Something new about WordPress plugins

WordPress is a very popular Content Management System (CMS) that many individuals and businesses use to build and maintain their websites. It has tools and features that assist us to perform this activity. You can use WordPress plugins to improve the functionality of your website.

These plugins are available for various purposes. Some of them are ideal for blogs, others are ideal for e-commerce websites and there are some that are especially good for corporate sites. There are literally thousands of WordPress plugins available for you. With this much variety, it is easy to get confused and wonder the ones you need and the ones you don’t. Here are some of the ones that you can find most useful in your website.

Jetpack

This is a plugin developed by Akismet. It has features that are ideal for WordPress websites. Examples of these features include sharing guides, commenting, WordPress statistics, a carousel, spellchecking, grammar correction and content distribution tools. Moreover, Jetpack provides you with features such as embedding for shortcodes and shortlinks too. This plugin is freely available. However, you can pay for the premium version and enjoy extended features.

Sociable

If you want your website to be successful, it is important to share its content in social media platforms. Examples of these are Google+, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Posterous. There are also some other social media sites, such as Reddit, HackerNews, Digg and MySpace. To promote your WordPress website on these sites, you can use a plugin that is known as Sociable. Over 1.7 million people have already downloaded it to use in their WordPress sites. It assists you to easily share your website link and content in your social media pages.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Developed from Yoast, this is an analytics plugin for WordPress websites. It makes use of a new technology that is known as asynchronous tracking. This one makes your pages load faster. In addition to that, this technology makes it possible for you to insert custom variables in your website. Examples of these variables are tracking of users who have logged in, sorting page views according to author as well as arranging the views according to the author or content. Other custom variables that the Google Analytics for WordPress can help you to organize include the type of posts and the year of publication of content too. You can integrate this plugin with WordPress E-Commerce and Shopp too. This assists you perform more efficient sales tracking.

Google XML Sitemaps

This is a WordPress plugin that you can use to make search engines in your website or blog in a much easier way. You can use it with Google Webmaster Tools or any other search engine tools that you wish. Google XML Sitemaps is built to support custom URLs and generated WordPress pages. It also supports activation for networks and automatic generation of sitemaps. Whenever you create some new content for your WordPress website, this plugin notifies all the search engines that you have integrated into it. In this way, your website is indexed in a much better way.

WP-Polls

This is a WordPress plugin that assists you to add polls into your website or blog. The plugin is very easy to use. All that you need to do is add a question or group of questions and their possible answers. After that, you make a setting that determines if visitors can select more than one answer in the questions. Once you do that, indicate the starting and end date of the poll and that’s it. By using WP-Polls, you can manage the layout of your polls without having to edit your website’s CSS.

W3 Total Cache

This is a WordPress framework that is utilized on literally thousands of websites. Even the blogs, which normally have high levels of traffic successfully use W3 Total Cache. Various web hosts recommend this plugin for WordPress websites. It caches literally every single aspect of your WordPress website. As a result, the site downloads much faster. After full configuration, W3 Total cache can boost the performance of your website by more than ten times. This works to maintain high levels of traffic to your website. By guaranteeing fast load times, W3 Total Cache can even improve your search engine rankings.

WordPress SEO

This is a plugin developed by Yoast. It offers you complete SEO managing capability for your WordPress website. By using this plugin, you can optimize various elements of your website, such as the titles of images, content, meta tags and XML sitemaps. WordPress SEO has features such as breadcrumb capability, configuration of Robots Meta, support for canonical link elements as well as optimization of the titles on posts. It further boosts the webmaster’s capability by having built-in RSS enhancements.

WordPress Backup to DropBox

It is very important to perform regular backups of all the content in your website. You can back it up online or offline. If you back it up offline, you will need to download all the data and then upload it again to restore your site. This is tedious. WordPress Backup to DropBox allows you to avoid this time-consuming activity. The plugin allows you to back up your site data to a DropBox account. By using OAuth, the plugin ensures complete security of your DropBox account details. The plugin has a User Interface that is clean and sleek. Moreover, you can personalize its backup settings and it is fully compatible with various types of browsers.

Conclusion : There are many plugins that are designed to improve your WordPress experience. Some of them allow for more functionality in the website or blog. Others increase its downloading performance. These are some of the most popularly used plugins. They help you to accomplish more out of the WordPress website.

Author Bio : Frankie Delaware is a webmaster. He manages quite a number of WordPress websites. For over five years, his main job has been to build and maintain WordPress websites. In his job, he makes use of plugins and reviews them at a WordPress event. According to him, they increase the functionality of the websites and make it more efficient for him to administer them.