35 WordPress Plugins that Will Immediately Transform Your Website

The WordPress plugins you choose can significantly impact whether you succeed or fail online.

If you’re a blogger, you are probably very familiar with WordPress .  You may even use WordPress Themes in your website.

But do you know how much power and functionality you can get from your website by using certain key WordPress plugins?

Plugins are like lawyers.  A good one, like the Corleone family had, will make you an offer you can’t refuse.  A bad one will make you an offer you can’t understand.

Here is a comprehensive guide to the must-have free and premium WordPress plugins that will help you get results that matter.

Utility Tools

1. Jetpack

This should be one of the first WordPress plugins everyone installs. Jetpack allows you to host your own blog and retain complete control over your site while you still enjoy the cloud benefits that the WordPress hosted service offers.

There are eight features that come with the initial install. These include:

Hovercards – This plugin by Gravatar shows a pop-up business card of users’ Gravatar profiles when they comment on your WordPress site.

Stats – This plugin gives you stats from WordPress.com with no additional load on your server.

After the Deadline – This plugin adds spelling, style and grammar checks by WordPress.

Twitter Widget – This plugin displays the latest updates from Twitter right inside your WordPress theme.

Shortcodes – This plugin embeds videos and more from sites like Vimeo, YouTube, SlideShare, etc.

Shortlinks – This plugin enables WP.me powered shortlinks that enable easier sharing on sites like Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.

Sharedaddy – This plug-in makes it extremely easy to share posts on Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else on the net.

Latex – This plug-in will mark up posts with Latex markup language. This works well for complex mathematical equations.

Below you will find a video tour of this plugin.

Search Engine Optimization

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

Yoast is an authority on WordPress and website optimization.  His WordPress SEO plugin is widely recognized as the most comprehensive and complete SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.  It features meta and title tag control, xml site map, custom breadcrumbs, rss header and footer link templates, snippet previews, social integration, page analysis (to optimize your on page content) and much more.

Rich Snippet Preview

On Page Optimization

You can watch a video below on how to set up and configure the  WordPress SEO Plugin

3. SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already embedded, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set.

 4. WP Smush.it

This WordPress plugin will automatically shrink the images you upload. The reduction in image size is significant.

5. SEO Slugs

The SEO Slugs WordPress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this:

“How to use Facebook Ads to Find Customers”,

WordPress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug:

/how-to-use-facebook-ads-to-find-customers

SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plugin activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this:

/facebook-ads-find-customers

The slug is generated on saving a post (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish. It won’t overwrite an existing slug. You can force a new slug generation by deleting the existing one.

6. SEO Smart Links

7. Dagon Site Map Generator

This WordPress plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress-powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

8. Broken Link Checker

Don’t let broken links sink your site.  This WordPress plugin will monitor your blog for broken internal and external links and let you know if any are found.

9. SEO Scribe

If boosting your blog’s search engine optimization is on the agenda, you’ll want to check out the Scribe SEO Plugin.  This premium plugin was created by Brian Clark who is widely recognized as one of the most influential bloggers online.

Scribe is one of several applications that helps companies optimize their blog content, choose effective keywords, and increase targeted traffic.  It helps you save time, understand your readers and create content that search engines will love.  Scribe focuses on three components:

• Keywords:  Shows the language style searchers use before you begin to write. Once your content is created, Scribe reveals other profitable keywords you might have missed.
• Content:  Analyzes natural, reader-focused content and tells you how to gently tweak it to spoon feed search engines based on 15 SEO best practices.
• Links:  Helps build back links, crosslink the content within your own site, and identify influential social media users who want to share your content.  

As part of your subscription, you also get Scribe Web plus integrated versions of Scribe for WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. The company also offers free educational seminars to help users more effectively leverage its application.

Scribe users report good results using the tool, with some customers reporting blog traffic increases of 25 percent or more within a few months of installing the software.

Spam Protection

10. Akismet

This is a great WordPress Plugin that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Google Analytics

11. Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track and analyze your website and blog traffic statistics.

Mobile Website

12. WP Touch PRO

With so many mobile users accessing the Internet on the fly, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a website that’s optimized for use by cell phones, PDAs, and tablets.

Thankfully, the process of creating a mobile-friendly WordPress site is now a lot easier with WPTouch Pro—a premium WordPress plugin you can use to instantly develop mobile and tablet-optimized websites.

WPtouch Pro works by detecting supported devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry. Once a device is detected, the plugin optimizes the theme to accommodate the mobile user, making your website easy to read and navigate on a variety of devices.

WPTouch Pro is versatile

Users also have the option to view your site’s regular desktop theme by simply clicking the “full site” option on the screen.

The plugin creates a full-fledged mobile theme, completely separate from your site’s desktop theme, which offers most of the WordPress native features and works with other plugins.

While the free version of WPtouch is great, the Pro version includes more features and comes with customer support and free upgrades through all 2.x version releases.

It is easy to learn.

You don’t have to be a website designer or blog developer to effectively use WPTouch Pro. Once it’s installed, even the most novice WordPress administrator can customize the look and feel of their blog with backgrounds, font colors, font sizes, and other elements.

And while the Wptouch Pro Software Plugin includes pre-set color schemes and a large number of pre-installed icons, it’s also easy to customize.

Features you’ll want to explore in WPtouch Pro include the ability to:

• Create a custom menu and assign it to your mobile theme

• Select fonts and colors

• Upload your company logo

• Upload a custom background

• Embed both images and video with just a few lines of HTML code

• Incorporate your AdSense campaign and other advertising network scripts into your mobile site

Using WPTouch Pro is straightforward.

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll use the “General Settings” tab to fill in some basic information.

Next, you’ll set your site’s fonts, colors, and backgrounds (under the “Theme” tab), and create a custom “mobile” menu. You can then create special sections for any content you may not have translated well to the preset mobile theme.

With this valuable tool, you can easily turn your professional website into one that mobile users can access from any type of device—whether it’s a Blackberry, a Droid, or an iPad.

Below you will find a video on how to configure this plugin.

Optimization

13. W3 Total Cache

This is the best caching plugin for WordPress. It significantly improves the user experience on your site by reducing download times and caching every aspect of your site.  It also combines very well with MaxCDN, the content delivery network we use here at CORE.

You may watch a video below on how to set it up.

Backup

14. Backup Buddy

Backup buddy is the only premium WordPress plugin that can efficiently handle both file and database backups.

Below you will find an installation and set up video for this plugin.

15. PressBackup

This WordPress plugin is a cloud-based solution to simplify the act of backing up and preserving your website data.

Posts

16. Editorial Calendar

The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire editorial calendar.

17. Landing Sites

When visitors are referred to your site from a search engine, this WordPress plugin shows them related posts to their search on your blog.

18. Popular Posts

This WordPress plugin displays a list of your blog’s most-viewed posts.

19. Yet Another Related Posts

This WordPress plugin displays a list of contextually related posts at the end of an article.

 Social

20. BuddyPress

This is the best WordPress social network plugin to start an online community.

View an overview of this plugin below.

21. Facebook Share

The Facebook Share (new) button easily allows your blog to be shared. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been shared throughout Facebook.

22. Tweet Old Posts

The primary function of this Tweet Old Posts is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic. This plugin randomly picks your older posts based on the interval specified by you.

23. Sharebar

Sharebar adds a dynamic and fully customizable vertical box to the left of a blog post that contains links/buttons to popular social networking sites.

24. Sociable

This is one of the most popular social sharing plugins.

25. TweetMeme

TweetMeme is the single best plugin to integrate Twitter into your Blog.  It allows you to quickly share and analyze your blog posts.

26. Twounter

Twounter returns the number of twitter followers in a plain text format.

Photos and Images

27. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.

The video tutorial below demonstrates how to install and set up this plugin.

Forms

28. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can easily customize forms and mail content with the simple markup feature. The plugin supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering

Pinging

29. cbnet Ping Optimizer

Save your blog from getting tagged as a ping spammer by installing this WordPress plugin.

Monetization

30. Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer

This WordPress plugin not only automatically changes any Amazon link on your site to use your affiliate ID, but it also changes the link to point to the user’s local Amazon store.

Tweet

Like what you read? If so, please join over 50,000 people who receive exclusive weekly marketing tips, personal branding advice, leadership tools, and get a FREE COPY of our eBook, 7 Deadly Sins of Resource Management! Just enter your name and email below: