One of the best aspects of WordPress is how easy it is to customize your website and the community of developers that have invested time into creating a great product along with complimentary themes and plugins. However you want to utilize WordPress, blogging or eCommerce, there is a plugin for it.
Here is a list of the top five free plugins that are essential to any great WordPress website that you should check out. Each of these have been utilized for several months and many have been compared to similar plugins and found to be the best of the bunch.
Disqus Comment System
One of the premiere commenting plugin systems that provides a great design layout as well as integrating well into WordPress. It is a quick and simple install that has become popular on my blogging circles and improved community discussion for many bloggers. With a great comment management system and always necessary avatar implementation, it is a definite improvement from the WordPress setup.
The future remains promising for this plugin. They have a very active developer base that quickly upgrades their plugin when a new WordPress update comes out. At the same time, a new feature called Disqus Ranks is currently in beta, available to premium members, and will soon roll out to free users as well. The hopes is that it will reward frequent and quality comments from visitors.
Digg Digg
A social media plugin that has the unique integration into one of the best WordPress themes out there, Standard Theme. It supports Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, and several more. They also give you the flexibility to display it on your posts and/or pages as well as including or excluding specific categories. Finally, they encourage customization of the CSS file by providing an editor in the settings section.
The one feature that makes this stand out is that you can place the widget in several areas of your website, including floating on the right or left hand side of your blog. This amazing addition has the potential to drastically improve social media integration into your website because the user is consistently exposed to the social media buttons.
JetPack by WordPress.com
It should be noted up front that Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) are the creators of this plugin and it is no secret that they focus on making premium plugins, so the future of this plugin staying free is up in the air. At the same time, the plugin has overcome some severe bugs that erased statistics and lagged load times, but that all seems behind them. JetPack is a “all-in-one” plugin including my favorites Site statistics, After the Deadline, and WP.me Shortlinks. Individually, all of these aspects would be must-have, but combined they have created a can’t-live-without.
WP Mobile Detector
A plugin disguised as a WordPress theme, WP Mobile Detector detects mobile devices that visit your site and displays it in a compatible WordPress mobile theme. This will provide a unique design that is optimized for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices that have premium real estate. The plugin also provides you will ten different web designs with different colors and slight variations in mobile layouts.
One extra feature they provide is collecting mobile statistics. They collect and compare basic and advanced mobile devices as well show what type of smart devices have visited. If you occasionally blog about iPads but notice that you have been getting noticeably more mobile iPad devices, you can make an extra effort to focus on them.
Revision Control
The plugin does exactly as it is described, it controls how many different revisions of a page or post you have stored in your database. Undoubtedly, consistent WordPress bloggers have had several revisions of a single blog post that may happen to each of the hundreds or even thousands of posts they have written. Every time you save a draft of your post, preview it, publish it, and even allow WordPress to auto-save it, a new revision is creating and over time this can clutter your database and even hinder load times on your website.
This plugin gives you the control to set a maximum limit of revisions per page and a separate one for your posts. At the same time, it allows you to delete stored revisions, compare two different revisions, or restore an older revision. Finally, it clearly displays the revisions kept below the post or page for easy manipulation.
What WordPress can’t you live without?
John Saddington says
awesome!
Jeremy Smith says
Thanks man.
p.s. Love your blog. 🙂
Andy Darnell says
Great Post, Jeremy. It is always nice to see posts like this to see what others think are the “top x plugins that I can’t live without.” I’ve just started looking at mobile detector for a site I am working in daily. It is nice to see a recommendation.
Jeremy Smith says
There really are not perfect options out there, but this is the best of what I have seen. Not fully customizable, but very good options and does exactly what it says it does.
Tom Jamieson says
Thanks for sharing this list. I always enjoy learning what others like and don’t like.
I’m glad you mentioned about the mobile detector. It seems like that will def come in handy.
Jeremy Smith says
Would love to know what you think after you use it.
Mark says
For me one of the most important is WP-DBManager — http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dbmanager/
Jeremy Smith says
Thanks for the share. I would definitely use this, except that it is better accepted to not manipulate the database within the actual program. This can lead to all kinds of problems. Something like phpMyAdmin might be a better option.
Aaron says
Thanks for the post!
I install these on every build:
1. Advanced Custom Fields (Game-Changer)
2. Blog-In-Blog
3. Duplicate Post
4. Exclude Pages
5. Page Links To
6. W3 Total Cache
7. Google Analytics for WordPress
8. Shadowbox JS
9. Contact Form 7
10. Contact Form to DB Extension
Jeremy Smith says
Wow! What a list. Definitely some good ones to have. When you have a whole list like this, you just have to pick the ones that float to the top. Thanks for the share!
Aaron says
I hope is that WordPress will eventually integrate most of these I posted.
Jeremy Smith says
Agreed. I don’t see these as plugins as much as missed opportunities from WordPress that will hopefully come in the future. Great ideas.