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Top 20 Wordpress Plugins

Dan Sampson, Esq. - 2/23/2013

Market research shows that making your blog look better will cause people to stay longer and return in the future. We've compiled the list of the 20 best plugins, many of which are available at the WP Discounts store.

To give you a quick wordpress training course, a plugin is software that adds to the larger software that a person is using, in this case it's Wordpress. Plugins enable customizing the functionality of an application. For instance, converterin is used to measure sales conversions online. WP plugins depend on the services provided by Wordpress and do not work by themselves. They enable web site users to extend an application, to easily add new capabilities, and to reduce the size of an application. (Source: http://dentagleam.co.uk/). Plugins differ from extensions because they do not become part of the application. But enough of the technicalities. Below is the list of the top-20 Wordpress plugs that we think you are going to love. Judge for yourself.


1. Jetpack: offers stats, sharing tools, spelling and grammar checker, comment features, subscriptions, a carousel, enhanced distribution, custom CSS, WP.me shortlinks, shortcode embeds, and much more.

2. Sociable: is a social sharing plugin that makes it easy to share your content on a ton of different social media sites.

3. Google Analytics: not only can you get visitor statistics, but it can your pages load faster.

4. Google XML Sitemaps: creates a sitemap necessary for Google Webmaster Tools.

5. WP-Polls: easy to create polls.

6. Quick Cache: creates a cache of every part of your blog.

7. WordPress SEO by Yoast: a tool for on-page techniques for search engine optimization to achieve higher results in Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.

8. Wordpress Backup Dropbox: back up your site in case it gets hacked.

9. Revision Control: retrieve old versions of your blog.

10. Broken Link Checker: nobody wants to visit a site with broken links and people will not return if you have them.

11. Antispam Bee: prevents your blog from being overrun by spam comments.

12. Manage WP: allows you to easily manage multiple blogs.

13. WP Google Fonts: change the way your site looks and feels.

14. The Events Calendar: allow your visitors to attend your events and otherwise track what you are planning on doing.

15. WPtouch: easy way to create a mobile theme for your website.

16. Tip Jar: allow your visitors to donate to you for the great work you are doing.

17. Secure WP: protects your web site from hackers.

18. Disqus: lets your visitors comment on your blog entries.

19. Sexy Bookmarks: allow people to share your blog on social networking and social bookmarking sites.

20. Fluid Video Embeds: people love watching videos. It will make your blog so much more lively.


This is just the tip of the iceberg. As we already mentioned, there are thousands of other Wordpress plugins and you'd be wise to look for them instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every time you need to make a change to your web site. Wordpress plugins are the next best thing after the iPhone apps. Maybe even better.