WordPress literally has thousands of plugins, and finding the best plugins can be overwhelming. If you are a new designer, or even an experienced designer looking for plugins that you might have missed, this list can make your job much easier. These plugins range from SEO help to e-commerce building, but all of them provide invaluable services to your website with just a few clicks of a button. Whether you are designing a site for yourself or building a site for someone else, these plugins will make it easy to design a professional quality website.
Get Shopped
With Get Shopped, you can add a shopping cart to your website simply and easily. The program allows product purchases, service purchases, and digital downloads. The plugin even allows for coupons, multiple currencies, pre-orders, wholesale pricing, and more.
Extra features include shopping carts that work online or for mobile, extra-secure checkouts, and limited-time downloads. With this plugin, it is easy to make any company or service appear professional and secure.
Slide Deck 2
SlideDeck 2 is a plugin that makes it easy to place slideshows on your website. The slideshows are displayed in a content slider on your site. The slides don’t even have to be photos. They can include text, social media feeds, video, and syndicated content. The deck can support YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, and many other photo platforms. You can make the templates match your site design as well.
WP Touch
The world is going mobile, and the easiest way to do this is with WPTouch. This plugin gives your website a different theme when they access the site from a mobile device. Visitors are then able to interact with your site using a touch screen. This makes navigation easier and will increase your visitor numbers. Best features of this plugin are that it is easy to customize the template to match the feeling of your desktop design.
Jetpack
Jetpack is a plugin designed by WordPress itself. The goal of the plugin is to bring WordPress features to self-hosted websites. Some of the features include cloud-hosted stats, URL shorteners, social network commenting, included spelling and grammar checks, better photo galleries, and e-mail subscriptions. This is an all-in-one plugin that can easily boost site functionality in one swoop.
Price Table
Service-oriented websites will love the benefits that the Price Table plugin offers. The plugin is designed to create interactive pricing tables for service businesses. The plugin creates drag and drop tables that are easy to place into your existing content. Editing the price tables is as simple as entering the new data and there is no need to adjust the CSS or HTML involved, which makes it perfect for non-technical users. The plugin is also easy to adapt for multiple looks and themes that match the feeling and tone of your website.
WP DB Manager
One of the biggest problems with managing a website is the issue with the site corrupting. Any designer who has dealt with a corrupted website knows what a pain this is. The WP DB Manager plugin makes it easy to manage your website and back it up without fuss or difficulty. The plugin makes it easy to manage databases, restore uncorrupted files and databases, empty tables, backup the entire database, delete backup files, and other processes that are ordinarily difficult and time consuming. All WP designers will benefit from the use of this plugin. It will free your time for other, more income-driving tasks.
Headspace 2 SEO
Headspace 2 SEO gives space back into your brain because it takes care of the hard SEO work for you. You enter your page title and page description, and the SEO plugin automatically suggests other keywords that might fit into your topic. It also keeps track of other SEO aspects that are important to the success of your website.
Finding the right plugin does not have to be overwhelming. As a designer, it is important to keep track of all relevant plugins for your site. The right plugins can drastically improve the success of your blog or website, transforming your traffic and improving your business. Place some of these top WordPress plugins on your site and see if you don’t notice a difference in site quality and user traffic.
This post is a work of Simon, a digital renaissance man of many talents and an always curious part time adventurer of the cyberspace. You can read his musing about the digital era on his website. He currently works for the really cool email marketing system provider Jangomail.