Here at Anant, we develop a fair number of websites. We have our Appleseed Portal, the platform and CMS we recommend for all of our clients for maximum flexibility. However, there are a still a number of projects which we develop on WordPress. Today, we wanted to give you some insight into the plugins we recommend go onto just about all of our client’s WordPress sites, and explain why.
1. SEO by Yoast
What is the WordPress SEO Plugin?
WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.
WordPress SEO by Yoast gives us flexibility from within the posting framework on WordPress to tweak all metadata, and assign SEO specific page and category titles to every single post. This is a great plugin to help you, or your clients rise through the ranks for your domain name, and for the keywords you’re trying to target. It’s simple to install, and best of all, it’s free!
2. WP Touch
What is WP Touch?
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from the most popular mobile web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices.
The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to touch mobile visitors, without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.
What is W3 Total Cache?
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
Benefits:
- At least 10x improvement in overall site performance (Grade A in YSlow or significantGoogle Page Speed improvements) when fully configured
- Improved conversion rates and “site performance” which affect your site’s rank on Google.com
- “Instant” subsequent page views: browser caching
- Optimized progressive render: pages start rendering quickly
- Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site; visitors view more pages
- Improved web server performance; sustain high traffic periods
- Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds
Page load times are important for SEO, as are a host of other aspects of website performance. This simple, free plugin will pimp your site performance, and give you a boost in the search engines thanks to reduced load times. There are a number of options to tweak the plugin to help your site perform exactly like you want it to, and with over 1.2 million downloads, this is one of the most popular performance-oriented plugins around.
4. Disqus WordPress Comments
What is Disqus?
Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.
The Disqus for WordPress plugin seamlessly integrates using the Disqus API and by syncing with WordPress comments.
Disqus Features
- Threaded comments and replies
- Notifications and reply by email
- Subscribe and RSS options
- Aggregated comments and social mentions
- Powerful moderation and admin tools
- Full spam filtering, blacklists and whitelists
- Support for Disqus community widgets
- Connected with a large discussion community
- Increased exposure and readership
