Is it a day that ends in ‘y’? Then there’s a good chance there’s a new update for WordPress available. You never know what issues WordPress will finally address (media replace… at last!), so this situation remains fluid, as they say in the news.
As of WordPress 4.1, these are our top favorite plugins of 2015.
Post Types Order
This plugin allows you to drag and drop posts into the order you wish. Such an easy and elegant solution! This is especially useful if your WordPress website is using custom post types; for example, a portfolio. With this plugin, you can quickly re-order your portfolio and save it. The alternative is changing the publishing dates in each individual post. Yuck.
WordPress SEO
This plugin bills itself as “the first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.” We’ve used at least a dozen SEO plugins over the years, and this one gets top ratings. It nags you to optimize your content on the fly by giving you a little message telling you if your content is not optimized for search engines, and it teaches you how to write better content, titles, and descriptions with its built-in content analysis function.
Buddypress
While Post Types Order falls at the simple end of the spectrum, Buddypress is on the complex end. We’ve been using Buddypress to build niche communities. The plugin lets users sign up and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups, and much more. It’s amazing!
An honorable mention goes to WP Mail SMTP. Not everyone has problems with email being delivered from forms on their WordPress websites, but if they do… it’s a huge headache. WP Mail SMTP can solve the problem. It allows you to use an SMTP server to send your WordPress emails instead of PHP’s mail() function. You can even use Gmail’s SMTP server to send your WordPress emails. We still wish all email delivery problems would disappear forever without our help, but failing that, we’ll try WP Mail SMTP.
Of course, if this discussion of SMTP settings and SEO and creating communities makes your head spin, don’t worry. You don’t need to learn everything there is to know about WordPress in order to use a WordPress website. That’s what we’re for. Contact I.T. Roadmap to help you get back to your own business!
