Q: What is your favorite WordPress plugin, and why is it an absolutely necessary feature for your business?
A: iThemes Security. “iThemes Security is a plugin that my company uses on our own site, and I recommend that all of our clients use it as well. Website security is something that cannot be overlooked by anyone, and this plugin has great features. It’s also easy to set up and manage, even for a business owner with little to no technical knowledge. The free version provides a lot of great security benefits.” Jonathan Long, Market Domination Media
W3 Total Cache. “Site speed is absolutely critical from a conversion standpoint as well as for SEO purposes and improved rankings. We have seen with Amazon how one second could cost them $1.6 billion in sales, but even for much smaller companies we’re talking about the difference between a visitor staying or leaving. W3 Total Cache is installed on all of our sites and it dramatically increases load speed.” Alex Miller, Upgraded Points
Akismet. “We can’t live without the anti-spam Akismet plugin since we produce so much content and always have comments enabled for our readers. Akismet protects you from the inevitable spam comments that pour in when you have a highly visible site, so you only see the comments that really matter. This saves so much time for our team.” Natalie Macneil, She Takes on the World
EditFlow. “EditFlow is a fantastic plugin to manage multiple authors, editorial calendars, deadlines, etc. It makes the management of a multi-author blog seamless and significantly more streamlined. Instead of using a variety of tools, we use EditFlow to create and follow a content strategy, without dropping deadlines. We complement this with Podio to track the status of each article.” Marcela De Vivo, Gryffin
Yoast. “While there are hundreds of WP plugins, the one that has helped clients the most to ensure their blogs meet the credentials of good SEO is Yoast. Using this little section, blogs get a green light when they are good to go. It takes the brains out of guessing if you’ve done it correctly.” Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
SumoMe. “I’ve been loving SumoMe recently. It’s super easy to set up and gives you a variety of plugins to add to your site. They have tools for sharing, list building and analytics. They all take seconds to implement and are very high quality.” Ben Lang, Mapme
Migrate DB Pro. “Migrate DB Pro makes copying the database and images/media files between sites (either from staging to production or migrating to different servers) a breeze. It also automatically updates the site URL when transferring over posts and data. We constantly use it on WordPress projects at Spartan.” Jesse Morris, Spartan
HTTPS Redirection. “Google, your visitors, your investors and your partners now look at your site’s address bar with far more scrutiny. It’s become an expectation that your site runs using SSL, that’s the ‘https://’ part of the URL. More than ever, visitors will stop a transaction with you if they feel insecure. The Easy HTTPS Redirection plugin makes this pretty easy. Just install and configure a few fields to get SSL rolling.” Brian Fritton, Patch of Land
ShareThis. “ShareThis is a social sharing plugin that embeds easy social media share buttons on a WP website. It has a variety of layouts and options to choose from, and takes away the need for a developer to manipulate the embeds. For example, if you do not want to show the number of shares on a particular post or if you want the buttons to be left aligned, ShareThis has settings and options for that.” Pratham Mittal, Outgrow
(Source: TCA)
