The Most Popular and Practical WordPress Plug-ins
There are currently over 74 million websites that are being powered by WordPress1, easily making it the most popular web design platform in use. The key to the success of WordPress is that it is very user friendly and can be readily adapted to create any sort of website that the user wants to make. While the enormous number of themes that are available makes it easy to give a website the desired look, the real power of WordPress comes from the plug-ins that give it the functionality that make it the most practical web design tool available. There are currently just under 20,000 plug-ins available2 that can do almost anything, and it is possible to imagine that these huge numbers of options makes choosing the ones you need something of a chore. These plug-ins all add functionality to a website while being simple to install and use, which is why they are among the most popular plug-ins that are being downloaded right now.
Jetpack
Blogs that are hosted on WordPress.com, the free blog service side of the WordPress empire, have always had access to the cloud of WordPress data like the fantastic stats that WordPress provides. Jetpack connects self-hosted sites to the WordPress cloud and allows users to include many features that were previously only available on the free service.
WordPress Shopping Cart Plug-in
Most websites are set up to sell something and so having a shopping cart on your site is a valuable addition that allows you to keep your visitors and their transactions on your website. The WordPress Shopping Cart plug-in is a fully featured shopping cart complete with product pages, coupons and all of the other online retail functionality that you need to sell your wares online.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Search engines are the largest contributor to most online traffic so having a site that is optimized for the crawlers is vital. WordPress SEO is a plug in that optimizes your website for you via a user friendly dashboard to make sure that it is indexed fully by the crawlers when they visit.
BuddyPress
To add a social dimension to a website or to create an intra-office instant messaging service for employees to communicate more effectively, BuddyPress adds a chat window to a website. This handy plug-in allows users to add many interactive social features like activity streams and discussion forums to their websites.
VaultPress
The mantra of IT is back up, back up, back up, and protecting your data online is a vital part of running any website. VaultPress is a plug-in that takes care of backing up information on your website automatically and even scans the content for potential threats or exploits. In the event that your site is damaged or lost, VaultPress can restore the entire site; pages, images and content with a single click.
Media Grid-WordPress Responsive Portfolio
Custom designing pages to display images or videos creatively can make a website truly memorable. Media Grid allows users to create portfolios of images in a variety of formats from a single image with text to a montage of pictures pieced together artistically to create a visually dynamic website.
These six plug-ins all add great practical features to the design of websites but they still represent only a tiny fraction of the total number available to add functionality to WordPress websites, many of which can be downloaded free. If you are interested in adding these dynamic features to your website, contact InfintechDesigns.com to find out which of the 20,000 plug-ins are right for your business’s website.
References:
1. http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
