August 26, 2014
The web development tool WordPress’s core was designed to be lightweight in order to provide maximum flexibility while reducing code bloat and so it may not offer much of the fancy functionalities. Plugins are added on top of the WordPress software to provide additional custom features and functions that users can utilize to build their websites according to their specific needs. We are currently in an era where social media services are very popular and are the biggest source of web traffic after search engines with Twitter, Facebook and Google+ being very popular. Although WordPress Plugins make it possible to have more content and functions on your WordPress-powered website or blog, they can actually slow down your website thus affecting its search engine ranking. A website or blog that loads quickly has a better search engine ranking and improves user experience more so in this age of social media. The answer is in having as few, well coded Plugins as possible; enough to meet your specific needs and properly integrate social media to your website. Below are eight of the powerful WordPress Plugins which you need in this era of social media and extensive.
Jetpack Publicize Automattic, the company behind WordPress has been adding features to its Jetpack Plugin which can be configured to implement just the features you want. Some of the features include sharing tool, Jetpack comments, notifications, WordPress.com statistics, Gravatar Hovercards, spelling and grammar among others. With Jetpack publicize, you can publish your content and post on your social media profile immediately and add personalized, optimized posts later.
JM Twitter Cards The JM twitter cards Plugins make it possible to send tweets that include media. You can include images and videos in your tweets making your twitter stream more like Facebook and Google+. With this Plugin, when you click on a tweet, its shows more information such as the title, twitter account and source link.
Tweet Old Posts This Plugin allows you to randomly Tweet blog posts with options such as adding HashTags and has easily customizable features. It is quite similar to the Plugin Tweetily and can be used to easily tweet out blog posts.
Sociable This free Plugin adds sharing buttons to your RSS feed, posts and pages and can be used with most of the popular social networks. It provides a number of icons that provide varied functionalities such as showing the number of shares Retweets and Likes for your article. You can customize the icons you want to include and how you want them to appear. Sociable can be included on your page automatically, but you can have control over where you want the buttons to appear whether on the home page, blog index, RSS feed or search results.
Shareholic Shareholic is a free Plugin compatible with Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, Pinterest and Google+ with a design that reduces clutter. It adds bookmarks to your RSS feeds, homepage, posts and pages and buttons for Facebook sharing and likes, Retweets, and Google+ which can be added to the posts. It has a share bar that is partly hidden and is fully visible when you hover over it. It is configurable and provides a lot of services totaling to about 86 services. It also allows you to add no follow tags to your links track your performance or set your links to open in a new tab as well as add images to your icons and hide the menu from mobile browsers. Shareholic also allows configuration of outputs for twitter by customizing the tweet message.
Thank Me Later This Plugin makes it possible to personalize thank you emails by customizing some fields making it easy to quickly send thank you emails to those who visit and comment or provide their email to your site or blog.
Akismet Akismet helps you deal with spam and the unwanted, annoying comments by filtering comments and allowing you to review those identified as spam. Used in the Contact form 7 Plugin it provides a very effective guard against spamming.
Really Simple Facebook Twitter Share Buttons This Plugin is a simple and quick social sharing tool that has rich functionality, supports buffer and makes sharing on social media trouble-free.