As one of the most popular blogging platforms and content management systems, WordPress is a “household name” for anyone familiar with web design. With its ease of use, customization and extensive features, WordPress is a one-stop solution for just about anything, thanks to the vast number of great WordPress plugins.

Ranging from simple to complex and free to commercial, WordPress plugins allow you to create a website that meets your every whim, want and need. Consequently, this plethora of plugins can cause you to spend a great deal of time determining which WP plugins will work for you. To help you narrow down you choices, here are some of the top WP plugins for building your business.

  1. 1-Click Retweet/Share/Like – This lets you add as  many as 8 social media buttons to your website  and to automatically  publish content to 30+ social networks.
  2. Akismet– Stop spam on your site by installing this all-important plugin.
  3. All in One SEO– This plugin makes SEO simple. Use it to post titles, keywords and descriptions in order to make your content more visible to the search engines. This is a must have for any WordPress site!
  4. Block Bad Queries-Also called BBQ , this plugin watches for long request strips, while protecting your site from hacker attacks.
  5. Cart66– Whether you are selling digital or actual products, this is a simple and effective e-commerce plugin. The plugin also allows you to manage orders, run promotions, tax by state, have custom fields for products, set multiple shipping options and numerous other e-commerce options.
  6. Contact Form 7– This makes contacting others easier and allows you to customize the form . The form works with AJAX powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and others.
  7. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator– Use this plugin with multi-level categories and page generations, provides permalink support, assists with list order, shows comments and many other features that will enhance your site.
  8. Digg Digg– If you are intent on using social media, (and let’s face it, who isn’t in the world of E-commerce?), then Digg Digg is a must-have plugin! With this plugin, you can add 20 top social networking sites and choose the size of the share buttons. You can also select the placement of the buttons, which is another reason this plugin helps build consumer interaction and awareness.
  9. Disqus– This offers a simple yet effective tool to view where site guest have commented on other sites while keeping up with your comment, allowing you to build social relationships as you interact on other people’s blogs or websites.
  10. GD LinkedIn Badge– This plugin adds the LinkedIn badge to your page.
  11. Gravity Forms– Use this plugin to create virtually any type of form you may have the need for. The plugin is simple to install and easy to use allowing you to create a long list of forms and placing the where you want on you site.
  12. LinkWithin– This plugin is great for helping your SEO as it displays up to 5 related blog post at the bottom of each post.
  13. Login LockDown– Want to know who is trying to access your site? This Plugin records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt then disables the login function if too many tries are made from that range, thus preventing forced password discovery.
  14. Maintenance Mode– Redesigning your WP theme? Use this plugin to notify guests with a splash screen that your site is under maintenance.
  15. My Review Plugin-This is touted as one of the best plugins available for one-click review. It includes star ratings, custom fields, automatic embedding, automatic plugin installation and three great themes.
  16. Permalinks moved permanently– This WP Plugin is ideal if you make frequent changes to the permalink structure as it looks for a similar slug rather than sending guests to a 404 page; it automatically generates a 301 error and a redirect request to a new location.
  17. Search Meter – Lets you see what people searched for on your site; you can see the stats for a single day, a week or a longer period. It will also tell you what searches were unsuccessful and what the most common search terms were.
  18. SEO friendly images– Use this plugin to update all images with ALT and TITLE attributes.
  19. SEO Slugs– Use this plugin to remove unneeded words such as articles (a, an, and the), conjunctions and prepositions from post titles making them search engine friendly.
  20. SEO Smart Links-Build SEO by linking keywords within your site. Google likes to see links on your site and this makes it easy. Making it especially user-friendly is the ability to customize how many links you want to appear on each page.
  21. SEO Ultimate – Similar to the All in One SEO pack, this gives you control over title tags, no-index, meta tags, slugs, canonical, autolinks, 404 errors, snippets , code inserter, permalink edits and much more.
  22. Share This– Believe it or not, there are more than 850,000 implementations of this plugin! This is likely because the Share This plugin networks with more than 50 social media sites, which means that getting the word out about your latest blog posts, product or sale is more far-reaching than ever!
  23. Shopper Press– With more than 20 ready-made themes, multiple languages, the ability to support both physical and digital goods, custom order forms and more than 20 payment gateways, Shopper Press allows you to designed your WP site to meet all your E-Commerce needs. The Shopper Press plugin costs $79.
  24. Shortcode Kid– This plugin allows you to include 100 different design elements. So you can post to your blog, spontaneously, with ready-made shortcodes. This is ideal if you want a great looking site, but lacks design and coding experience.
  25. Simple Image Link– Take any image plus text and make it into a widget. The SIL will allow you to add whatever image you want, easily, to your sidebar as well.
  26. Thank Me Later- Use the Thank Me Later plugin to send an e-mail to visitors who leave a comment. You can use the customize option to set up how quickly the note is sent, as well as create the note’s content.
  27. TwitterCounter-This WordPress plugin creates a button that can be placed in any widget that displays the number of Twitter followers you have next to the well-recognized Twitter bird.
  28. VaultPress– This is a paid plugin, but well worth the investment. With VaultPress you can back up your site on redundant servers and provide all the measures needed to keep your site up and running.
  29. V-slider– Have an image you want to add to your site? Want to make it more interesting? Then use the V-Slider to animate your header, posts or images.
  30. W3 Total Cache– Improve the speed of your page  by adding browser, page, objects and database caching as well as  content delivery networks making download speed quicker.
  31. Wbiya Toolbar– This is seen by many as a must-have plugin. With Wbiya, you can incorporate Twitter and Facebook activity and then share this on nearly any platform.
  32. WordPress Stats– Keep up with your most important performance stats through this simple plugin. The data can be viewed as a simple snapshot of visitor stats, top content and other information right on your WP admin dashboard.
  33. WP Security Scan– Use this plugin to check your site for weaknesses such as password strength, file permissions, database security, version, WP admin security and removes WP Generator META tag core code
  34. WP-ecommerce– Whether you use your site for selling products, services or collecting fees this is a great plugin. This is especially helpful for sites where you are focusing on bands and record labels, selling clothing, crafts, artwork, books, or media, have membership opportunities or need ticketing capabilities.
  35. XML Sitemap– Supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN, the plugin creates XML Sitemap compliant content for your site.
  36. TinyMCE Advanced – Ever need tables in your WordPress site? This plugin adds exactly that!

Update 1/29/2014: Another plugin worth considering is WP AJAX Form Pro. It’s a Form Builder for WordPress that allows you to build online responsive mobile friendly forms in a matter of minutes without any programming knowledge.

As one of the leading web platforms, WordPress can be used to create and maintain your company website. Its ease of use makes it perfect for anyone-regardless of your programming skills. If you are interested in building a company website or perhaps would like to add more features to your existing one, talk to the pros at Page Progressive. We would love talk with you and show you how to get the most out of your WordPress website!