subject: Wordpress For Business: 5 Essential Plugins For Your Wordpress Site [print this page] A plugin is a piece of software that can extend the out of the box function of WordPress to do just about anything you could want a website to do. Among the things plugins can do include beef up the search engine optimization power of your site, cut down on spam, give site security a boost, add social media capabilities to your site and more.
There are over 9,000 plugins available for download at WordPress.org now. To save you the time and hassle of finding the ones you'll need for your site, I've compiled a list of the plugins which I recommend for business sites/blogs in no particular order (oh, and all of the plugins listed here are free!)
1. Google XML Sitemaps As the name implies, this plugin generates an XML sitemap for your WordPress site. What's a sitemap you ask? It's a document that contains a lot of information about all the pages on your site and how they all link together. Sitemaps are very helpful when it comes to search engine optimization because they help the search engines index your site better. What Google XML sitemap does is automatically generate a sitemap whenever you put new content on your WordPress site and then notifies all the major search engines.
2. All In One SEO PackIf you're going to have a website, you might as well optimize it as much as possible so you get higher rankings in the search engines. The All In One SEO Pack plugin takes care of a lot of the optimization work for you out of the box. All you do is install it and it starts working to send some SEO-love to your site. And if you're an a more advanced SEO type, you can tweak the plugin to your liking. (Note: If you're using the Thesis Theme for your site, you don't need this plugin because Thesis has all this search engine optimizing goodness already cooked into it).
3. Contact Form 7Chances are on a business website you're going to want a way for visitors to contact you with questions, comments, etc. Using Contact Form 7 you can easily customize a form to place on your website. Simply drag and drop fields to create a form with the fields you want. Then copy a short code onto the page of your site where you want the form to appear and you're done! It doesn't get any easier than that.
4. Google Analytics for WordPressWhen you have a website, it's critical to get data about site visitors - how they found your site, what they do when they get to your site, etc. Google Analytics is a free program that lets you collect data about site visitors and run reports that will give you more information about your site then you'll know what to do with. This plugin makes setting up Google Analytics on your WordPress site a snap. All you need to do after installing the plugin is enter your Analytics account ID and you're done. From that point forward all current and future pages on your site will automatically have the Analytics code on them so you can collect the data you need about site visits.
5. WordPress Mobile EditionThe number of people using smartphones like the iPhone, Android, etc. is exploding. And a lot of those people are using their phones to browse the web. If your website is not mobile browser friendly, you could very well be losing out on some business. With WordPress Mobile Edition, that won't be an issue. This plugin will determine if someone is coming to your site using a mobile browser and if they are will give your WordPress site a mobile-friendly interface making it easy to navigate with a phone.
