One of the biggest advantages of using the WordPress platform for website development is the huge number of plugins available.  There are some great free and commercial WordPress plugins available and we thought we’d list those we consider essential for any WordPress development. Here goes:

WordPress SEO by Yoast

If ranking well on Google is important, this one is essential.  This plugin provides lots of analysis of your individual pages and provides suggestions as to how you can improve.  A simple color coding scheme gives immediate feedback for each page.

This plugin has plenty of help tool tips for items you may not be familiar while providing advanced functionality for SEO experts.  Fill in the fields as needed to get a good (green) SEO status.  If this plugin likes the page then so will Google.

Duplicate Post

This one is handy when you need to create lost of pages or products with slight variations.  With this plugin installed, you get a “clone” link under the item title on the item display screen.  Clicking creates a new item in “draft” mode. You can the use “Quick Edit” to quickly change the titles, categories, slugs and so on.  Very quick way to create all your pages or products.

GA Google Analytics

Most people know how important Google Analytics are.  The advantage of this GA plugin is that it supports the somewhat new “Universal Analytics” upgrade.  Easy to install, then add your tracking code for the web property.

SEO Redirection

This plugin provides a feature rich way to add 301 redirects.  This is especially useful for site upgrades where the pages names may change while retaining existing content.  Google doesn’t like a bunch of 404 errors on a site so it’s a good idea to redirect old URLs to the new ones using this plugin.  You would want to use this in conjunction with Google’s Webmaster Tools which provide a list of 404 errors (missing pages).

There are tons of great plugins available for WordPress.  At Techeffex, we consider these 4 to be essential and add them as a standard part of any new WordPress development.