WordPress is a great website-building platform, in part because it’s open source. This allows for a gigantic index of plugins created by freelance developers to increase functionality and customize various aspects of the WordPress package.

There are many plugins to sort through, and when I’m looking for one that does a specific thing I’ve found that I often need to install several different plugins and try them each out before settling on the best one.

Below is a list I’ve compiled of my favorite and most frequently-used plugins.

Google Analytics for WordPress

I do of course run GA on all of my sites, and this plugin make it painless to incorporate the GA code into WP sites.

Google Sitemap Generator

This is standard operating procedure for all my sites. Sitemaps help you site’s visibility to search engines, and this tool allows me to set up once and forget about it.

Page List

Absolutely indispensable! It’s a pain to create and maintain content on a parent page when you don’t really have anything to say – because all the good stuff is in the sub-pages. This flexible plugin allows me to put in one shortcode on the parent page, then leave it alone to automatically generate an index of the sub-pages on every pageload, including featured pictures and descriptions.

This image shows how I used this plugin on my Washington DC Piano website to list all of the pages organized under the page My Combos. When I add a new page under My Combos, it appears immediately in this list! Just need to be sure to include Featured Image and enough ext for a description.

Random Text

I wanted to display one client review in the sidebar on every page, but I didn’t want the review itself to be hard-coded. This plugin allowed me to enter all of the client reviews and then have a randomly-selected review appear with every page load in a sidebar widget. Perfect. There are a couple additional features which make the whole experience really smooth.

Floating Social Media Icons

When I started developing WordPress sites a few years ago, it was surprisingly hard to add social media icons (at least in the themes that I was using). This plugin makes it very easy, and I use it on pretty much every site. There are two dozen icon styles to choose from and it installs very easy. On the downside, their reviews appear much too good to be true and the plugin pages are pretty loud with colors and advertisements, although you can turn off this setting.

Easy Contact Forms

This is the best plugin for customizing contact forms that I’ve tried. The built-in features in JetPack are simply too limiting, and while this plugin is a little complicated to figure out and slightly overkill for my needs, once I got the hang of it I came to appreciate the flexibility it provides and now recommend it.

Simple eCommerce Shopping Cart

I’m not sure that an eCommerce Shopping Cart on WordPress that is will automatically deliver electronic products via email and connect to PayPal is ever “simple,” but I was able to pull it off with this plugin. It wasn’t pretty, but it works for the most part. I would have just stuck with regular PayPal buttons, but I sell lots of PDFs and MP3s on my inspirational music site, and I wanted something that would deliver those automatically upon purchase. So far so good, but it doesn’t do well with large ZIP files.

Facebook Photo Fetcher

This plugin does the job of fetching Facebook photos from a particular album or page, but doesn’t do it with as much grace as I’d like.