Reading Time: 4 minutes -

What are the top 5 best WordPress plugins in 2014? Here are some of our favourites

If you use WordPress for your CMS then you will be aware of the vast number of plugins available for download. With so many great plugins, how do you best choose which ones are worthwhile for you or your business? This is where we hope to be of some help by highlighting some of our favourites that we find useful:

#1 – YOAST WordPress SEO Plugin

We covered this in a previous blog in detail as we found this to be a must have for anyone that wants to have a website or blog that can be easily optimised for SEO without having to pass it all over to an SEO company. Obviously for other aspects of SEO, you will want to work with a company that can focus on other practices that fall under SEO such as keyword analysis and SEO copywriting, but for your general metadata, URL and content optimisation, YOAST is a fantastic place to start when it comes to getting your website pages indexed by the top search engines. Another favourite of ours for SEO is the All in One SEO pack. So if you’re looking to compare two solutions these would be a great place to start.

#2 – AdSense Made Easy

If you have a small site that you feel could be monetised by certain ads relevant to your content, you should look for tips on our previous blog covering monetisation and also consider the AdSense Made Easy plugin. With this plugin, you gain widget functionality that allows you to insert your ad codes while selecting the widget position where the ad will appear. It’s a very quick and simple way of monetising your website or blog.

#3 – Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons

There are many plugins that provide this functionality but for a quick simple solution to adding sharing buttons to your website, this Really Simple Facebook Twitter Share buttons plugin does the trick. Networks include the typical Facebook, Google+ and Twitter options, but it also includes the option to share with Reddit and Linkedin along with many more. The plugin also provides a number of layout options so you can really customise the way the boxes look and where exactly they are positioned on your page.

#4 – TinyMCE Advanced

TInyMCE Advanced enables advanced features within the visual editor in WordPress. You will typically notice an ‘MS Word’ type set of options above your content as you can see in the image below:

Longdesc=

All of these buttons create a shortcut to regularly required features such as text formatting options and spell checking.

#5 – Maintenance Mode

If you or your web design company  need to make regular changes to your website, a maintenance mode plugin is essential in order to keep your visitors updated on site progress. With this plugin, you simply input an estimated down time and the plugin generates a countdown timer to be on your maintenance page. For those not familiar with maintenance pages, these are typically temporary pages that are blank other than some text telling the user that the website is currently being updated. This plugin supports various other settings such as splash page themes.

Which WordPress plugins are others using?

Below you will see a great infographic by marketingtechblog.com which shows some of their favourites. This is really useful for those that want to get a general idea on which plugins should be used for which type of website.

Which of these do we suggest trying?

Here are a few more must-haves for your WordPress website:

  • Google Analytics for WordPress – This is a great and easy to use plugin for users that want to integrate Google Analytics into their website. Very easy to use and informative with all of the key features you would want from an analytics plugin.
  • Pinterest Pin it button – If you feel that ‘Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons’ doesn’t quite do it for you with the Pinterest integration, you should try this. This plugin allows a ‘pin it’ button to be added over images on your website allowing easy sharing to other Pinterest accounts.
  • Akismet – Cuts down on the spam that can become a problem on some popular websites or blogs that have a comment section.

Download links

Below you will find a link to every plugin mentioned in this blog:

There are many more plugins for WordPress that are amazing. If you manage to try any of our suggestions or have any of your own please be sure to leave us a comment below or drop us a message one of our social networks and we’ll update our blog with your suggestions.

Image credit – littledebbie11

Follow us and share if you found this blog useful…

If you found this blog useful you can follow us below to get the latest as we release more useful internet marketing blogs over the coming months!

And don’t forget to share…

 

1 Comment

  1. Mary Martin

    Great collection. You described very good list of plugins.
    I have just installed User Activity Log Plugin on my website. It is very helpful to monitoring and tracking of all the activities occurs on the admin side.
    Visit Here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-activity-log/

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

 

Latest Posts

Tags