WordPress is a fantastic free, open source blogging tool and content management system. Using WordPress is one of the easiest & cheapest ways for you to create a powerful, professional website on your own.
A popular feature of WordPress is the ability to add “plugins” to your WordPress website – these are bits of software that you can add on to your website that will give it extra functions, and expand the capability of your site. For example, you could add a plugin that allows you to easily include a poll into your website. This means you don’t have to get involved in creating any complicated code, or have to spend money paying a developer to create one for you – the quick & simple solution is to use a plugin which does it all for you.
WordPress was used by more than 23.3% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2015. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, with more than 60 million websites using it. A major factor in the popularity of WordPress is thanks in large part to plugins.
Below are 5 popular WordPress plugins that can help expand the functionality of your WordPress website:
Akismet
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. Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam..
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further!
wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Disqus
Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.
wordpress.org/plugins/disqus-comment-system/
W3 Total Cache
The only WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework; designed to improve user experience and page speed. Recommended by Easyspace, this is trusted by countless companies like: AT&T, mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, makeuseof.com, yoast.com, kiss925.com and tens of thousands of others.
wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
Digg Digg
With Digg Digg by Buffer, you have an all in one social sharing plugin for your blog. Display all social sharing buttons nicely on your blog and make it look amazing, just like Mashable. Display all popular social sharing buttons with count, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
wordpress.org/plugins/digg-digg/