Recommended WordPress Plugins
I’ve done countless searches on what plugins are the best and I have tried several. With so many plugins available it’s hard to figure out which ones you need and which ones work, as so many do almost the same thing. After some trial and error with several over the past year, I have finally started to standardize some plugins on all CinnTech’s WordPress web designs. Below you will find some commonly used plugins recommended by CinnTech.
All in One SEO Pack
There’s two big boys out there, All in One SEO Pack and HeadSpace2. I’ve tried both and both are great. The reason why I have listed All in One SEO Pack in my recommendations is ease of use. When selling a website to a non-technical user it’s important that they be able to add and change info relating to the SEO easily. The other reason is compatiblity, I found that there were some odd plugins HeadSpace2 had some conflicts with – granted this might have been resolved because I have been using the All in One SEO Pack for a few months now. If you are looking to do a lot of customization with your SEO then I’d probably recommend HeadSpace2, but for the quick easy and relatively simple option it’s All in One SEO Pack all the way. In just over a week, using this plugin and other SEO stragtegies, CinnTech has brought Ackent Motors to the top 2 and 4 pages of google using top search queries!
Broken Link Checker
This plugin is handy, even though it’s rarely used. If you ever remove a page that was linked from another page on your site, this plugin will let you know in the dashboard.
BulletProof Security
CinnTech has only been using this plugin for a month, but I have to say it’ll be on all my future WordPress sites. There is a little learning curve on this plugin, but it locks down your site and lets you know what isn’t secure. I’m also going to be putting this on all my previous designed sites.
CloudFlare
If you’re using CloudFlare, I recommend this plugin for easy integration. I also recommend CloudFlare as it also adds a bit of Security as well as good analytics and of course speeds up your site. CloudFlare will also keep your site online, in cached mode, even if your server goes down for a period of time.
DirtySuds – Kill Howdy
Not something you really need, but some people get annoyed with the ‘Howdy, yourname’. This is a handy plugin that allows you to change ‘Howdy’ to anything you like or some different phrases – have it more proffesional or layed back.
Google Analyticator
CinnTech has tried a few Analyticator plugin’s and some of them work good, some are buggy, and others just are too frustrating to bother. This plugin doesn’t give you alot of page stats, but it does track well and has a brief overview on the dashboard. The thing why I like it is because it allows you to remove specified logged in users from the stats. (so if you’re website just got designed and you see several hits – you know its’ from visitors and not from you or your designer making adjustments.)
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin is so important for Search Engine Optimization and works so well I haven’t tried anything else – highly recommended. It creates the much needed sitemap for your site and automatically updates search engines when you change or add something.
Hide Admin Bar
With the later versions of WordPress came a feature of the Admin Bar on the front page. This little added feature may be praised by some, but on a designer’s aspect it’s hard to determin space and layout with an anoying bar on the top of the page. This plugin will remove the admin bar on the front end page for logged in users.
JS & CSS Script Optimizer
This plugin must be tested before going live. It works great when it works, but there are some WordPress themes and plugins it doesn’t play nice with. You can fine tune the options to get it working usually, and even if only a few options are active it will speed up and optimize your WordPress site. I will be testing some other plugins to see if I can replace this one.
Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
I’ve been using this plugin for over a year and have no complaints. This handy plugin will move every wordpress menu buttons to the top of the page, which gives your layout more screen room, plus you dont’ have to scroll down when you have a tone of plugins installed. Highly recommended.
Ozh’ Better Plugin Page
This plugin always gets installed right after Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. This adds some added menu’s on your plugin page for quick and easy references to updates, inactive and currently activated plugins.
Redirection
Another highly recommended plugin. Redirection will log all the incoming linked pages that get a 404 not found. This allows you to easily create a 301 redirection for them and know which sites or your own pages, have out-dated links. It even allows for regular expressions so you can say every page that links to /images and subfolders now goes to /image for instance. Very handy and a good tracking tool.
Regenerate Thumbnails
This handy plugin allows you to regenerate all your thumbnails if you happened to change the default size within wordpress.
Secure WordPress
With this plugin comes some basic Security essentials. It also adds the option of using WebsiteDefender. CinnTech recommends both for easily tracking when a file or anything gets changed on your site.
SEO Smart Links
Every wonder how most sites have links to other pages on their own website all over the place? This plugin allows you to do that with ease. All you do is activate the plugin go through some relatively easy customization and bingo, you type web design (or any word that is the same as your menu links) in your post, and it’ll automatically create a link to it.
TinyMCE Advanced
Sometimes the default WYSIWYG editor is not enough, this adds some needed features for easy visual editing in WordPress.
W3 Total Cache
If you’re concerned about page speed, and you should be, then you need a cache plugin for your WordPress site. CinnTech has tried several cache plugins including W3 Total Cache, SuperCache and QuickCache. Although there is a little more learning curve on W3 Total Cache, it’s just much easier to configure and overall does a better job at the task at hand. It also allows for easy CloudFlare integration as well as your own Mirror CDN.
WP-DBManager
This should be standard on all sites, and I believe a lot of hosting providers even include this by default in their WordPress custom install scripts. It backs up, optimizes and does everything needed for your valuable WordPress database.
WP-PageNavi
Not only does this plugin make your page navigation look better, it also features a few more advanced options to your WordPress navigation.
WP Security Scan
Another WebsiteDefender plugin and it just adds onto the security of your website. This usefull plugin will show you any security risks in your web server and site.
WP Smush.it
Lastly we get back to page speed. If you’re running a site with High Quality images, you may want to test this on a few of them before running the bulk smush it tool. This plugin takes all your images (or selected) and reduces their size. For most pictures, the quality reduction is unnoticible, but as mentioned with high quality photos you may want to test a few so you don’t lose customers based on image quality. This simply tool will ‘smush’ all your images as you upload them and reduce the loading time on average (from our experience) 20 percent.
That wraps up our Standard WordPress Plugins. Stay tuned for our next blog, where we’ll discuss some other recommended plugins for specific tasks.
If you have a standard used plugin that we’ve missed, or if you have an opinion on our recommendations, feel free to comment below.
