WordPress Plugins for 2016

WordPress is powerful Content Management System (CMS), but the real power is in the plugins.  There are literally tens of thousands of WordPress plugins to allow you to add just about any functionality you can think of to your website.  Here is our Top 10 WordPress Plugin List for 2014.  We utilized these plugins with almost every website we develop:

Askimet:  Free for Personal Use

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Major features in Akismet include:

• Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
• Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
• URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
• Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
• A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

Block Bad Queries: Free

Block Bad Queries (BBQ)is a simple script that protects your website against malicious URL requests. BBQ checks all incoming traffic and quietly blocks bad requests containing nasty stuff. This is a simple yet solid solution that works great for sites where .htaccess is not available. The BBQ script is available as a plugin for WordPress or standalone script for any PHP-powered website.

Please note:  If you are hosting a a premium WordPress host such as WP Engine, you do not need this plugin because they already protect against malicious URL requests.

Social Media Widget:  Free

The Social Media Widget is a simple sidebar widget that allows users to input their social media website profile URLs and other subscription options to show an icon on the sidebar to that social media site and more that open up in a separate browser window.

WordPress SEO by Yoast: Free

WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO,  but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this WordPress SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.

Contact Form 7:  Free

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

W3 Total Cache: Free

The only WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework; designed to improve user experience and page speed.

Please note:  If you are hosting a a premium WordPress host such as WP Engine, you do not need this plugin.  In fact, they don’t allow this plugin because they handle the cache for you.

WP Smush.It: Free

Smush.it offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG meta data) automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress.

Use Any Font

* Quick and easy to setup. No css or any rocket science knowledge needed.
* Support all major browsers including IE 6+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IOS, Andriod, Opera and more.
* Font conversion within the plugin interface. You just need to upload ttf font, other required font types are generated automatically.
* Multiple fonts can be used.
* Faster load time as your fonts are stored on your own server.
* Quick font assign interface. You can select pre defined html tags or assign it to custom css.

Foo Gallery:  Free

Foo Gallery allows for better image and video gallery management within WordPress. Built to be simple for users and highly flexible for developers.

Essential Grid

Essential Grid is a premium plugin for WordPress that allows you to display various content formats in a highly customizable grid. Possible applications range from portfolios, blogs, galleries, WooCommerce shops, price tables, services, product sliders, testimonials and anything else you can imagine.