Jetpack

Looking to increase speed of your website or optimize your images? Also want to protect it from unwanted ailments like hackers? Want to check how many people visit your website and other traffic-related stats? Jetpack is answer and it is free WP plugin.

Jetpack makes it easy to manage your WP sites and helps you build more powerful online presence with its tools like Publicize, Sharing, Related Posts as well as Enhanced Distribution. The plugin is always updated so to monitor downtime of your website and safeguard against unauthorised attacks. It optimizes images automatically and thus saves web hosting costs plus speed up images.

At Slinky Web Hosting, they highly recommend Jetpack to their clients as it complements their hosting services and enhances overall website performance and security.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the most popular free plugins that allows you to sell anything, effortlessly. The plugin is built to integrate with WordPress seamlessly, offers endless flexibility, access to hundreds of premium and free WooCommerce extensions essentially extending its functionality. The WordPress plugin allows you to sell both physical and digital products, in all shapes and sizes, offer multiple product configurations, instant digital downloads or even affiliate products from online marketplaces and ship wherever you like around the world. You can also use WooCommerce on non-ecommerce websites such as holiday websites like Bali Villas where you wish to display items or properties and manage it through the WordPress backend.

Google XML Sitemaps

A sitemap is one of the most important elements that you can install on your website to make it more search engine friendly. As a webmaster, you need a sitemap to help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask index your websites pages for better results. The plugin is easy to install and activate, and you don’t even have to change anything, but if you like you can change the settings. Actually, it is very hard to manually index any page or post, which makes this plugin beneficial for SEO. You can also set the time that you would like search engines to crawl your websites posts, author pages, static page, archives and tags, and you can even exclude the pages or posts you don’t want indexed using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

Akismet Plugin

akismet

Akismet is an anti-spam WordPress Plugin and a favourite with all digital agencies as it checks all the comments you get with their very own web service and filters out spam comments. The Plugin provide status history of each comment for the webmaster’s review. Any hidden or misleading URLs are also revealed in comment body. This Plugin automates filtering comments that appears to be spam while checking through all the comments received.

The personal blogs can use Akismet free API Key and the commercial and business site need to opt paid subscription. Now you can block the spam out of your website and thus save your disk space and enhance your website speed.

Read more here > Akismet

BuddyPress

When you think of a community plugin you want to use for your WP website that will take your blog beyond, look no more further – here comes BuddyPress. BuddyPress is a must when you are building a social network platform or community site with User Groups, Profile for Members, Messaging or even Notification or activity streams as well as Friendship connections. It is an open source social networking software package.

The BuddyPress components are well-build  to directly integrate with your blog theme and widgets and plugins. It uses same MySQL and PHP platform. So it is best designed to be used for Companies, Sports teams, Schools or colleges to start their very own communication platform.

WP Super Cache

The plugin helps generate static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress website. After the file is generated, the web server then serves that file rather than processing the comparatively more expensive and heavier PHP scripts as is common with WordPress. The WP Super Cache plugin will serve at least 99% of your web visitors the static cached files, and in addition it will do ‘garbage collection’  which essentially is the act of cleaning up out of date, stale cached files that have no more value after their expiry date.

WP Maintenance Mode

The WP Maintenance Mode plugin allows you to add a maintenance page to your blog or website, which lets your web visitors know that the site is down for maintenance. You can also add a coming soon page when the website is under development, but with admin rights you have full access to the blog including the front end. When you activate the plugin, only registered users with enough admin rights can view the front end. In addition, you can also include a countdown timer on WordPress WP Maintenance Mode letting visitors know when it will be up and running again.

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to view your google analytics within the dashboard, eliminating the need to edit the template code in order to start logging. The plugin has a number of widgets that enable data display on the admin panel as well as your WordPress blog. The other Google Analyticator features include a widget that you can use to display visitor stats on the front end, event tracking, instant installation, language localisation, out-bound link tracking among others.

Sucuri Security

The Sucuri WordPress security plugin helps enhance your WordPress website security. It comes with some key security features that include security activity audit, remote malware scanning, file integrity monitoring, post hack security actions among others. With Sucuri, any change occurring on a website can be a security threat, and for that reason it is recorded, and this helps the website administrator to keep an eye on the various activities occurring within the site’s environment; things like who logged in from what IP address, what changes they made among etc are monitored by Sucuri WordPress security plugin .

Video Gallery

This plugins was specially designed and created to help display videos from YouTube and Vimeo in unusually splendid ways. You can choose any of the 5 good looking views that suit your website’s style and theme.  One of the popular views allows you to show videos with its description or relevant information in an elegant pop up, or a slide, and the second popular view presents videos in a lightbox. In addition, you can make all kinds of updates to the videos, add more videos to your Video Gallery and include HTML enabled descriptions.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress is technically ready for SEO, but this does not mean that you can’t improve it a little more. The Yoast SEO plugin, formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast is a plugin created from the ground up and carefully designed to improve your websites’ SEO prospects.

Some of its key benefits include forcing you to choose a post or page keyword, which consequently enhances your SEO prospects. In addition, it uses a snippet preview mode allowing you to preview the rendering of a page or post and you get to see what it will look like on the search engine results pages, and it also helps you check the simple things that you are likely to forget such as meta description, focus keyword, subheadings among others.

When used correctly, the Yoast Seo plugin will ensure you post the kind of content search engines love.