WordPress is an amazing and powerful content management system (CMS) that offers a lot of customization and can be used to make almost any type of website.  Although WordPress is very powerful, it can be very overwhelming to the average user.  Fortunately, it has tons of plugins that make very difficult functionalities much easier to implement for the less tech savvy users. The problem is that there are so many different plugins in the WordPress.org market, that it makes a difficult to pick the right ones.  So we have compiled a list of our 10 favorite wordpress plugins to help the average user get their blog up and running.

The Top 10 WordPress Plugins

1) Akismet

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Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Major features in Akismet include: Automatically checking all comments and filtering out the ones that look like spam. Each comment has a status history, so you can see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator. URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links. Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user. A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

2) WordPress SEO

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Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. WordPress is already technically quite a good platform for SEO, but this doesn’t mean you can’t make it even better. This plugin is written from the ground up by Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this WordPress SEO Plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, it first and foremost helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.

3) Contact Form 7

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Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. Contact Form 7 also has a translator that translate over 60 languages.

4) bbPress

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bbPress is forum software. It is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, web standards, and speed. We’re keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system. bbPress is also available in Català, English (Australia), Español, Italiano, Nederlands, and 7 other languages.

5) Jetpack

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Jetpack- Jeetpack adds powerful features including: Customization, done with Custom CSS, Carousels, spam-free Contact Forms, Sidebar Widgets, Infinite Scroll, and Tiled Galleries. Mobile theme, which is an instant and customizable lightweight responsive theme designed for phones and tablets. And content and performance tools.

6) Google Site Map

Google-Crawling-Sitemaps1With the Google Sitemap Plugin you can create and add a Sitemap file to Google Webmaster Tools, and get the info about your site in Google Webmaster Tools. This plugin generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

7) WordPress Importer

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WordPress Importer will import the following content from a WordPress export file: Posts, pages and other custom post types, comments, custom fields and post meta, categories, tags and terms from custom taxonomies and authors. It is also available in Azərbaycan dili, Bahasa Indonesia, Bosanski, Català, Deutsch, and 25 other languages.

8) Wordfence Security

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Wordfence is by far the best security plugin for wordpress.  Wordfence is a free enterprise class security plugin that includes a firewall, anti-virus scanning, cellphone sign-in (two factor authentication), malicious URL scanning and live traffic including crawlers. Wordfence is the only WordPress security plugin that can verify and repair your core, theme and plugin files, even if you don’t have backups.  The best part about this plugin is that it’s 100% free.

9) Meta Slider

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This is an easy to use WordPress slider plugin. It allows you to create SEO optimized responsive slideshows with Nivo Slider, Flex Slider, Coin Slider and Responsive Slides. Simply select images from your WordPress Media Library, drag and drop them into place, set slide captions, links and SEO fields all from one page. You can choose from 4 different slideshow types (Flex Slider, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides & Coin Slider) and use the provided shortcode or template include to easily embed slideshows in your blog.

10) WooCommerce

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WooCommerce is a powerful, extendable eCommerce plugin. It transforms your WordPress website into a thoroughbred eCommerce store. WooCommerce is built by WooThemes who also offer premium eCommerce themes and extensions to further enhance your shopfront. You can lee an eye on all performance and statistics from the WordPress dashboard or go to the reports section to view stats in more detail. Payment Gateways and Shipping Methods are important to any store – WooCommerce comes bundled with several popular options including PayPal Standard (for accepting Credit Card and PayPal account payments), Simplify Commerce (a US gateway backed by Mastercard), BACS, Cash on Delivery, flat rate shipping, and free shipping.

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