At Bourn Creative we have a stable of various paid and free WordPress plugins that we regularly use on our clients’ sites, depending on needed website functionality.
Out of our collection of trusted WordPress plugins, there are five must have plugins that we use on pretty much every custom WordPress site we build — and this past week I shared these five plugins in a lighting talk I gave at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup.
WordPress Plugin #1: Akismet
Why We Recommend the Akismet WordPress Plugin:
- Created, managed, and owned by Automattic
- Save time with simple comment spam protection
- Low monthly fee (still free for personal bloggers)
- Download Akismet
WordPress Plugin #2: Limit Login Attempts
Why We Recommend the Limit Login Attempts WordPress Plugin:
- Simple and easy security for your WordPress login
- Automatically locks out an IP address after a specific number of failed login attempts
- Download Limit Login Attempts
WordPress Plugin #3: Google Analytics for WordPress
Why We Recommend the Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin:
- Easy integration with Google Analytics
- Includes download tracking and outbound tracking by default
- Advanced settings are available
- Download Google Analytics For WordPress
WordPress Plugin #4: Simple Page Ordering
Why We Recommend the Simple Page Ordering WordPress Plugin:
- Helps you manage your WordPress pages dashboard
- Drag and drop functionality makes it easy to keep your pages organized
- There is no effect on the front end of the site
- Download Simple Page Ordering
WordPress Plugin #5: WordPress SEO
Why We Recommend the WordPress SEO Plugin:
- The most comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin available
- Easily manage your SEO titles and meta descriptions
- XML sitemap support to alert search engines of site changes, new pages, and new posts
- OpenGraph data support for Facebook
- Google authorship support (so your photo shows up next to your links in the search results)
- Even more awesome settings and advanced configurations available!
- Download WordPress SEO
And that’s it!
With about 20,000 different WordPress plugins available, these are the five plugins we install on nearly every custom WordPress site we build.
A Note About the Sacramento WordPress Meetup
Whether you’re a WordPress developer, web designer, or WordPress user, at the beginning, intermediate, or advanced level, the Sacramento WordPress meetup group is something you should check out!
We love WordPress and we’d love to not only see the Sacramento WordPress community grow and thrive, but to meet more WordPress lovers and users in our area! The Sacramento WordPress meetup group meets the third Tuesday of every month at Hacker Lab — 1715 I Street, Sacramento.
About Brian Bourn
What is a Website Content Management System (CMS)?
5 Keys to Landing Pages that Clinch Conversions Every Time
WordCamp Las Vegas 2011: 48 Hours of Debauchery and WordPress
The StudioPress Showcase & Doughnuts = Balance for the Bourn Family
How to Use the WordPress Next Page Tag to Manage Long Content
There are designers that can make it pretty, coders that can make it work, and marketers that can make it sell — at 
Bourn Creative is a 
Jennifer you are so generous with your expertise. Thanks for sharing. I’m going to check right now if I’ve got limited log in attempts in my site.
Elaine – Limit Login Attempts is a great tool to help stop brute force attacks on the login screen. Just be sure to remember your password! Once right after I changed mine, I locked myself out of my site for a day!
We use those plug-ins too, excellent choices. Thanks for sharing, I would add how important it is to keep those plug ins updated as well.
Wendi – Tell me about it! Keeping your plugins up to date is a simple way to help protect your site from hackers. What most people don’t realize, is that when WordPress and plugins get updated, they publish what was wrong and what they fixed … basically telling the world the vulnerabilities with the older versions!
We recently built a new site for a client and needed to import the blog posts from their old blog. When we logged into their old site, we saw they were still using WordPress 2-something and a crazy old version of Genesis … plus, just about every plugin installed was out of date. It was scary to see that! That site was a hackers dream come true!
Ooh! I have a little work to do this week! Thanks for sharing this. Now, a question: I have All in One SEO. What is the benefit for using WordPress SEO instead? If I change, will I lose anything? Thanks!
Amy
Amy-All In One SEO is a good plugin as well and has been around for a very long time. If you decide to switch to Yoast’s WordPress SEO, it has a built in migration option within the interface. For other plugins and themes, we use the plugin SEO Data Transporter to migrate existing SEO data.
I like WordPress SEO for the built in XML sitemap functionality and a few of the advanced SEO features that just aren’t available in some of the other SEO plugins.
Omigosh…I SOOOO need some ‘order’ in my pages. I was just thinking about this the other day. So grateful for your expertise!
Thank you!
Kerry – This plugin is awesome! The drag and drop features make it so easy to reorganize your pages … and when you change your screen options to display all of your pages on one screen, it’s even easier!
Once again your blog proves to be among the most valuable one I read. I’m good on all these except Limit Login, and the Ordered Pages. Like Kerry, I need that! Thank you for sharing.
Thanks Lisa! Happy to hear it!
Oh, this is so valuable. I’ve never heard of Limit Login Attempts – but it’s such an excellent idea. And reading through the comments I realize I haven’t updated in a while. I didn’t realize how important this is as well. Thanks so much for the reminder :)
Miriam – Keeping your plugins updated is important in keeping you site secure and protected from hackers. Limit Login attempts will help too. The best WordPress hosts require this plugin on every website.
Thanks for highlighting Simple Page Ordering – just the thing I needed to help manage some sites.
It was only when I read your suggestion that I realised how awkward it can be to find pages in the standard layout.
regards
Gareth
Gareth – And under screen options you can change how many pages appear in your pages dashboard. I changed mine to 200, so all of my pages show up on one screen. Much easier!
Thank Jen and Brian
Great info – I’m using all this since you were the ones who did my site. I get so many compliments on the beauty and simplicity of my site which feels great but it feels even better to know I have the nuts and bolts behind the scene to really meet critical needs!
Thank you!
Kelli
Fabulous Kelli!
Wow, there is so much I just don’t know! Page ordering and updating sound like the places I need to start. Thanks so much for sharing your expertise, Jennifer!
Pamela – It will speed things up in your dashboard.
I’m so grateful for the advice, Jennifer. I have much to learn when it comes to WordPress and with so much ‘noise’ out there, it’s a relief to get information from a trusted source.
Warm wishes,
Mia xo
I’ve been lead to believe that plugins can slow a site down, I’m a complete newbie and of course take in a lot of advice at the start, not all got. From the comments these plugins seem good and I’m going to try them thx, Is there a way to tell what does and doesn’t slow your site down?
There is no such thing as too many plugins, but one bad plugin can be detrimental to a WordPress site. For testing performance of plugins you can use P3 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/p3-profiler/.
I have to disagree with you. Perhaps plugins that only run on the back end don’t slow your site down, but anything that runs on the front end CAN certainly affect page speed.
Anything that can be done without a plugin, should be done without a plugin. There’s no reason to have functions running that don’t produce anything.
Thanks for the input Valerie, but the statement “anything that can be done without a plugin, should be done without a plugin” is completely false. WordPress doesn’t care if custom code is coming from a function within a theme or from a plugin. The point is to evaluate and test each plugin to find out if it will negatively impact performance or not. Often, the source of performance issues on a site isn’t related to a plugin, but to the hosting account where the site lives, especially on low cost shared servers.
Not sure I agree with needing to order the pages. I do work on a few sites that have a *lot* of pages, but most sites I work on have perhaps a dozen to a dozen and a half. Perhaps on a giant site, but then, how often are you changing pages that it isn’t just as easy to go to the page and click the edit button or search for the page? Am I missing something? I try to keep plugins to a minimum.
Valerie – A lot of website owners, aren’t that web savvy. So the easier you can make the backend dashboard of the site the better …
We’ve had several clients call freaking out that part of their site was missing. But in reality, they just hadn’t logged in for a long time and forgot the pages dashboard was paginated and didn’t know where the other pages went.
We’ve also had older clients complain that the list of pages in the dashboard is overwhelming. So I usually set it to not be paginated and to order all the pages in type and in menu order.
Great! Downloading the Google Analytics one right now, thanks!
Thanks I am new in the WordPress world this help me a lot . I have installed all these plugins on my web site :)
That’s great to hear!
Hello Brian..
I use All in one SEO plugin for SEO..and I think it not make a site map automatically.Please suggest me a plugin for creating site map of by word press site..
Try http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bwp-google-xml-sitemaps/ or http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/.
Thanks you for the list. I have to ask if you run Google Adsense in your Blog, do you have to pay for akismet now.
According to their terms, my answer would be yes, as now the purpose of the blog is commercial in nature instead of personal.
Great list. Thanks. I would add “Redirection” to the list of WordPress plugins if you’re an affiliate marketer. This is just a simple plugin that cloaks your affiliate links and tracks clicks on them as well. This is a good thing to do to prevent from a lot of naked affiliate links being out there on your site. It will clean them up and it will look to Google a little bit less suspect. And, at the same time, it’s going to allow you to create a lot of different affiliate links for different posts on your site, different positions on different posts, so that you know always which link is being clicked, which product is being bought and which piece of content and which link of is actually doing the selling.
Redirection is a good plugin and is very powerful if used correctly. For creating simple outbound URLs for affiliate marketing or other off-site links I would recommend the plugin Simple URLs instead http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-urls/. It’s quite a bit easier to use and will accomplish the same result for most people.
WordPress SEO is really better than the one that I was using before. Really Thanks for the very useful post.
Hi Brian,
Nice post. I was wondering why you would the SEO plugin if Genesis has SEO built in?
The built in Genesis SEO settings and functionality are great for most sites, but with WordPress SEO you get a few more features than Genesis provides like XML sitemaps, open graph data, Google Authorship for business pages, ability to add content to your RSS feed, custom post type archive support and a few more. Plus, Yoast also has a few compatible, premium SEO plugins (Video SEO) that I have heard great things about.
Thank’s Brian! I finally understand why everyone is giving so much praise to this plugin (: