with the use of Podcasting Plugin. It will help you to bring your audio files from the desktop to the website. It includes a fantastic player, allowing your visitors to hear right from your page without redirecting them to iTunes or some other program. As it stays in the websites, so it has lower bounce rates as well as great content for your site.
Launching an e-commerce store, then you need to download this plugin. It is flexible, powerful, and smart dashboards with reports.
Check out some of the unique features of this customizable plugin:
- a. View Sales, Reviews, Stock Level, Statistics
- b. Customized Online Store Design
- c. Get access to popular Payment Gateways and Shipping Methods
- d. Plethora of free and premium extensions
Security and the speed of the site is the strong determinant for most of your website/blog. With Wordfence Security, you can put an end to all your preoccupied worries and resolve the security threats with ease. This free plugin offers stellar features to keep your site in shape.
Some popular features of them include:
- 1. Blocking known attackers in real-time
- 2. Comes with a firewall
- 3. Monitors the DNS security option
Everyone likes to get something extra, so we think a plus one WordPress Plugin will make our readers give an extra choice, rather yet another best.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
According to many WP Plugin users, even many of our blog subscribers think Yoast as the top WordPress plugin you should be using, especially for your SEO efforts. Some of the incredible features are already shared by our blog subscribers – let us get some more scoops for you–
- 1. Advanced XML Sitemaps
- 2. Automatically Optimizes and Inserts Meta Tag and Link Elements
- 3. Available in 24 Different Languages
- 4. Can Improve Previous Plugins
- 5. Compatible with Multiple Sites
- 6. Premium Support
- 7. Page Analysis
- 8. RSS Optimization
- 9. Social Media Integration
Plugins make your website simple and effective. Moreover, it adds up an ability to utilize the SEO packages and work directly with social platforms. If you have used anyone of these plugins, Team Unified will like to know your experience. Drop a line or two in our comment box.
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