Selection of a plugin for a WordPress based website completely depends on the nature of website we are creating/managing. Some WordPress plugin might be required during the course of development like (Custom CSS, Sliders etc). Some plugins are required post development like Analytics, SEO, Sitemap plugins etc.
We created a list of commonly used WordPress Plugins You May Need Right After a Fresh WordPress Installation.
1. Simple Custom CSS
When it comes to writing a custom design code or to alter a given design with CSS, there is no better way to go with simple custom CSS plugin. This plugin is super cool and get you ready to write your own custom code in minutes. If you are a web developer, this plugin might be your first choice even before jet packs CSS which need a step to connect with WordPress.
2. XML Sitemap Plugin
What all your site contains n and what you want to index on search engines and explicitly tell to focus on certain pages on your site is important for getting visible on search engines in style. The search engines are smart enough to deal with your website and index the pages on your website without your intervention. This plugin let you chose what you want to index and create new entries once you add a post or page to your site. It thus keep you out of the world which involve creating a sitemap every time you add something new to the site.
3. Google Analytics
Okay, so the most common factor and accurate at the best is to have the visitor stats of your site. This plugin Is one of the many available but not limited like them when comes to bringing delight tracking your traffic. For a novice user, it let you install and track and for developers it let bring custom user accounts in the scanner and put filter on which user role to track, to track the admin or not, or blah blah.
It also come with a beautiful dashboard with the most recent (wops! 2 days old) data on dashboard.
4. Jetpack WordPress Plugin
The epic in itself. Custom CSS, cached images, mosaic galley, site statistics, and almost everything your blog may need to be successful. It needs an account with WordPress and once you are connected, you are all set. (Don’t forget to check all the modules available in Jetpack as it contain a lot of module which are extremely useful like image cache, brute force protection, site stats which shows traffic and other visitors stats, social sharing and auto posting to social media profiles, contact form and or….)
5. Contact Form 7
This plugin is one of the most popular plugin and let you create a contact form on your website in less than 1 minutes (please don’t use dial up Internet to test my words).
6. All in One SEO Plugin
We don’t need automatic SEO suggestions but a human defined title and meta description is all we need for better SEO. Rest all is taken care by the content of a given page. This plugin let you chose which page and post not to index and rest goes like any other plugins. Be cautious, don’t ignore the warnings.
7. Under Construction Plugin
The simplest and less fancy under construction page can be set for non logged in users using this plugin in 1 minute (hope you tested it right with the contact form 7). Don’t forget to enable the under construction mode as just activating the plugin is 50% of the work.
*This plugin did not support multi site at the moment.
8. Easy Columns
Nothing in this world is as easy as setting up a custom page layout with columns of your choice. Page builders are stinky sometimes and you may not have super awesome theme DIVI which comes with the most powerful page builder ever on WordPress. In a situation when your theme don’t have a page builder or column creator in page area, you can’t miss this plugin.
9. Delete Revisions
Pretty simple to clean up the mess after completing development of a website caused by editing and saving pages and posts multiple times which creates revisions on every instance of page save.
10. Akismet
The final plugin if you want to keep comments on is Akismet. The Alexander for spammers. Just get your API key after installing and forget the pain caused by spammers.
11. Custom Login Screen
Every body want to look pretty. So does your WordPress website login page. Customize your WordPress login with this plugin in minutes.
That’s not the end, we’ll update this post with more plugins in coming days. Here are a few plugins from Automattic, the makers of WordPress and you will love them.
