Though WordPress provides a huge number of features and high functionality, there still lack many functions which are filled in with right plugins. However, choosing a good plugin from the great options available in WordPress Plugin Directory is quite difficult. It’s even more difficult for beginners who get confused when trying to pick the best plugin. There are terrible plugins which are poorly coded, full of bugs and security holes, are hard to use and can slow down the website.
The following 5 plugins I listed below are proved to be of high quality and necessary for every WP user. They are being used by thousands of WordPress customers, have good ratings and have been reviewed by famous bloggers and developers.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is the fastest WordPress performance optimization plugin. It is designed to increase page load speed and improve user experience. The plugin improves server performance by reducing download times, caching every aspect of your site and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. This directly influences the overall site performance, since high page speed helps the site rank well in search engines.
Slider WD
Image slider is considered a great addition to any website since it allows displaying images to the visitors in an eye-catchy and engaging way. Slider WD is a feature-rich WordPress slider plugin that helps to create numerous slides on any WordPress site. The plugin offers fully customizable features, has responsive design and layout, and is easy to use. You can upload images by three simple options – by Media library, Slider WD media uploader and add by image URL. Also there is a possibility to display videos on your slides which is very simple – either you embed video links to your slides from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Flickr or upload them directly from your computer.
Slider WD provides 26 transition and 38 layer effects, time bar, gives a possibility of slide duplication, enables to change the navigation buttons and bullet styles. Image watermarking and right-click protection options are also available and help to protect images from illegal use and downloading.
Another important feature is that you can use the plugin as a widget and show it on your website’s sidebar.
Jetpack
Jetpack is a popular WordPress plugin which includes powerful features to manage a WordPress site much easily. The plugin offers enhanced security, improved site performance and plenty of content tools. It gives statistics about your website traffic, protects your site against brute force attacks and unauthorized logins. Its centralized dashboard helps to manage plugins and menus, publish posts, and view stats for the overall website. Additional features of Jetpack include Social Sharing, Related Posts, Post by Email, spam-free comments and many more. By Jetpack you can optimize and speed up images using the global WordPress.com content delivery network. Besides you can customize your site including Custom CSS, Contact Forms, Galleries and Carousels, Notifications, Subscriptions and Configurable Widgets.
Event Calendar WD
Once you want to create and show events on your website the importance of a high grade calendar plugin comes forth. Event Calendar WD, a very popular WordPress event calendar, can’t be but mentioned here. It helps to display events in an organized and clear way. It’s a feature-rich tool that provides complete information on your events, including the venue, organizers, location on the Google maps, etc. You can add tags and categories to your events so that the users can easily find the desired event.
The plugin comes with 7 event views and 5 customizable themes. It supports structured event markup feature, which helps search engines to understand the details of events and add them to the event listings in Google search. Event Calendar Pro offers many other features and provides more functions due to its add-ons. You can check the calendar demo to better understand its core features.
Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is a must-have plugin that will automatically generate and update a sitemap in XML format for your site. It’s of utmost importance to have an XML sitemap for your website since this greatly helps search engines to better index the site. Due to a sitemap web crawlers see the website structure and retrieve the results much more effectively. Without the plugin you’ll need to create the sitemap manually which will take much time and effort. But once you do that with the help of this plugin you save your time and search engines will be notified every time you create a post on your site.
I have tested all the above mentioned plugins and believe that they can take a website from good to great. If you have other good plugins in mind, please, mention them in comments so I can test them too and include in my listings.
Author Bio: Gayane Mar is a passionate web-blogger who started her blogging activity a few years ago. Her posts are all about web design and web development. She writes all these posts for good people who need some guidance or advice with web development. The driving force behind her writings is the great hope that her blog posts would be helpful for each and every one reading them. If you are interested you can follow her own blog wpcapitan.com.