Unlocking the true power of WordPress comes with using an intelligent combination of plugins together to make a killer website functionality. While the graphical design and look and feel of your WordPress website is important, the function is controlled by plugins. Plugins let you do all sorts of things with your WordPress site that normally would require hours and hours of custom coding. Due to the open-source nature of WordPress, many developers write incredibly productive and helpful plugins often for FREE for people to install on their websites and extend the functionality.
Using a combination of plugins, you can get a website to do almost anything you want. There are so many developers supporting WordPress and creating new plugins daily that the market is huge for them. Again, all comes down to the open-source nature of WordPress making this possible.
So without further ado, here are 5 of my favorite incredibly useful FREE WordPress plugins that you can install on your website and extend the functionality.
1) Fast Secure Contact Form—This plugin has recently released a major update to an already incredible piece of software. As of writing this article, this plugin has been downloaded an astonishing 4 million + times. Fast Secure Contact Form allows you to create as many forms as you would like with almost any option you can think of. I use this plugin often to create separate sidebar and contact page forms. Other highlights of this plugin include an auto-responder (with HTML), a redirect function (good for Google Analytics conversion tracking), Askimet spam integration (to block spam form submissions), and easy CSS styling.
2) Yoast SEO—This plugin allows your website to take SEO seriously and for the author of the website to easily target keywords on each page or post. Yoast is known as an SEO expert especially in the WordPress arena and his free plugin does a lot of the heavy lifting SEO wise on your website. Highlights include the ability to intelligently auto generate meta titles and descriptions for every page, generate powerful sitemaps for the various content on your site, and block certain pages and taxonomies from being crawled by Google search engines.
3) Yet Another Related Posts Plugin—This plugin embeds related posts and pages at the bottom of your content to encourage readers to read other articles on your site. Setting this plugin to also pull thumbnails from each post create a very visually appealing look and entices readers to read other articles on your site. Highlights include the ability to set the logic behind what posts/pages are recommended; extremely powerful.
4) Portfolio Slideshow—This plugin allows the author to create amazing slideshows with easy shortcodes and only having to upload images to the page they want the slideshow on. Basically, you just have to upload photos to the page you want to show the slideshow; no need to insert them into the page. Then use the portfolio_slideshow shortcode and you have a gorgeous slideshow. Highlights include the ability to control virtually every aspect of the slideshow including look and feel, styling, size, transition type and time, and many other customizations.
5) Easy Columns—This plugin makes creating balanced columns in any content area super easy and convenient. Basically, you just need to know if you want to divide the content into halves, thirds, or any other combo you can think of, and the plugin inserts the simple shortcode. Then you just have to place the content into the shortcode and boom, the plugin makes perfectly aligned columns. The days of ugly and sticky <table> code are over; this is way easier and much much cleaner.
