5 Essential Wordpress Plugins for Beginners
With thousands of valuable plugins to choose from and new ones being created every day, it is no wonder Wordpress has developed into such a hugely successful website and blog publishing platform.
Plugins can allow you to do almost anything and they are great way of improving your blog or website. They each provide custom functions so that each user can create their own unique website which is personalized to their individual needs.
But if you are new to the whole Wordpress world it can be difficult working out what’s going to make your life easier and what’s going to cause you a headache. Luckily we have compiled this list of 5 great plugins to get you started, all of which are free.
1. WP Super Cache
We all know how frustrating it can be when we’re waiting for webpages to load, especially when you are short for time. Most web users do not like hanging around waiting for pages to open, instead they move straight onto the next website. However the WP Super Cache plugin helps you prevent losing visitors if your website takes a long time to load.
The plugin creates a static copy of your dynamic Wordpress web page on the server and this in turn helps speed up the loading time. Even if your pages load quite quickly, it is still important to have especially if you begin to acquire heavy traffic to your blog, as without this plugin your website will crash. This is one of the must have plugins for your Wordpress blog or website, so if you haven’t installed it already, get it right away.
2. Google Analytics
One essential aspect of managing your blog or website is to keep track of the amount of traffic you are receiving. Google Analytics is the most popular and arguably easiest ways of doing this. It produces extensive statistics for your website including the number of page views, new visitors and the average time spent on your website.
It also provides you with an overview of where your traffic comes from, whether it is from search engines, referral sires or direct traffic and also the country and region your traffic came from. This plugin helps you to understand who visits your website and what they are looking at, which is essential to succeed online so that you can target your website accordingly.
3. Akismet Spam Protection Plugin
The amount of spam you receive through Wordpress is never ending and you have to be careful when dealing with it, as it can affect your search engine rankings. The Akismet Spam Protection plugin helps catch any comments that look like spam. Even if it picks up a comment which you believe isn’t spam, you can easily review and unmark any that are legitimate.
The main advantage is that it helps you save time going through pages and pages of spam and deleting the comments from your website. This plugin has been developed by Wordpress so there is no need to install it, as it is downloaded by default, all you need to do is activate it and sign up for your Akismet API key.
4. All-in-One SEO
The term SEO (search engine optimization) is used to describe the process of customizing a blog or website in order to improve its visibility in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The more visible you are the more people are going to find your site.
Wordpress by default uses your post or page title for the title tag, and a snippet of your post as the description, this is what search engines will see and index, which is not necessarily going to help you increase your search engine ranking.
However, this plugin helps you optimize your titles, descriptions, keywords and meta tags for each post you create. This is crucial to the performance of a website as it can help increase your visibility in search engines allowing users to find you which can dramatically increase your traffic.
5. Contact Form 7
The Contact Form 7 plugin should definitely be on your list of plugins to download. This plugin will allow your readers to interact with you, which is perfect since you created the content to get people’s attention. Content 7 is not only easy to install, simple to use and highly customizable but it also allows you to create several contact forms for all purposes. It is a brilliantly simple plugin which has everything you need to interact with your readers and it also supports Askimet, file uploading and has extensive language support.
Whatever you’re using Wordpress for these plugins can make your life easier and help you produce a better site. If you have others that have helped you when you were a beginner then feel free to tell us about them in the comments below.
Tom Parnell is a former reporter and now writes freelance for the web, working with the nice people at US car hire firm Alamo while looking for IT jobs.
I also recommend no self-pings (used to drive me nuts when I’d link to another post and it pinged me).
Nice! I’ve always wondered about that — though, my solution was editing the code. I think it depends on the theme you’re using, as they can either be upfront and distract from the content or hidden away.
Nice list, but I’d replace WP Super Cache and All-in-One SEO Pack with W3 Total Cache and Greg’s High Performance SEO, personally. W3TC is filled with great functionality like CDN integration, opcode caching, and even control over client-side browser caching; and GHPSEO provides all the functionality of AIOSEO but is programmed better and puts much less strain on the server. I use both on my blog, and they work wonderfully.
Awesome — thanks for the suggestions!
hi, i am using All-in-One SEO and Google Analytics,
thanks for your seggestions.
Thanks for sharing, Jinbei … how do you like those plugins vs. others you’ve experienced?
Good list for those that are just starting out with blogging. Personally, though, I ditched Akismet and replaced it with GASP to deal with spam comments. Since I made the switch, I no longer had the problem with those spammy comments.
Hi Adeline, what does GASP stand for? And is it better than Askimet from your experience?