Contact Forms Related

  1. Contact form 7

By its very name, one can easily guess the functionality of Contact Form 7. It is the manager of multiple contact forms. Also one can modify the form and the mail stuff openly with easy mark-up. The form can support the well-known Ajax-powered submitting, Akismet spam filtering, CAPTCHA, etc.

Basically, Contact Form 7 is a WordPress plugin that provides one of the most practical, artless, and easiest contact forms designed for bloggers.  If you’ve lately filled out a contact form on a blog, then there’s a high certainty that it was designed by Contact Form 7. As mentioned earlier, Contact Form 7 works with Askimet, so that you can chill with guaranteed ease (the spammers are way far from abusing your contact form).

Photo Gallery Plugin

  1. NextGEN gallery

It is also an incredible WordPress gallery plugin that provides a controlling engine for uploading and handling galleries of pictures. It also has the ability to group upload, add/delete/sort images importing meta-data, group galleries into albums, edit thumbnails, and more.

Following are some of its awesome features:

  • Uploading galleries
  • Managing galleries which includes centralized gallery management
  • Easy management of thumbnails
  • Displays of a single image
  • Editing galleries
  • Editing of individual images
  • Intricate display of galleries
  • Adding watermarks
  • Albums creator
  • Multiple gallery viewing types
  • Slideshow of galleries.
  • Thumbnails of galleries.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

The reason is its usage by over 7 million downloads to date, this is the #1 WordPress plugin for its control, ease-of-use, and functionality for enhancing one’s posts for search engines. Basically, this plugin works as easy as the way it sounds: just download it, install the plugin, and its energies to work, and get your blog search engine optimized.  According to the frenzied customer reviews, this plugin should not be ignored.

WordPress SEO by Yoast is in one solution for SEO-related essentials regarding your WordPress site as it includes maintaining your SEO titles, XML sitemaps, meta descriptions, breadcrumbs, and a lot more.

Blog Statistics Related

  1. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

This is another hero of plugins of WP as it displays google analytics reports and some real-time statistics right in your Dashboard. It automatically attaches a tracking code to every single page of one’s website.

Following are some of its features:

  • Single widget to access all website statistics.
  • Displays real-time visitors, sources, and traffic details.
  • Different colors for your charts, maps, and graphs.
  • Displays top 24 pages, searches, and referrers.
  • It also has the option to display visitors on Geo Map by country.
  • Use of Pie Charts for showing Traffic.

Social Networking

  1. ShareThis

This plugin is very useful as it allows a blogger’s visitors to share his/her posts or pages with others. Another good thing is that it also supports e-mail and posting to social networks. It is a new social tool that allows you to leverage a sort of frictionless sharing without the idea of having to create one’s own custom solution. It puts your users in direct control over how they share content. Being placed on the right or left side of your content, ShareThis makes it easier for one’s users to share as well as delete and re-share to their social network timeline.

Following are some of its features:

  • Increased social activity
  • The choice to select from 120 social channels, including Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook,
  • Usage of multiple size buttons
  • Add counters
  • Sharing Bars
  • Access to greater insights by creating a Social Analytics Dashboard account
  • Daily sharing activity per registered domain
  • Detailed reports on the top shared URLs of your site(s)
  • Top social channel reports
  • Track Users' Copy and Paste Shares by CopyNShare feature
  • Easy sharing because of the hovering bar
  • Leverage Frictionless Sharing

Caching Plugin

  1. WP Super Cache 

This hit plugin is used for static caching in our one and only WordPress. It has the power to generate HTML files that are served directly by Apache without the processing of comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By the use of this plugin, you may speed up your WordPress blog considerably.

This plugin goes working with the generation of static .html files through your dynamic WordPress blog. After the generation of a .html file, your webserver will start to serve that file instead of processing the relatively heavier and affluent PHP scripts of WordPress.

The static .html files will then be delivered to the immense majority of your users, but because of the fact that any user's details are displayed in the comment form as you might have noticed after they leave a comment those requests are managed by the legacy caching engine. Static files are basically served to:

  • Users who are not signed in.
  • Users who are logged in but haven’t left a comment on your blog.
  • Users who are logged in but haven’t viewed those posts that are password protected.

A close to 99% of your visitors will actually be served with static .html files. Those users who don't see the static files have another answer waiting for them and that is that they will see different cached files may not be relatively very efficient but still they will give a better result than the uncached ones.

Super Cache is the tool and plugin you need that saves you in many situations even in the situations such as one in which your server is underpowered, or if you’re going through heavy traffic. Super Cached HTML files will be made readily available to users as they are quicker as compared to PHP-generated cached files.

E-Commerce

  1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is yet another dominant and strong plugin that helps you in selling anything. It is free and it features rich, widely supported, and used by many successful shops. Extra features and plugins can be expensive, but the simple features set should be enough for most of the small sites.

Following are some of its features:

Strength & flexibility
WooCommerce is known to be built using WordPress's best run-throughs on both the front as well as the back end which results in a competent, tough, and natural plugin.

Smart dashboard widgets & reports
WooCommerce has a tendency to keep a birds-eye view of sales and incoming reviews as well as general store performance, stock levels, and statistics right from the WordPress dashboard or go to the reports section to gain more details on the statistics.

Customizable
Your business is something you do a lot for and so should you do for your online store. One can choose one of the eCommerce themes made available by WooCommerce or build his/her own and give it a personal and exquisite touch by the use of the built-in shortcodes and widgets.

WooCommerce works with any theme of your liking, including the very basic WordPress themes. Additionally, if you're by any thoughts looking for a well-developed WordPress eCommerce theme that is specifically designed to be used with WooCommerce, you can always go and browse for them in the official WooCommerce Themes.

Additive Features
No matter what you are operating be it a superstore selling hundreds of products, or just a sole trader who is selling artifacts, WooCommerce has you all covered. Moreover, as you must be surely aware that Payment Gateways and Shipping Methods are a significant matter to any store, WooCommerce is the plugin that comes with all the necessary add-ons such as PayPal Standard, BACS as well as Cash on Delivery.

Comments Related

  1. Akismet

It is top-rated plus a gift from WordPress to you, but if for some unfortunate reason, you haven't activated it which requires adding an API key, you should definitely do it right now. Because every hour you are attacked by hordes of comments and Akismet does the trick to save you a lot of trouble. Let me answer some of the basic questions regarding Akismet.

What actually is Akismet?
It is basically a hosted web service that saves you quite a lot of time by automatically spotting comments and spam that are actually trackbacks. It's actually hosted on our servers, but we give you access to it through plugins and our of course our API.

How does it work?
Each and every time a new comment or trackback, or pingback is added to your site, it is also submitted to the Akismet web service which in turn runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns with a thumbs up or down in accordance with the result. Pretty easy for you as now you don't have to waste your precious time deliberately and tirelessly in just surfing through and deleting the spammy comments one by one from your blog.

How can Akismet help?
Serving the reason for its creation, Akismet is a powerful engine that monitors many of millions of blogs and forums. And at every precise moment, it discovers the methods and tricks used by malicious users in real-time. They have almost all the knowledge about the spambots and buffer sites of the spammers. Akismet uses this precise knowledge to warn you when a spammer, be it an automated one or human, tries to peek comments in your personal blog.

Therefore, I must say with my personal recommendation that if you notice a comment in your spam folder from someone you have no idea of or if it is from some website you’ve never seen the whereabouts of, just download this Akismet kid and it will tell you what exactly are you dealing with.

Blog Security

  1. Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is an open big class security and performance driving plugin that has the capability of making one’s site up to 50 times quicker and more secure. It is just like a complete WordPress security suite which includes all of it ranging from the firewall, malware scanning to strong password enforcement, plugin and theme file repairs, and real-time traffic overview. Just, awesome.

Following are some of its features:

  • Login from Cell-Phone
  • Scanning remotely
  • Blocking by country
  • Repairing of Files
  • Scanning frequently
  • Scanning scheduled
  • Support of Premium nature
  • Real-timeliness of Security Network
  • Scanning of Core, Plugin, and Theme Files
  • Blocking brute-force attacks
  • Scanning content for URLs that are bad in nature
  • Showing of hackers in real-time
  • Scanning for hundreds of backdoors
  • Firewall
  • Scanning for DNS changes
  • Blocking and Tracking of IP's
  • Scanning for acknowledged malware
  • Intelligently blocking networks
  • Blocking fake Googlebots
  • Viewing top content leeches
  • Monitoring disk space
  • View of crawlers in real-time
  • Enforcing strong passwords
  • Checking existing passwords

Blog Backup

  1. BackUpWordPress

According to your suiting, BackUpWordpress will back up all of your site stuff including your database as well as your files. It should come in handy so try it now and see how easy and useful it is.

Following are some of its features:

  • Simple use.
  • Low memory operation.
  • Management of numerous schedules.
  • Backup file email.
  • Supports both Linux & Windows.