WordPress Plugins That I Use

In this page I give you a list of WordPress plugins that I am currently using (and a list that I have in the past but do not use anymore).

Let me tell you right from the beginning, that I am trying to keep the list of active plugins as short as possible. The reason for this is that plugins (especially the poorly coded ones) can slow down website speed and that I do not want.

1. All in One SEO Pack

This is the original SEO plugin for WordPress and I am pretty happy with it. In fact, I liked Yoast SEO plugin too, but for some reasons I could not handle its sitemaps properly. As a result, my organic traffic dropped significantly and I decided to switch back to All-in-One SEO plugin.

2. Contact Form 7

In my opinion, every website that respects its visitors, should give them an easy way for contacting its owner(s). For this I tested different contact form plugins for WordPress and finally picked the Contact Form 7 plugin.

Want to see how it looks like in real life? See my Contact Page. (Check also the post that I wrote about creating a beautiful contact page).

3. EWWW Image Optimizer

This is an important plugin – it will automatically optimizes all your images as you upload them to your blog. By using different compressing methods (lossy and lossless) it produces the smallest image file sizes.

It is very important because it unoptimized images can slow your site speed considerably. (By the way, here are some more tips and tricks to give your images a smaller size)

4. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate and maintain a specific XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.

As I wrote above, I struggled with the Yoast SEO sitemaps. I don’t know why – I did everything according to their instructions, yet my organic traffic fell off a cliff. That’s why I switched back to All-in-One SEO and Google XML Sitemaps

5. Pretty Link

This is a simple plugin which you can use to quickly and easily change a URL in multiple of places. It is especially useful when you have a big number of links that all point to the same sales page. Let’s assume you write a new sales page and want all those links to point to the new page.

That’s where the Pretty Link plugin comes in. Just one URL change and that’s it. Done!

Also, it allows you create links that look how you want.

6. Remove Query Strings From Static Resources

This plugin is purely to speed up my site. It’s recommended so I have it.

7. Sumome

I use Sumome for social sharing. For a long time I used Shareaholic for this but as it slowed my site down so I decided to remove it. Now I am testing Sumome. Until now I am pretty happy with it.

8. TinyMCA Advanced

This plugin extends and enhances the WordPress Visual Editor and gives me some important buttons that I need (like Font Sizes, Font Family, etc.)

9. WP Image Borders

I use this plugin purely for fun. Have you noticed, all images in my website have light grey borders (3px wide). The thing is, I use often various screenshots and I have found that image border gives it my articles a cleaner and more organized look. (Here’s how to add borders to your images)