Plugins and Features for a Professional Wordpress Website

After building over 20 websites with Wordpress, I realized the need to compile a list of must-have plugins for every website and which plugins to keep in my toolbox for the occasional project.

Plugins are important for marketing, search engine optimization, and improving the performance of your site when it's heavy with content or numerous plugins.  But most of all, plugins enhance the capabilities of your site (usually for free) and straight out of the box, no advanced coding required.

Every wordpress website should have:

1. Search Engine Optimization: Wordpress SEO [formerly Yoast].
   This is the most widely used SEO plugin for Wordpress today, with over 5.6 million downloads [as of early August 2013].  I first came across this plugin when looking at a site designed by a professional e-commerce consultant.   He used this plugin on several sites and after using it on a few of my own websites, I was hooked.  It's easier and more intuitive than any other SEO plugin for Wordpress I have used. It also offers XML Sitemaps, which can be activated by checking one box.  XML sitemaps are very important for google search engine ranking and help google to show more links into the key pages of your site.
2. A good contact form: Contact Form 7 or Easy Contact Forms
   A clean, professional looking contact form is essential to connect with customers and increase leads.  The best contact form plugins for Wordpress support spam filtering or CAPTCHA, so you're not wasting time checking spam emails that you thought were customers contacting you.  I endorse these two plugins because they are simple and completely customizable.  Some contact forms require you to use their default fields, which means they lack flexibility and adaptability.  Contact Form 7 is very simple to use, but does not have a drag and drop interface, so you have to move around code to change the field ordering.  Easy Contact Forms has an awesome drag and drop interface, but the dizzying array of options can be intimidating for the first few minutes while you acclimate to all the choices.
3. Easy database backup: Online Backup for Wordpress
   No matter what web host you use, it's smart to make your own backups of your Wordpress Database.  A Wordpress database contains all the content of posts and pages, and all settings you have changed in your Wordpress dashboard.  It does not include your images, uploads, and any file modifications--these need to be backed up separately.  Online Backup for Wordpress is simple, intuitive, and very fast.  On an E-commerce website with over 400 products and many posts, the plugin created a backup of a 37.5 MB SQL file in about 1 minute.  It compressed this SQL file into a downloadable 2.5 MB ZIP file that makes it easy to store weekly backups without wasting hard drive space.  Regular backups are critical because some plugin or theme updates can break a Wordpress website that was previously rock solid.  This plugin can schedule weekly or monthly ZIP backups to be emailed automatically, ensuring that your website's content is protected.
4. Caching:  WP Super Cache
   Any Wordpress site can be improved with a caching plugin.  Caching is critical if you are running a large blog, a site with many plugins, or if you have a content heavy site. WP Super Cache speeds the loading of pages by reducing the requests for information from the database.  Visitors are served a static HTML page that will load faster.  Wordpress site owners previously had to accept that their page load times would be slowed if their site made use of several plugins.  Caching takes the bottleneck of the equation,  allowing your site to retain visitors and remain up if there's a spike in visitor traffic.

Plugins and features to meet client needs:



Woo Sidebars (free)
http://wordpress.org/plugins/woosidebars/
Create new sidebars for a Wordpress site and assign them to specific pages, without touching a line of code.

Webtreats Column Shortcodes (plugin download at the page bottom)
Create multi-column layouts on your site with shortcodes.

Easy Fancybox
Display more videos (or content overlays).  Reduce the page load times when embedding youtube videos.

Slideshow (free)
Slideshow provides an easy way to integrate a slideshow for any WordPress installation.  After using this plugin on just one client website, I'll be adding it to my photography website instead of using a coded Javascript slideshow.

The options are very intuitive and the only thing that takes a bit longer is that images need to be added in the Media Library before they can be inserted into a slideshow.  Several slide transition options are provided, and this plugin has so many custom options to choose from.

Each slideshow's height, width, navigation options, and image ordering can be customized.  The theme authors were smart to provide both the shortcode and the PHP code needed to insert a slideshow into Theme Template files.

This plugin has saved me a lot of work and I plan to donate to the developers.



Google Analytics
Some themes offer a box to add your Google Analytics tracking code.  If your theme does not, there are several plugins available to insert the code so that template header files do not have to be edited manually.
Google Analytics for WordPress [Created by Yoost de Valk, the author of Wordpress SEO]
Track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.

Google Analyticator - adds a dashboard widget to show Analytics reports
Easy installation of Google Analytics code on your site and a dashboard widget to show performance