One of the major reasons why WordPress is the most popular content management system is because of the availability of WordPress plugins, which add additional features or change existing capabilities. These plugins allow site owners to customize the way WordPress operates, making for nearly limitless possibilities without any programming experience.
What is a WordPress plugin?
A plugin is additional programming for the WordPress system that is typically developed by a third party. Many of them are designed to alter the way the system operates by default, so almost anything about WP can be changed as needed.
There are also more that are designed to add completely new features to the system. The best part is that people are not limited to using a single plugin. They can be mixed and matched on a site in almost any combination to provide the specific capabilities needed by the site owner.
The whole point of plugins is to allow site owners to completely customize the way their sites work. It also gives developers a way of making changes or improvements to the sites without modifying the core code. If the core WordPress code is changed, future updates will not be able to be performed.
Free plugins in the WordPress repository
The easiest place to find new plugins is to search or browse the WP repository. This is a collection of completely free, open source plugins that have been developed. Some of them are made by actual users of WordPress, while others are made by software companies.
There are a ton of them available through the repository. However, there are a few downsides to using them. These free plugins can literally be developed by anyone, so there is no guarantee that they will work as intended or without problems.
Furthermore, as new versions of WordPress are released, problems can develop in older plugins that are using outdated code. When they are no longer supported by the developer, which frequently happens, then site owners who use them can find themselves with a broken website after a WP version upgrade.
There are definitely quite a few that are excellent plugins that are frequently maintained by their developers. However, beginners may not realize that there is a difference. There are actually some that are freely available that will cause problems on sites, so it is important for site owners to carefully pick which ones to install.
Commercial WordPress plugins
The other alternative is to use commercial plugins. They are generally packed with many more features and capabilities than the others, and they are frequently updated to keep them working with new versions of WordPress.
Even though a commercial plugin will almost always be more powerful than a free version that attempts to do the same thing, the commercial versions are typically better for marketers that are trying to make money with their websites. When money is involved, future plugin updates to keep pace with WordPress are essential to long-term success.
Just like free versions, there are still going to be commercial versions that are inferior products. In general, avoid overly simple commercial plugins unless they are absolutely necessary. Since WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, there are a lot of marketers out there that will quickly develop low quality plugins to attract sales from many different products, but there are also marketers and companies that develop extremely high-quality WP software for very affordable prices.
Recommended free plugins
In general, there is one major kind of WordPress plugin that should be used on basically any website. These are search engine optimization, or SEO plugins, which are designed to optimize the WordPress system for better search engine rankings.
SEO is so important on any WordPress site because it is typically the largest source of free traffic. Most WP sites will usually not pay for advertising, so they depend on free traffic from search engines. However, the base WP system is lacking is many areas of search engine optimization, so these plugins are designed to improve this significantly.
A lot of people have a false misconception that SEO is for professional marketers that are trying to sell something on their websites. The truth is that anyone with a website should be taking advantage of the free traffic that search engines can offer.
This even applies to bloggers who simply want to gain more loyal readers. Publishing posts on a WordPress site is generally not going to be enough to get decent search rankings unless the system is optimized for this purpose. SEO WordPress plugins allow people without this type of knowledge to have success.
Keyword Statistics
For WordPress users who are interested in improving their search engine rankings, Keyword Statistics is highly recommended. This plugin, which is free through the WP repository, provides site owners with keyword density statistics on each post on their site.
While writing a post or page in the system, Keyword Statistics displays the most frequently used keyword phrases. It will show one, two, and three-word phrases along with the count and density percentage of each phrase.
This type of information is extremely important to get good search engine rankings, since it allows bloggers to make changes to their writing to ensure an optimal keyword density. In general, the targeted keywords on a single page should not have more than a 5% density on the page, although even lower numbers are recommended for best results.
Keyword Statistics is also going to automatically generate a meta keyword and description tag for each page on a WordPress site. It will set the most frequently used words from a page as the meta keyword tag. It will also pick a group of text from the content of the page that contains those words to use as the meta description, which is typically seen by those viewing listings on a search engine.
The meta tag features of this WP plugin are extremely useful, although it is important to ensure that there is not another plugin on the site that is already generating this information. Many SEO plugins will perform these tasks, so they should be disabled in all the plugins except for one. Allowing Keyword Statistics to be the plugin that accomplishes this task can be a big time saver, since the information is automatically generated but still allows customization as needed.
SEO Ultimate
Another essential WordPress plugin, SEO Ultimate, is one of the top two most popular SEO plugins available for free through the repository. A lot of people do prefer to use All in One SEO, but SEO Ultimate is a matter of personal preference since both will accomplish many of the same things.
SEO Ultimate is designed to optimize websites for better search engine rankings in a wide variety of ways. It does do meta tag generation, but it can be easily disabled in this plugin. In fact, any of the main SEO features are actually modules that can be disabled with ease. This allows people to pick and choose what will work best for them.
The base WordPress system is indeed powerful by itself, but most of it is not optimized to obtain good search engine rankings. This is why a plugin like SEO Ultimate is so important for site owners to use. It will tweak dozens of things in the base system. It also adds competition and internal link researching tools, which aren’t necessary but can be useful.
SEO Ultimate is also designed to allow easy integration with the major search engines. Bing and Google require webmasters to add verification code to their website to add a site to their Webmaster Tools system. Adding this manually on a WordPress site can be confusing and time consuming, but using SEO Ultimate simplifies the process by giving site owners a place to insert this information with the plugin settings.
