WordPress Must Haves

WordPress is a versatile content management system. However, many users have discovered that straight out of the box it lacks the functionality of more robust systems. These “WordPress Ten Must Haves” will make your WordPress site better, more easily managed and more fun to watch.

With the addition of these 10 WordPress Must Have plug-ins, widgets and short codes, WordPress can do remarkable things. Please note that some of these links may result in our being compensated (at no extra cost to you), should you elect to purchase a product.

We suggest that you search for plug-ins at www.wordpress.org and compare the free products to the premium products. Sometimes the freebies offer remarkable quality. However, pay attention to their popularity and go to the support forum of the vendor’s sites before installing them on your site.

Here are the WordPress products we suggest you consider.

Yoast SEO for WordPress - Getting your pages visible in search engines such as Google or Bing is a challenge.  This handy plug-in built by Joost de Valk gives you ways to optimize WordPress pages, track their performance and tweak the minor usability issues users sometimes encounter. This one is free, but he also offers several premium products that are worth consideration.

 

Yoast SEO

Social Network Tabs for WordPress  Looking for a way to add Social Media to your page without having to take up a lot of space? This is it. Use either slide out or static tabs. This product is fast loading because each social network feed is only loaded when needed using AJAX. The included short codes will allow you to place it where you want it. It has 17 social networks and 49 feed options.

Social Network Tabs

WordPress has lagged behind in shopping cart development in the past, but all that has changed. Now you have choices that work and one that we recommend is WooCommerce. The litmus test on whether a shopping cart is worth your time is in the areas of REAL TIME shipping and Payment Gateways.

WooCommerce has real time shipping using these $50 extensions for Fedex, UPS & USPS.

It supports PayPal and a variety of other payment Gateways. Yes, you are going to pay extra for those plug-ins. You should want to because it means there’s a dedicated team behind keeping things working properly.

The basic WooCommerce package is free.

You may need some help getting it going, so contact us.

WooCommerce

Developers Only Section

On The Go SystemsYou stumbled upon my list because you were looking for some ways to add functionality to your WordPress sites. Here is a way to perform advanced queries, organize views and display content, without having to get into the underlying Model-View-Controller (MVC) code.

Check out ToolSet to get all the details.

wp-types has a wonderful collection of tutorials and movies,  a page of detailed installation instructions, and support forums.

You will have much better luck getting things going if you go through the tutorials that help you build a complete site. The concept of nested views by taxonomy is intuitive to programmers used to working with MVC, but seems backwards to those who grew up doing linear PHP coding.  You will probably want to bookmark this User Guide page because everything is so well organized.

There is even a plug-in coming to allow front end editing. CRED allows creating, editing and deleting content from front pages. CRED is currently in Beta and is available for Views clients. When CRED goes out of beta, it will be available for purchase as a separate member of the plugins family, or together with Views.

I can’t believe they don’t charge more for this product.  It dramatically outperforms stand alone plug-ins, while allow you to tailor your output to the precise way you need it to be done.

Attention Divi Users

If you like working in Elegant Theme’s Divi theme, but feel it could use a few refinements, take a look at Divi Booster.

Looking for specialty WordPress Plug-ins with great Support?

Try Formidable Pro

Need a good all around security moment?

Try WordFence

Looking for a good old fashion way to build coded sites?
Try Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and/or Pods.