Use WordPress Plugins to Improve Your WordPress Website

Edited by Robbi, Eng, Lynn, Inukshuk

4 Parts: Find out more about plugins Steps to finding the plugins that you need The most useful plugins for WordPress Comments
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One of the most positive things about WordPress is the proliferation of add-ons and plugins which are available for your use. The WordPress community is comprised of hundreds of thousands of users.

Many of these users devise a code to address a requirement that they have for WordPress. They make their own plugins, and when they have perfected it, they offer it to the community for their own use.

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Many of these plugins are offered free of charge and will give you nearly amazing functionality in your WordPress installation.

Find out more about plugins

You can find a plugin that will do literally anything in the world. In a community as large and as active as that of WordPress, a lot of work takes place. Many of the extensions and plugins that you will find can be helpful to you in hundreds of ways. 

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Plugins can allow you to create a forum, to cache your images, to fix the security on your site and to create entire profiles of added users. You can also find plugins which will afford you the means to firewall your site as well as to scan it for malware on a nightly basis.

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Need to have your WordPress take orders or make payments directly to PayPal? There are plugins for those functions as well. Each is well updated and the community as a whole supports them, which means that you get solid, quality software and in many cases, good support free of charge inside the WordPress community.

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Steps to finding the plugins that you need

  1. 1
    Determine what it is that you want your website to do. Knowing that will help you to find the available plugins and which ones you need a great deal easier.
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  2. 2
    One of the best places that you're going to explore as a new website owner is the open source community called the WordPress Plugin Database. It is found at wp-plugins.net and has about 2,500 WordPress plugins and counting.
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  3. 3
    The top 10 most important plugins for any WordPress site include those that secure it, speed it up, lower the spam, check it for malware and allow you to take payments. These are the best of the batch.
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The most useful plugins for WordPress

  1. 1
    Security is job one for any website these days. By default, WordPress allows your website to take as many attempts at logging in as they can. Login Lockdown, a free plugin, allows you to limit that and to automatically lock out those who try to log in more than a number of times that you specify.
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  • 2
    WP_malware watch lets you check your website nightly or on a schedule that you specify in order to ensure that malware has not been placed on your site for the purposes of a drive by distribution.
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  • 3
    Wordfence is among the best of the firewall software plugins for Wordpress. It permits you to specify given options for your website that will lock out someone after a certain amount of time or to throttle the users who are seeking out pages that are known vulnerable 404s. If someone tackles your website pages more than a given number of times in an hour it will throttle or block, depending on the directions that you give to your WordPress plugin.
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  • 4
    WP Simple Cart allows you to put up a wide range of products and to link them directly to a PayPal button or a PayPal cart in order to sell products or services from your website quite easily and with relative security. Even if you don't have an SSL, you can take advantage of sales on your own site using PayPal and a great little shopping cart system.
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  • 5
    Would you like to add a forum to your blog? Vast HTML forum is outstanding and offers a wide range of different controls to you as the administrator. It is a free plugin that is simple and straightforward forum. Visitors who have a way to interact are more likely to come back to visit you.
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  • 6
    All in One SEO. permits you to do the basic SEO on your website and gives you fill in slots below the WordPress posts and pages in order to help to make your site more visible and more viable in search. Be very careful as you use it, and read the instructions and the help files very carefully, as an SEO plugin can and does cause negative effects as well as positive ones if it is incorrectly configured. While it does have competition, we've not found anything which works as effectively for helping to create a better site than ALL in this plugin. And the price is certainly right"�it's free to download and to install although there is a professional version that will cost a small amount.
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  • 7
    Akismet, which ships with WordPress by design is one of the best anti-spam plugins that is available for WordPress. Free of charge or $5 dollars for a website that is commercial in nature, Akismet is easy to install with a key that you can get from the website.
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  • 8
    Want to do podcasts from your website? PodPress is a free plugin and is free whether you're using it commercially or not. It's been billed as "a full-blown Podcasters Plugin for WordPress." With Podpress, you can post a podcast along with your article for visitors to download or simply to listen to. Offering podcasts or interviews of your guest posters is one of the best ways to engage your visitor.
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  • 9
    Post in Page lets you take a few posts and drop them into pages to show your visitors what you have to offer. It makes a wonderful layout for the guest and gives them a taste of what you're doing on your site.
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  • 10
    Membership is a free plugin that permits you to create a membership site where you can charge your members or give multiple levels.
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  • 11
    Newsletter, free from Wordpress.org is a plugin that gives you all the power of Mail Chimp or any of the other list builders without paying a fee. Lay out your newsletter or simply auto mail out a new post as it is placed on the site. Set up the newsletter to go on a regular basis and capture the emails of your visitors all free of charge with Newsletter.
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  • 12
    Mingle and Mingle Forum are also plugins to take a look at, offering you the means to turn your website into a community of friends who can post and interact on the site.
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    • Okay so we said the top 10 and we've posted 12.. That's because we're trying to give you a little bit extra OR because - our inherent inability to count has manifested itself in a little bonus. Have a great day!

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    Categories : Noindexed pages | Ultimate Guide To Build & Promote A Website

    Recent edits by: Lynn, Eng, Robbi

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