Ten Popular WordPress Plugins

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Finding popular WordPress plugins

check Using plugins to enhance your website

In this chapter, I list ten of the most popular plugins available for your WordPress site. This list isn’t exhaustive by any means; hundreds of excellent WordPress plugins can, and do, provide multiple ways to extend the functionality of your blog. If these ten plugins aren’t enough for you, you can find many more at the official WordPress Plugins page (https://wordpress.org/plugins).

The greatest plugin of all is Akismet, which I describe in Chapter 7. Akismet is the answer to comment and trackback spam; it kills spam dead. It’s installed with WordPress. Chapter 7 contains information on how to locate, download, unpack, install, activate, and manage plugins on your WordPress site.

AppPresser

Developer: AppPresser

https://wordpress.org/plugins/apppresser

Introduced in January 2014, AppPresser was the first plugin of its kind, in that it allows users of the plugin to create native mobile applications using WordPress as the platform. Before AppPresser, if you wanted to develop a native mobile app, you needed to be an advanced programmer in a language such as Objective C or Ruby. With the AppPresser plugin, if you know how to build a WordPress site, you can also build a mobile application.

AppPresser is a cloud-based app builder for WordPress websites. It helps you build iOS and Android apps that integrate all your WordPress content. The plugin includes several WordPress plugins and a theme that perform special functions such as integration with your favorite custom plugins. You can create your app completely in WordPress, using themes, plugins, and all the other stuff you know.

The AppPresser core plugin is free to download from the WordPress Plugins page. At https://apppresser.com, you can purchase professional plans starting at $19 per month to build iOS and Android apps. Features include

A visual app builder that allows you to create and customize apps with a live preview
Push notifications from WordPress to specific users
Integration with plugins such as BuddyPress, WooCommerce, and Gravity Forms
Offline content
Geolocation, Facebook login, Device camera, and social sharing

Jetpack

Developer: Automattic

https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack

Jetpack isn’t one plugin but a suite of plugins that connects your self-hosted website running WordPress.org with the hosted WordPress.com service, bringing you many of the features that WordPress.com users enjoy. Jetpack bundles features such as the following:

WordPress.com Stats: This simple statistics program gives you information on your site visitors, such as how many visitors you have, where they’re coming from, and what content they’re viewing on your site.
Jetpack Comments: Manage comments that integrate with social media login options like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
Post by Email: Publish posts to your blog directly from your email account.
Carousel: Transform your standard image galleries into slideshows and carousels.
Spelling and Grammar: Catch your grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors with this integrated proofreading service.
VaultPress: Manage real-time backups and security-scanning for your site.
Contact Form: Easily insert an email contact form anywhere on your WordPress site with one click of a button.
WP.me Shortlinks: Create a short URL for easier social sharing with the WP.me service.
Tiled Galleries: Easily create magazine-style image tile layouts for your photos.
Custom CSS: Customize the appearance of your site using CSS, but without modifying your theme files.
Extra Sidebar Widgets: Add widgets to your WordPress site like the Easy Image Widget and the RSS Widget.
Jetpack Single Sign On: Allow users to log in to your site using their credentials from WordPress.com.
Enhanced Distribution: Share your content with search engines and other services in real-time.
VideoPress: Easily upload and insert videos on your site.

Because Jetpack runs and is hosted on the WordPress.com cloud server, updates to this suite of plugins occur automatically.

To use Jetpack, you must have a WordPress.com account (see Chapter 1).

Subscribe to Comments

Developer: Mark Jaquith

https://wordpress.org/plugins/subscribe-to-comments

The Subscribe to Comments plugin adds a very nice feature to your blog by letting your visitors subscribe to individual posts you’ve made on your blog. When your readers subscribe to individual posts on your blog, they receive notification via email whenever someone leaves a new comment on the post. This feature goes a long way toward keeping your readers informed and making the discussions lively and active!

The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification email addresses.

Facebook

Developers: Facebook and Automattic

https://wordpress.org/plugins/facebook

This plugin was developed by Facebook for WordPress with a little help from the developers at Automattic. With the importance of a social media presence today, you want to make sure that your content reaches the eyes of your friends and followers on social networks such as Facebook, but that pursuit can be time-consuming. The goal of the Facebook plugin is to save you time by easily sharing your new content with your Facebook page and allowing your Facebook friends to discover that content and interact with your website seamlessly. The plugin allows you to

Automatically share new content from your WordPress site on your Facebook page. After you connect your site to your Facebook account in the plugin settings, your new site content is posted automatically to your Facebook page.
Mention friends and favorite pages within the content of your posts and link those mentions directly to their Facebook pages.
Include the Share, Like, and Subscribe Facebook buttons on your WordPress site, with easy customization.
Display a recommendations box where Facebook makes additional content recommendations for your readers to discover, based on the content they’re currently browsing on your site.
Include Facebook commenting on your site to allow your Facebook friends to comment in both places at the same time.
Include an Activity Feed Box Widget that allows Facebook friends to see what their friends are doing on your site.
Determine how well your Facebook presence is doing in promoting your content through Facebook Insights integration.

The Facebook plugin is easy to install. After you connect your Facebook account to your WordPress site through the Facebook plugin settings, you’re ready to go.

All in One SEO Pack

Developer: Michael Torbert

https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack

Almost everyone is concerned about search engine optimization (SEO) in blogs. Good SEO practices help the major search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) easily find and cache your blog content in their search databases so that when people search for keywords, they can find your blog in the search results. All in One SEO Pack helps you fine-tune your blog to make that happen. It automatically creates optimized titles and generates HTML keywords for your individual posts. If you’re a beginner, this plugin works for you out of the box, with no advanced configuration necessary. Woo-hoo! If you’re an advanced user, you can fine-tune the All in One SEO settings to your liking.

BackupBuddy

Developer: iThemes Media

https://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy

Starting at $80 for personal use and $297 for the entire development suite of plugins, BackupBuddy lets you back up your entire WordPress website in minutes. With this plugin, you can also determine a schedule of automated backups of your site on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can store those backups on your web server; email backups to a designated email address; SFTP backups to a designated SFTP server; or store the backups on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, Dropbox, or the Rackspace Cloud, if you have those accounts.

BackupBuddy backs up not only your WordPress data (posts, pages, comments, and so on), but also any theme and customized plugins you’ve installed (including the settings for those plugins), and it saves and backs up all WordPress settings and any widgets that you’re currently using.

BackupBuddy includes an import and migration script (importbuddy.php) that allows you to transfer an existing site to a new domain or host within minutes. You simply download the backup file created by BackupBuddy from your Dashboard (choose BackupBuddy ⇒ Backups), install the script on a new domain, and follow the steps displayed on the screen.

This plugin is invaluable for designers and developers who work with clients to design WordPress websites. Using BackupBuddy, you can download a backup of the site and then use the import/migration script to transfer the completed site to your client’s site within minutes, saving all the customizations you did to the theme and the plugins you installed, including the settings and data you’ve been working so hard on.

WP Super Cache

Developer: Automattic

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache

WP Super Cache creates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress content. Why is this plugin useful? On a high-traffic site, having cached versions of your posts and pages can decrease the load time of your website considerably. A cached version simply means that the content is converted to static HTML pages (as opposed to dynamically created content pulled from your database through a series of PHP commands) that are then stored on the server. This process eases the efforts the web server must take to display the content in your visitors’ browsers.

You can read a helpful article written by one of the plugin's developers, Donncha O’Caoimh, at https://odd.blog/wp-super-cache.

WooCommerce

Developer: Automattic

https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce

E-commerce is the practice of selling products or services on your website. The WooCommerce plugin for WordPress allows you to do just that. Whether you’re selling products such as T-shirts, posters, or art, or selling services such as consulting, WooCommerce allows you to set up products and accept payment transactions on your website.

Here are some of the high-level features you enjoy with the WooCommerce plugin:

Accept payments: You can accept payments from your customers from PayPal or any major credit card.
Configure shipping: If you sell physical goods that require shipping, the WooCommerce shipping feature gives you several options, including configuring free shipping or flat-rate shipping.
Manage inventory: Easily manage physical or digital goods (like music, for example); you can also assign store managers to handle day-to-day inventory for large online shops.
Run reports: Keep track of your sales, reviews, stock levels, and overall store performance with WooCommerce reporting tools.
Run marketing campaigns: Run marketing campaigns with a range of discounts, coupons, usage limits, and product and/or user restrictions — as well as free shipping.
Configure taxes: Configure tax settings with classes and local tax rates.

WooCommerce also has a variety of Add-Ons, called Extensions, that allow you to extend your e-commerce platform to your tastes. Its Extension library contains items such as Event Bookings, Membership subscriptions, Product Reviews, and Product Labels.

Google XML Sitemaps

Developer: Arne Brachhold

https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator

This plugin lets you create a Google-compliant XML site map of your entire blog. Every time you create a new post or page, the site map is updated and submitted to several major search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. This plugin helps the search engines find and catalog new content from your site, so your new content appears in the search engines faster than it would if you didn’t have a site map.

Sucuri Security

Developer: Sucuri, Inc.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/sucuri-scanner

With the rise in popularity of the WordPress software, a nefarious group of anonymous hackers tried to take advantage of the vast number of users in the WordPress community by attempting to inject malicious code and malware into themes, plugins, and insecure and outdated files within the WordPress core code.

The Sucuri SiteCheck Malware Scanner plugin checks for malware, spam, blacklisting, and other security issues hidden inside code files. It’s the best defense you have against malicious hackers and very easy to implement — and for the peace of mind that it provides you, the free price tag is worth every penny!