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The popularity of WordPress continues to grow and I’m sure a lot of you use it on multiple websites.

One of the things that makes WordPress so powerful is the amazing number of plugins.

They turn what is a fairly normal blogging platform into the Swiss army knife of websites – there’s a plugin that will allow you to do almost anything.

Due to the number of plugins available, there are many that have the same functions. To help you decide which you should use, I have put together a list of the most powerful and functional WordPress plugins.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is an incredibly powerful plugin and one of my favorite SEO plugins so far. Its features beat those of Platinum SEO and All in One SEO hands down. In fact, to get the same sort of functionality out of All in One SEO, you would need to upgrade to the pro version.

This plugin will create xml sitemaps and connect to Google and Bing Webmaster tools. There are also powerful import/export features if you want to migrate at any point, which is handy for users wanting to switch from All in One SEO.

W3 Total Cache

When fully configured, this plugin can improve the load time of your site by up to 10 times. Whether you have shared hosting or VPS, you will see a great benefit here because you will also potentially save around 80 percent of your bandwidth through http compression, page caching and minifying CSS files. You will find this to be more effective in the long run than WP Super cache, although it is slightly more complicated to set up.

WordPress Ping Optimizer

Each time you update or publish a post, WordPress will notify a list of update services contained within the admin panel of WordPress (Settings > Writing). This is potentially a huge problem for those of us who make a lot of corrections and updates to posts. In these situations, the update services (or ping sites as they are sometimes called) will be continuously pinged which can result in being black-listed – something you would never want to happen. This plugin is the perfect solution as it enables you to limit excessive pinging.

TinyMCE Advanced

The visual editor (or WYSIWYG: What you see is what you get editor) in WordPress is the standard advanced version, which is fairly limited and can prove very annoying as it strips out paragraphing and line breaks. TinyMCE can stop these tags from being removed, making for a much easier and smoother writing process. TinyMCE also adds extra functionality to the visual editor with other options such as advanced image, advanced link, context menus, emotions and more.

WPtouch

This is one of the most popular and frequently downloaded plugins throughout the WordPress plugin world. It allows you to display a mobile website to any visitors who are using a mobile phone. This can vastly improve the usability of your website. There are also advanced options such as mobile advertisements and even a pro upgrade for those who want a wider range of features and themes.

Ultimate Coming Soon page

This plugin does what it says – it gives you the ability to put a splash page on your site when it’s not completed or is under construction. This allows you to continue building your site, but visitors will be unable to see any of the tweaks or changes you are making in the background. Instead they will see a coming soon page.

Broken Link Checker

Can you imagine how much time it would take to check a website for broken links? It would be a large task, even on a small website. This plugin takes the problem out of your hands by scanning for broken links. It goes even further by providing an interface that allows you to either edit all broken links or unlink them from just one page in the admin area. This is a huge time saver.

WP-DB Manager

I would be at a loss without this plugin. Not only does it manage your database by scheduling backups and e-mailing them to you, it also allows you to optimize and even repair your WordPress database – this can seriously improve the performance of your website.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Displaying related posts under your articles is extremely important if you want to lower bounce rates and keep people on your site. This plugin provides a lot of customization options to ensure only related articles are posted.

All plugins mentioned above are freely available from the WordPress plugin repository.

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John has worked behind the scenes on a number of websites, collaborating with writers, bloggers and a number of other professionals. For a more extensive resource on WordPress plugins visit: http://bestpluginsforwp.com/19-best-plugins-wordpress

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