WordPress is the most popular content management system on the planet. That means that there is a whole ecosystem (more than 26,000 of them) of plugins developed for the platform. Here are five that we recommend to our clients and use often.
Events Manager
Events Manager is a full-featured solution for managing events and locations, including online registration and payment, recurring events, searchable calendar and event lists, and more. It’s designed to be flexible, which makes it an easy process to customize the platform to our client’s needs. It’s also a very popular plugin, which means that there are many great resources within the development community to pull from.
Contact Form 7
This is a “bread and butter” plugin for every site we create. Almost every business needs a way for users to contact them, and this is the simplest, cleanest, most flexible contact form plugin out there. Contact forms from simple to complex are easy to create and edit, and work without a hitch. Combine this with Contact Form DB and either Contact Form 7 Honeypot or Contact Form 7 reCAPTCHA Extension and you have a fully secure Contact application where all submissions are stored in the database for easy retrieval.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is our favorite e-commerce WordPress plugin. It is powerful and flexible. It allows you to sell everything from shipped products to digital media to subscription services. It has a very customizable store-front, and a clean, user-friendly back-end product and sales management interface, including detailed sales reporting. It’s secure, promotes your store with built in SEO, and supports complex shipping and tax schemes.
The official Facebook WordPress plugin does everything you could hope for to integrate your site with the most popular social media site in the world. Everything from adding like/send buttons to your posts, to automatically posting your blog posts to Facebook is possible with this comprehensive plugin.
WordPress SEO
This plugin makes the complex field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as simple as installation and a few clicks. Though SEO has a number of different components which are all critical to helping people find your site, this plugin takes care of the structural basics with minimal effort, automatically creating search-engine friendly URLs and page titles, and allowing you to use key words to build those titles. We always recommend a full SEO package that includes both on and off page methods, but WordPress SEO is often our starting point with a new site.