As the most popular CMS on the market, WordPress is often the go-to blogging platform for businesses large and small.
Even if you’re more reliant on email or social media marketing to woo followers, you’ll need a solid foundation to build your site on.
The following plug-ins will take your WordPress site to the next level.
Shareaholic
In this day and age, the ability to share content with broader social media networks is the ticket to making your content really go the extra mile.
Shareaholic is the easiest way for webmasters to allow devout followers to give their friends a heads-up when it comes to relevant content that really matters.
Easy Testimonials
The collective clout of high-profile followers goes a long way in boosting SERPs standings for any site.
Making it effortless for important characters to leave a thumbs up in the form of a testimonial is what Easy Testimonials is all about. Be sure to include it in your site for solid feedback.
MarketPress eCommerce
If your blog isn’t based around e-commerce, you may have forgotten about the selling equation for various items. If that’s the case, you need something to handle petty online transactions.
Brought to you by the folks at WPMU Dev, MarketPress eCommerce is the best way to quickly take care of online sales.
Infinite SEO
Like it or not, it’s impossible to ignore the importance of SEO on the web. You’ve got to manage SEO in an intelligent manner to ensure that your blog isn’t lost to the hinterlands of Google.
Infinitive SEO ramps things up to another level in a way that SEO Ultimate can’t match.
iThemes Security
Once upon a time, iThemes Security was known as Better WP Security. Though the name has changed, iThemes Security is still one of the best all-in-one firewall modules you can find to protect your WordPress installation.
Whether you’re concerned about bogus log-in attempts or SQL injection attacks, iThemes is the ultimate solution.
Google Maps Ready
Location awareness brings a lot to any site and the blog posts that come with it. Google Maps Ready makes it easy to add custom maps featuring various landmarks and measurements to any post.
It’s free and works flawlessly with any kind of sidebar, post type or page you can imagine.
WP Fastest Cache
When you hit a certain level of traffic, it’s important to focus on speed and efficiency at the server level.
WP Fastest Cache will make your site snappier by compressing Javascript and CSS files as well as caching common HTTP requests. The net result will be shorter page load times and lower resource consumption.
Push It to the Limit
Obviously, there’s plenty of must-have plug-ins like Akismet that are so obvious that they don’t need to be mentioned.
Those bedrock add-ons should of course not be ignored. For the purposes of putting out the best blog for any given SMB, the plug-ins mentioned above are the way to go.