I'm always getting asked what plugins and tools I recommend for websites, so I've decided to put together a definitive list of tools that you should be using in your blog.
As we know technology changes pretty fast so i will be regularly adding to and updating this list which will include WordPress plugins as well as email marketing and other tools. Most of the plugins featured on here are free and can be installed pretty quickly on to your site however a few will have cost attached to them.
Essential WordPress Plugins
WordPress SEO by Yoast (free)
WordPress SEO by Yoast is the complete Search Engine Optimisation plugin from Joost De Valk. This cheeky little plugin is great as it helps you optimize your page content, image titles, meta descriptions (and loads more). You can also create XML sitemaps, along with a pile of other tricks. WordPress SEO also includes Robots Meta configuration, breadcrumbs, permalink cleanup, canonical link element support, and optimized post titles. This is in my opinion currently the best SEO plugin for WordPress there is.
These are the plugins at you should have on all of your WordPress websites to help improve performance as well as improve your rankings on Google.
Sociable (free)
Sociable is a sharing plugin for social media sites. It makes it dead easy to share your content on a different social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Google+, and Delicious, as well LinkedIn and others. To date its been downloaded more than 2 million times, meaning ist one of the most popular social plugins around. In fact this site uses it so why not try it out and share this post by clicking on one of the social media icons at the bottom of this page.
Contact Form 7 (free)
Contact Form 7 lets you manage loads of different contact forms on your website from one place, each one being fully customisable and it can even have different email addresses. It can be used in conjunction with CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering which means its harder for non humans to spam you. Creating forms is done with simple markup, and the plugin comes with full instructions making it dead easy to use.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (free)
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin produces a list of related posts or pages relevant to the one you are reading. It’s a great way to keep people on your site for longer. One of the great things about this plugin is that you can control the way related posts are displayed on your site.
WPtouch (free)
If you don't want to invest in a custom mobile version for your site then WPtouch will create a simple, elegant, mobile theme for your website. It works on Iphone, Ipad, Android, and other popular mobile devices, and you can install it and have it working n a few minutes. It is fully customisable and your visitors also have the ability to view the full site instead.