One of the fantastic things about WordPress is the staggering range of plugins available, many completely for free. Here I have rounded up a few great general plugins that can help enhance your WordPress site.
Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
Adds a text widget with a full wysiwyg editor so you can easily add fully styled text, galleries or media to your sidebar or other widget areas instead of just plain text.
Contact Form 7
Probably one of the very best contact form plugins out there. Fully customisable with loads of easy to use features. Simple use the drop down boxes to add the forms you want then drop it into any page using the shortcode provided. Can be paired up with Really Simple Captcha plugin to provide a simple, attractive captcha image to your form for added protection against spam.
Envira Gallery Lite
A great responsive gallery with plenty of features in the free version, plus the option to buy the premium version and get loads more features.
Regenerate Thumbnails
WordPress doesn’t automatically change thumbnail sizes of previously uploaded images if you change the sizes in settings. Use this great little plugin to quickly regenerate all the thumbnail at the new size and avoid having to upload them all again.
Limit Login Attempts
Protect your site from hackers with this simple plugin that locks the site if the wrong password is entered more than three times in a row.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
A brilliant, comprehensive, but easy to use plugin to help you improve your site in search rankings. Come with loads of other great features to including site maps and more.
Kebo Twitter Feed, display your lastest tweets really easily, without even having to create an Twitter app using the easy to use plugin. Just in stall, click the button and your are all good to go!
Crop from Top
Don’t like the way WordPress crops your images from the centre? Use this simple plugin to force it to ‘crop from the top’ of the image. Remember to regenerate your thumbnails after installing!
Column Shortcodes
Make your pages more interesting and attractive by breaking up text into columns. This plugin adds a simple button to the editor with a list of column shortcode that you can wrap around sections of text easily create fully responsive column layouts.
Do you have a favourite WordPress plugin that isn’t mentioned here? Is there something you wish there was a plugin for but haven’t found yet? Let me know your best and worst WordPress plugins.
