This post is a living document since I keep finding great plugins!

When I first mentioned “WordPress” a few years ago, most people didn’t know what I was talking about.  Now, with the growth of blogging and new media structures, WordPress has become so popular that large companies like National Geographic, Yahoo.com, Sony Playstation, Tech Crunch, and WSJ / Wall Street Journal use the content management system called WordPress.  But WordPress is pretty vanilla without what are called plugins.  Developed by a hugenormous developer community, plugins are third party addins that make WordPress flexible and the amazing platform it is today.  New plugins come out all the time, and I will talk about those I find as I come across them.  Other plugins have become a ‘standard’ of sorts to make a website search engine friendly, load more quickly, redirect pages to the right place, backup the databases to even backing up the entire website.

I started pinning some of these to Pinterest, but since the plugins pages don’t always have screenshots, those pages can’t be pinned.  So I want to share them here.

ALL IN ONE SEO

Even though WordPress is supposed to be optimized to be the best SEO platform available (and Everyone wants to be #1 on Google:), you still need some tools to help you along.  All in One SEO’s settings help you control the search engine optimization aspects of your every tag, page, and post, allowing you to override WordPress’ defaults.

Headspace2: update coming soon

Backup Buddy (my personal affiliate link)

I use Backup Buddy.  I use it on my websites and recommend it to my customers.  It is from iThemes and backs up your entire single or Multisite WordPress install. Including the widgets, themes and plugins.  You can also use it to migrate your site to another host.  This is a Must Have.  You can click above for my personal affiliate link or go to iThemes to purchase.

You can compare Backup Buddy to VaultPress HERE.

WP DB Backup

An on-demand backup of your WordPress database.  Note: this only backs up the database.  It does NOT back up the information stored on the server such as download files and pictures.  To do that you need another program, like Backup Buddy (and why Backup Buddy was developed).

Re-CAPTCHA

Re-captcha is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University, then acquired by Google.  Instead of generating nonsense words, re-CAPTCHA actually uses words, then, when enough people have purportedly spelled them correctly, Google uses the results for their OCR book digitizing, doing good for the World.