Essential Plugins for Small Business Wordpress Websites

Wordpress might just be the most powerful website content management system in the world. It’s not that Wordpress can do everything – it can’t – it’s just that Wordpress allows someone with little or no technical talent (like me) to quickly and cheaply create websites that work. That benefit, along with excellent security and a huge community of developers creating free themes and plugins, makes Wordpress a great CMS.

The best part is that it’s completely open-source, meaning most of the good functions are free.

The basic Wordpress system, however, is still somewhat limited. In order to get the most out of a basic Wordpress installation, you need to install some plugins. Here’s a list of my favorites:

• One-click plugin updater. Install this plugin first. You can use the “install a plugin form a URL” feature this plugin comes with to install the rest of the plugins on this list in about 60 seconds. Right click each plugin name listed below, choose “copy link location,” switch tabs to your WP install, and paste the URL into the appropriate field.
• Gravity Forms – OK, so this plugin costs money. Trust me when I say it’s MUCH better than anything else you can find – you can add logic to forms, file uploads are a cinch, and you can route form results to different email addresses…and it’s really easy to use. Cforms looks like a clabbered together wreck compared to this slick plugin. If you don’t want to pay for a contact form plugin and you don’t require any complicated functions, then Contact Form 7 is A-OK.
• All-in-one SEO Pack. A handy SEO plugin, I like it for it’s simple structure. There are other SEO plugins worth having, but this is my personal favorite.
• Google XML Sitemap Generator. Build a new XML sitemap everytime you post, automatically, then automatically transmit the new sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and MSN so your blog gets crawled ASAP. Amazing that this one is free, isn’t it?
• Subscribe to comments. If you have a blog, and you don’t have this plugin, I want you to do two things. First, go to bed without desert for being so ignorant (seriously, this is a must-have). Second, download and install this plugin.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags. Don’t know why it’s named after “Viper” and I don’t know who Viper is, but this plugin is great for embedding videos from YouTube, MetaCafe, and a dozen other smaller video sharing sites.
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrades. Upgrading Wordpress is necessary to maintain security, and it used to be a tedious, awful process (especially if you managed a dozen or more WP sites like I do). With this plugin, it takes about 2 minutes. When I first started using this about a year ago, it changed my life…(only a slight exagerration).
• Wordpress Automatic Backups. Set it and forget it. Email yourself a backup once a week, store it in your Gmail account, and don’t worry about losing data ever again.
• Feedburner Feedsmith. Google’s feedburner is a great way to manage and track your RSS feeds and it’s free. The concern is that Google might decide to charge for this feature some day, but I’m betting against that.

There are some other WP plugins that I like for very specific tasks, but these are the plugins that go on every Wordpress site that I create.

Special thanks to Advertising Copywriter Tony at TonyWrites.com for giving me this blog post idea in an email exchange a few weeks ago.