In this post we will discuss about the most needed WordPress plugins for your wordpress site. I am using WordPress for my site sibeeshpassion, and I would say using Worpress is so simple and effective and easy to configure. When you start using that, I am sure you will love it. There are so many things you can do with WordPress. One of the interesting thing about WordPress is, everything is available there in the form of Plugins. So we don’t need to scratch our head to do anything.

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Just download and install those plugins will do remaining. Sounds cool?

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In this post I am going to discuss about those kind of plugins that you must install in your WordPress site. I hope you will like this.

Introduction

This part is for the people who have never tried or heard about WordPress yet (I know there won’t be many numbers). Basically WordPress is a web software which we can use to create websites, blogs, apps and many more. We can choose any themes which is available in the themes directory, or we can download and install the themes too. Worpress provides 100% customizing options, so that we can do everything what we want to do in our websites/blogs/apps. If you want to read more about WordPress, I strongly recommend you to look here.

WordPress Plugins You Must Install

So far I have installed 16 plugins in my Website. I will list all of them here.

1. All In One SEO Pack

You can install this plugin from here.

All In One SEO Pack help us to optimize our website for SEO. As you all know SEO plays an important role in ranking our website. Your websites rank go lower if your website has low SEO. This plugin has the following features.

2. Autoptimize

You can install this plugin from here.

Autoptimize plugin is taking care of optimizing your site in a very easy manner. It does the following things for us.

3. Content Views

You can install this plugin from here.

We all know Grids are the perfect way to show our posts or data. Isn’t it? You must install this plugin if you need to show your posts in a responsive grid layout. I have installed this and, I loved to see my posts in a responsive grid.

Here I am listing the basic things we can do with this plugin.

There are so many other options you can avail, to know more, please see the plugin page.

4. Disqus Comment System

You can install this plugin from here.

A blog isn’t a blog without comments. Right? So to make our visitors to express their feedback or for any discussion we need to build a commenting system in our site. I have installed this plugin which does the commenting much easier and effective. This plugin is an old one, still it does for what it is made for. There are many other commenting plugins available, you can try those.

Below are the key features of Disqus comment system.

5. EWWW Image Optimizer

You can install this plugin from here.

It is a great plugin that automatically optimize the images as you upload to your post. Sounds cool? The good thing is, it can optimize the images that you have already uploaded too in a timely manner.

These are the few things that you may need to know why you must install this plugin.

6. Google Website Translator by Prisna.net

You can install this plugin from here.

There is no non English country visitors if you don’t have an option to translate your contents to other languages in your blog. So is is recommended to install a translator plugin. In that case you can use this plugin, since it is capable of translating your contents to 90 plus languages. It uses Google’s automatic translation service.

The other features are listed below.

7. MailMunch

You can install this plugin from here.

As the plugin author says you can increase your Email subscribers by over 500% by using this plugin. This is a very well needed plugin which helps you to collect the mail ids of the visitors of your site and collectively sends mails to them when you create new posts so that you you can increase the visitors rate of your site. This plugin makes email marketing much easier that we think. With this plugin you can place a stylish and responsive form in your site which will allow user to subscribe to your site. Once the user is subscribed, the emails will be sent to those users whenever you create a new post.

The features are given below (from the plugin home page).

8. Popups – WordPress Popup

You can install this plugin from here.

This plugin can be used if you want to create a pop up with some contents, it can be any informations, or if you want to show your social links so that you can increase your followers. You can customize your Facebook page link, Twitter link, Google plus links and many more.

You can find more information in the plugin home page

9. Post Views Counter

You can install this plugin from here.

We all are fascinated about the statistics about our site. We are quite happy if the visitors count increases. Am I right? In this case, you may needed an option to track the visitors count of each posts. Here you can use this plugin which really works great.

The features are given below (from the plugin home page).

10. Redirection

You can install this plugin from here.

Sometimes we may end up in a situation that there is no other way than migrating our site. In that situation this plugin will help you. I will say you what makes me to install this plugin. Previously my site was static, and later I moved to dynamic one as I used WordPress. Since I was using some static HTML pages with the extension of /html, for example http://sibeeshpassion.com/achievements.html, after migrating to WordPress the post URL was changed to http://sibeeshpassion.com/achievements, hence 404 error occurs. With this plugin we can redirect the pages which is not available now, to the actual pages after the migration.

The features are given below (from the plugin home page).

11. Relevanssi

You can install this plugin from here.

As you all know search feature is an essential thing in every website or blog. This makes sure the visitors to get all the informations he/she is seeking for. If he/she founds the result, you will definitely get a returning user to your site. This plugin replaces the standard WordPress search which is not sufficient enough.

The features are given below (from the plugin home page).

12. Smooth Scroll Up

You can install this plugin from here.

This is a simple plugin with options to scroll back to top of your page. When a user clicks the given icon, the scroll will be moved to top so that user doesn’t need to scroll to top manually.

The features are given below (from the plugin home page).

13. Super Socializer

You can install this plugin from here.

I would say this is a most needed plugin that you must install because as you all know social media plays a vital role in our life. It reflects in our site popularity too, If you are in a part of any social media, you are getting some chances to increase your websites visitors visits. If you have a new post, you can share that to any social media, that is all you are required to do. You followers will love those and visit your site, that makes your site popular. Simple!. Now we need a plugin to do make this easy. Here you can install Super Socializer.

There are so many features available. You can always see those in the plugin home page.

14. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

You can install this plugin from here.

If you are a developer, or any kind of coder, you may have situations to post some codes to your posts. The SyntaxHighlighter helps you to do that. It formats everything we are placing inside the tags. What we are required to do is, just place the codes inside the tags.

SyntaxHighlighter Example

15. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore

You can install this plugin from here.

We all are humans and we do mistakes. In fact mistakes are making us strong. Once Albert Einstein said “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”. So practically we need backups to do the mistakes. It is quite easy to take back ups of your WordPress files and database with the help of UpdraftPlus plugin. It helps you to back up the files and database to a safest place, that is cloud (Amazon S3 (or compatible), Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, DreamObjects, FTP, Openstack Swift, UpdraftPlus Vault and email).

Please see more features and informations from plugin home page.

16. WP Super Cache

You can install this plugin from here.

We can simply says “Without caching, your site is just like a computer with 100 MB Ram”. I am not sure what are all we can do with 100 MB Ram, since I have never get a chance ( Not sure it exists too). What matters is, it becomes slow. What if a returning user keeps on waiting to see your site post. Will he/she waits more than a minute? I would say a big NO. All users needs the results quickly. As we know “Time and tide wait for none”. To get rid of this, you must install a cache plugin in your site. Then WP Super Cache would be the nice selection. The features available with this plugins are outstanding. You can check those in the plugin home page.

Conclusion

Did I miss anything that you may think which is needed? Could you find this post as useful? I hope you liked this article. Please share me your valuable suggestions and feedback.

Your turn. What do you think?

A blog isn’t a blog without comments, but do try to stay on topic. If you have a question unrelated to this post, you’re better off posting it on C# Corner, Code Project, Stack Overflow, Asp.Net Forum instead of commenting here. Tweet or email me a link to your question there and I’ll definitely try to help if I can.

Kindest Regards
Sibeesh Venu