Here are a few of the plugins I use to extend the core capabilities of WordPress.

How To Keep WordPress Current

First and foremost is Plugin Central. This was shown to me by Ed Keay-Smith of Ozdomainer.com. It keeps track of all of the other plugins installed on a site and automatically lets you know when new versions are available.

How To Migrate A Site To WordPress

Once of the sites I built using XSitePro, had around 40 pages and some pretty complicated navigation. It’s a key site of mine and attracts a lot of visitors, so I was reluctant to change anything.

However, because of it’s size, it became a bit cumbersome to update and of course, I had to be at a certain computer in order to make any amendments.

The problem though, was migrating the site to WordPress would mean that all of my page names would change, since WordPress doesn’t use the .htm or .html extension by default. ((Though there is a plugin for that).

I didn’t want to change everything and lose valuable search engine placement. I knew that I’d need to either amend my .htaccess file and include 40+ error 303 references, or look for another solution.

Not being too technical, I decided on the latter course of action and found a wonderful plugin called Redirection. This plugin is really easy to use. All I had to do was enter the old site’s page URLs and select from a drop down list, then new location for the information. The plugin automatically creates the 303 redirect and also handles the error 404 page not found issues too.

But that’s not all it does. Once it’s working, it logs each time an error 303 is triggered and captures the user-agent information and the link information, so you can see where old search engine or out of date site links are.

How To SEO A WordPress Site

The next is All In One SEO Pack – popular with other WordPress users, it offers easy on-page search engine optimisation, by providing just about all you need in terms of title, description, keywords, etc. I use the PRO version – it’s well worth the few dollars it costs, but the free version is great too.

How To Create Contact Forms In WordPress

If you don’t like publishing email addresses on your sites, then it’s likely that you’re going to need a form. The plugin I use for my forms is called Contact Form 7 which I use in conjunction with Really Simple CAPTCHA from the same developer – to help prevent Spam bots auto-completing forms.

Adding contact forms to web sites can be tricky, but Contact Form 7 has made life very easy for me and I use it all the time.

How To Create A Google Sitemap With WordPress

Google XML Sitemaps is another plugin that I consider essential to any site, since it notifies Google, Yahoo, Bing & Ask of any changes made to your site and puts it all in a nice XML compliant file that search engines like. It’s been around since 2005 and is constantly updated.

How To Create An Image Gallery With WordPress

For image galleries, I use NextGEN gallery, which makes super professional-looking galleries in an instant, complete with slide viewer. If you have photographs on your site, this really is a nice tool to display them with.

How To Hide Pages From Navigation In WordPress

One of the difficulties with WordPress (compared to XSitePro for example) is trying to remove pages from the general navigation. Every page you publish automatically gets included in the navigation area, but sometimes, you might not want that.

For example, who wants their privacy policy page sitting there on a tab of it’s own, or their email confirmation pages being visible to all?

The plugin I have found invaluable in this area is called Page Link Manager. This plugin allows you to decide which pages should and shouldn’t appear in your navigation

How To Add Adsense & Affiliate Program Links To WordPress

The main advantage to me, for using XsitePro, was it’s ability to include affiliate and Adsense links, which if course, WordPress doesn’t do as standard.

Although I don’t really do much in the way of affiliate marketing or ppc, I do occasionally add the odd Adsense ad into a site. For this I am currently using WP Simple Adsense Insertion. I’ll probably investigate other options, but I certainly like this plugin developer’s other ideas. You’ll find them here.

How To Create A Mobile Version Of Your WordPress Site

Another nice function of XsitePro was the ability to create a mobile version of your site on the fly, so that people using mobile devices can view the site without having to download all of the images and other files and code that slows down mobile browsers.

My search for a suitable plugin led me to WPtouch, which was designed to work specifically with iPhones, iPod Touch, Android and Blackberry Storm.

This plugin automatically detects one of these devices and serves it’s own theme to those visitosr only. You can add other user agents from the admin panel, but so far I haven’t bothered – there’s too many of them!

Using this plugin was a real eye-opener for me, because previously, although I could see entire web sites using my iPhone, the text was small and it was almost impossible to navigate on such a small screen.

WPtouch makes the user experience much better – which after all is said and done, that’s what web sites are about.

How To Build A Membership Web Site

Membership Sites are something that a lot of people would like to be able to create and as this an area that is of great interest to me, I went off in search of something suitable.

In the past, I’ve had to have special php sites built, which always come with their own set of problems, not least because I don’t understand a single line of php code!

With XsitePro, I could never manage to do anything membership related, so was always at the mercy of developers, which is ok when the money is flooding in, but not so great when it’s all flowing out into the pockets of the developer.

My research led me to a product called Wishlist Member and I have to say that it is hands-down the best off the shelf membership system I have ever seen.

It is now possible to add a comprehensive, multi-level membership system to a WordPress site in just a few clicks, complete with payment integration from popular payment processors including Paypal, 2CO, Clickbank and others.

Unlike some plugins, Wishlist Member is paid software that costs $97 for a single site licence and $297 for a multi-site licence. Needless to say, I got myself the multi-site version, because I can recoup the entire cost on a single client membership site.

To think, when I ran a membership site previously, I used to spend hundreds of dollars every month on having new and different functionality built. It really is a bargain at the price and I have seen nothing to compare it with, not only in terms of functionality, but also support and video training – it really is first class.

I have found that development using WordPress to be far more flexible than other software I’ve used. There are plugins for just about everything and whenever I am asked if it’s possible to do something in particular with a site, I always check for a suitable plugin before going in search of specialist software solutions.

So far, I have managed to achieve everything I’ve wanted in terms of site development. I hope that you do too, but if you don’t have the technical inclination, I might just be persuaded to do it for you. See Hollywood Internet if that’s of interest.

3 Responses to “My Top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins”