Extensive WordPress plugins listing for business websites. If you are in business and want to get the most from WordPress revue this list. I have tried and tested these plugins and if I find a better plugin I will update this list regularly. Bookmark this page as a reference and return when you need a plugin solution.
by Tony Cosentino (twitter: @thewordpressguy) inspired by Nancy Georges (twitter: @NancyGeorges) from www.magnoliasolutions.blogspot.com
Feel free to email me or send a comment with your favourite plugins or themes for that matter and I will add them in and link to your website.
Admin tools
add a tech support panel to the user admin area so if a client needs WordPress help they can fill in a request form right from the admin panel that emails tech support directly.
Keeps an eye on all the links you mention in the website and tells you if any have stopped working.
Make it easy for your visitors to print out you webpages and turn them into pdfs too. See bottom of this page for a demo.
WordPress.com Stats
Great for seeing live stats of visitors virtually as they happen. All from within your WordPress login page.
Need to register with WordPress.com to get an API key to use it (easy).
Hyper Cache
A standard WordPress site can handle about 14 different request to view it’s pages per second. Which is normally adequate. If you happen to end up on a huge website with links to your website this may not be enough. Hyper cache can receive 130 pages requests per second.
There are a number of plugins that improve this option. Also webshosting companies also help with this issue. For example mediatemple.net hosting(their GridServer product) is built to take a surge in traffic.
Great post on all of the major cache plugins and how well they really perform is at www.tutorial9.net/web-tutorials/wordpress-caching-whats-the-best-caching-plugin/
Smart 404
Instead of quickly giving up when a visitor reaches content that doesn’t exist, make an effort to guess what they were after in the first place. This plugin will perform a search of your posts, pages, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested URL. If there’s a match, redirect to that content instead of showing the error. Great for when you change post link occasionally or relocate wordpress to a new folder on your server.
Contact forms
CformsII
If you want beautiful looking contact forms this is the one for you. Lots of options and multiple forms can be on one page. The format the completed forms arrives in is the best I’ve seen to date. Very easy to design customised forms. Provides Q&A spam protection or Captcha. I don’t use captcha as it discriminates against the sight impaired.
Gravity Forms – www.gravityforms.com ($US39)
The professional option for online forms. A paif plugin = real ongoing support. These forms are ideal for business use. For example you can send the completed for to a specific person in your team depending on the nature of the form, eg Tech Support, Sales, Accounts. View and edit forms previously submitted. The list is long of features that free forms just don’t do.
Visitor Contact Forms (recommended by Sam Mutimer: twitter: @sammutimer website: www.thinktankmedia.com.au/blog/ )
This is a very simple method to have add a contact button that pops up a window with a contact form but also shows your contact information. Required installing the plugin called ‘Visitor Contact Forms’ (see link above) and registering with www.visitorcontact.com which is where you enter your details. You can use the button like the red one on the left of this page or have a separate contact page created by the plugin.
Presentation
WordPress SEO Table Of Contents – http://hackadelic.com/solutions/wordpress/seo-table-of-contents (shown to me by the master of good presentation Tim Noonan of Vocal Branding Australia.)
I used this at the top of this post to automatically creat a table of contents that links to any content with a heading style. To make it work well you also need to install the MYCSS plugin to control how it looks. See MYCSS below for more info.
MYCSS – http://www.channel-ai.com/blog/plugins/mycss/
Useful if you want to apply your own CSS changes to your website that won’t be overwritten by a new theme or wordpress update. After installing the plugin I need to upload a blank file called my.css to the mycss folder in the plugin area and then I was able to edit that blank file from the admin area. The MyCSS menu item is under the Appearance menu on the left hand side.
Post Teaser
This controls how much information is displayed on the post page for each post as a preview before people go and read the whole post. It saves a lot of time for the viewer as they don’t have to scroll down through every post to find the one they want. You can set how many words are displayed in the summary and show estimated reading time even. I suggest using 100 words for the preview.
Comments
Intense Debate – www.intensedebate.com
I can’t speak highly enough of this option. See comment area below for live example. If you want to take you comments to the next level install this plugin and sign up with Intense Debate. Comments are backed up offline and can easily be re-imported if your website dies for any reason and needs rebuilding, great anti-spam and general options and look are the best in this class.
WordPress Thread Comment (inspired by Heidi Allen from Heidi Allen Online or @dreamingspires on twitter)
Allows visitors to comment on each others comments which creates more conversation online and a mini community around your post
Shopping
As tempting as free online shopping plugins seem I highly recommending paying for a plugin in this category. After all it is going to pay for itself in a very short period of time if it produces good results which paid plugins do.
WP eStore ($US35)
Great online store option. Lots of short video tutorials on how to do any task. Looks great and lets you add products to posts and pages specifically.
WP Shopp – www.shopplugin.net ($US55)
The real deal in online shopping plugins. Originally created out of frustration with WP eCommerce plugin which is the most well known and probably the first shopping cart plugin. If you want to get great support, lots of features, and the ability to extend you online shop this is the solution.
Backup
WP-DB-Backup
Recommended by Andrew Blanda (twitter: @AndrewBlanda website: www.andrewblanda.com)
Have your WordPress database backup emailed to you for safe keeping on a regular basis or download it via your browser.
Andrew knows first hand what it feels like when your website vanishes. Take a leaf from his book and make a backup regularly.
After installation you can access it via the ‘Tools’ menu.
Google Analyticator
Talks to google to keep track of visitor stats.
Need to register with www.google.com/analytics/ to get an API key to use it (easy).
Google XML Sitemaps
Keeps google in the loop for new content on your page.
Needs registration with www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ (relatively easy process).
Images
Faster Image Insert
Add easier interface for adding photos and image galleries that look professional.
NextGEN Gallery
Add groups of images with a great looking gallery that has a lot of options to control how it is presented.
If you want to use stock images from Crestock who have a reasonable collection of quality images this is a way to use them for free and there is a small logo from Crestock but it’s not excessive and it’s free. Can take a little fiddling to get it to look right but for the cost it’s worth it. All the images in this post are from this plugin.
Social Media
Tweetmeme Retweet Button
A great way to allow people to retweet your posts and also display how many retweets there were. www.tweetmeme.com collects all of the retweet data too which will bring more traffic to your website also.
Twitter Goodies
As used in my sidebar this is a very customisable widget to display your tweets and it puts you twitter avatar on the top which is a nice touch. Adjust the colours to match your website easily.
Twitter Tools
I use this tool specifically automatically generate a weekly post with the tweets from that week. It allows visitors to catch up on your hints and tips tweeted throughout the week. It also keeps a weekly post coming out of your website weekly which is great for staying on the google search radar.
TweetPress
Use this with iPhone apps: twittelator pro or tweetie 2 that support tweetpress to post images to your website from twitter instead of the other twitter photo
sites (eg twitpic). That way when someone looks at your photo from twitter they come to your website which is far more useful than going to a picture hosting website.
Sociable
Add all those nice icons to the bottom of a post so that people who like it can easily post it to twitter, delicious, Facebook, digg etc
Writing
After the Deadline
A great plugin that checks spelling and grammar and works really well. I was a little horrified when I used it to check this post and found a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. You need to register and get an API key but it is very painless to do.
TinyMCE Advanced
If you are frustrated when writing posts about the lack of control you have over the styling and little things like adding extra line spaces in a post then this is the plugin you have been searching for. It takes writing content to the next level of control. Also inserts tables for those that are tired of hand coding html tables in every time they want to arrange some images or content neatly in a table.
Managing Posts
WP Archive-Sitemap Generator
When you have created a lot of great posts it becomes difficult for your readers to be able to find them easily.
The strategy I believe to help this situation without changing the look of your current blog area
- Install the plugin
- Add a new page as a submenu to your blog page labelled for example “blog sitemap”
- add the code
<!--wp-archive-sitemap-generator-->to the page
Forum
Simple:Press
is a feature rich forum plugin for WordPress. It fully integrates into your WP based site utilising the same user records and database and displaying on a single WP page. It is fully customisable and comes with a number of skins and sets of icons to get you started. Current users have shown it to be fully scalable whether your site membership numbers the tens or the thousands.
Membership sites
Wishlist Member (Around $US97)
Unbeatable for membership sites. This plugin has a huge community behind it and lots of training videos on how to do everything. This is the only membership plugin in my opinion worth using. Please note the link to this plugin is an affiliate link so I will earn a commission if you purchase the plugin.