If you are using WordPress, give yourself a pat on the back. Whether you are using it to power your blog or as a full featured CMS, WordPress is one of the best platforms available on the Internet. Best of all, it’s completely free to download and use.
If you’re not currently using WordPress, I highly recommend looking at all of the features it has to offer. Even if you can’t use it for your current projects, you should at least consider using it for a future project.
In addition to the platform itself, the reason that WordPress is such a powerful medium is because of the community of developers that have gone to great lengths to extend its capabilities. Through the addition of plugins, the power of WordPress is quite extensive.
Although there are over three thousand plugins available to download, not all of these are necessary for every instance of WordPress. However, there are six WordPress plugins that I have come to view as necessities, and if you don’t have all six of these plugins already installed, you need to do so right now!
WordPress Automatic Upgrade: If you are using WordPress, you know that it is a very user-friendly platform. Unfortunately, you probably also know that when an upgrade is released (which is fairly often thanks to the active WordPress development team), properly upgrading your installation can be quite the hassle.
Luckily, the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin makes upgrading as user friendly as the rest of the WordPress experience. The plugin will notify you when a new version is available, and will take you through the process of upgrading in a matter of minutes.
All in One SEO Pack: In a matter of minutes, the All in One SEO Pack plugin can optimize the on-page search engine optimization elements of your WordPress installation. Not only will this plugin automatically optimize new posts and pages that you create, but it is fully customizable, so you can easily tweak it to your specific needs.
Akismet: Even though this plugin is included with every installation of WordPress, far too many people are still not utilizing it. While there are multiple solutions for dealing with comment spam on WordPress, I firmly believe that Akismet is the best by far. By spending a couple of minutes getting a WordPress API Key and activating this plugin, you can save yourself hours of dealing with spam comments.
Enhanced WordPress Contact Form: Instead of simply displaying your email address on your WordPress installation, the Enhanced WordPress Contact Form plugin adds a contact page for you. Once you install the plugin, all you have to do is create a new page and add [wpcf] to it, and your contact form will automatically be created.
In addition to being fully customizable, the reason that this plugin is called the Enhanced WordPress Contact Form is because it shows the referrer information for each email that is sent to you through the form.
Cross-Linker: The Cross-Linker plugin automatically achieves two goals: encourages users to spend more time reading your content, and boosts your internal link structure. The importance of the first goal is obvious, while the second goal is important because it can improve your search engine rankings.
The plugin works by allowing you to link specific words to specific URLs. An example of using this plugin would be every time you type the word “lizards”, it is automatically linked to the “lizards” category of your blog.
RSS Footer: The RSS Footer plugin allows you to add custom text at the end of your RSS feeds. Although there are a wide variety of uses for this plugin, one of the best is adding a link back to your website, which will allow you to automatically gain backlinks from any source that scrapes your RSS feed.
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