Many WordPress plugins are poorly written—not future proof, bug-ridden, contain invalid code or share no regard for their counter-effect on other plugins or scripts. On the other hand are the ones created with a broad feature-base, while your site only uses a small fraction of it’s core code. When you start to install all of these plugins you can severely slow down your site, or even break it if they clash with one another. I’ve seen the smallest of WordPress blogs with so many plugins installed that it’s just not funny—how many of them are actually required? Usually only a handful.

A lot of this comes down to the controversial approach of giving the average computer user full control of their website in the age of the CMS. In 2010, everyone wants or already has a website, every thinks they are or wants to be a web designer.

So if you’re tired of seeing this (left) every time you log in to your admin panel, you shouldn’t take this advice lightly. For the purpose of usability, Let’s break this down into three areas that the average WordPress user won’t necessarily have a great understanding of, or may not be aware of the solutions available.

Bolt-On WordPress E-Commerce

Without a doubt something a designer or blogger shouldn’t have to go near. It’s pretty much unavoidable to use a plugin for e-commerce, due to the advanded programming required and the high level of security necessary to maintain such a feature.

Introducing the Shopp Plugin

No, that wasn’t a typo. My vote goes hands-down to Shopp—the best plugin I’ve ever used with WordPress. The store that used to be on this site ran on this engine as do a couple of other projects I’ve worked on. Shopp is a premium plugin, so it will set you back $55 for a single license, but take it from me that’s a small price to pay for the near-endless functionality you’ll receive.

Shopp boasts a very well maintained documentation & support centre and a solid developer API for building customised e-commerce themes. It has great support for selling digital and physical products, integration with popular payment gateways, and a fully-fledged user account system for tracking orders and providing access to digital downloads.

When placed beside other e-commerce plugins like Instinct’s WP E-Commerce and eStore, from my experience there really is no comparison.

Think about it—with this single plugin you can add a complete store-front to your website allowing you to sell physical products, offer your users access to premium digital goods, run online auctions and even maintain a donation meter system. All without too much additional work if you’re not fussed about branding. Do you really need a separate plugin for each of those features?

Search Engine Optimisation

Let’s face it—real SEO requires a lot of work, and no plugin can truly offer an automated approach to fulfilling all of the actions required to maintain a solid search campaign. What they can do, is use your website’s content to generate search friendly meta data and tags. If your content sucks, so will your search results.

Content is King - Gary Vaynerchuk

There are three plugins I could honestly recommend for use with your search campaign—the reasons for this I’ll go in to shortly. For everything else, do it manually if you want results.

Google XML Sitemap Generator

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

As your website grows, so will your Sitemap. If you post regular updates to your blog, or edit your content often—you’re going to want Google and the other search engines to know. This is where the sitemap generator plugin comes in. The Google XML Sitemap plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog, and that’s why I love it so much—that’s all it does, and it does a great job of it too.

A couple of years ago I used to create these manually for my sites, but as I started using CMSs more often, it grew out of hand and an automated solution was needed. This plugin, does the trick perfectly.

WP-SEO vs All in One SEO Pack

Im a bit un-decided between these two, so if you have had any experience with either or both (positive or otherwise) of these plugins, I’d love to hear it. I’ve used the All in One extensively on many projects and have never had a problem with it. However I recently became aware of WP SEO and am keen to give it a whirl. Which ever way you go, I’m sure they both achieve a similar result in terms of generating the right meta data for your site—because that’s all we want it for right?

There are just certain things that you shouldn’t let a machine handle. I wouldn’t want a plugin to add alt tags to my images. I wouldn’t want a plugin to convert my titles to h1s, to add nofollow attributes to any of my links or to try and validate my code. But I’m happy for it to use content I’ve already created, and assuming I’ve setup the plugin structure correctly, generate my titles, descriptions and keywords. Good SEO requires dedication and time; these plugins are just tools, nothing more.

Form Building

The final element I want to cover for this post is building and managing forms. The average user can’t do this—but every site needs one. I’ve seen webdevs and designers be baffled by the process of building even the simplest of web forms—so understandably, it’s acceptable to use a plugin for this sort of more advanced functionality.

I’ve tried them all. Believe me—I’ve used (almost*) every WordPress plugin under the sun to build forms and to tell the truth I don’t like any of them.

* I’m well aware of the Gravity Forms plugin which I’d kill to be able to have a go at, but don’t like the idea of paying $200 for a plugin. But that’s just me.

If I had to pick one, I’d choose cForms II by Delicious Days. My main problem with the plugin is really that it does too much. I like simplicity more than anything else and this plugin is far from it—packed with so many features that it’s near impossible to hand over to a client to handle.

The plugin itself is well built, and can do pretty much anything. But I’d recommend the developers of cForms read Jason Fried’s book Rework and learn why more often than not, having less features makes your product better than the competition.

In Conclusion

The WordPress plugin directory is a bit like the iPhone App store (or the web as a whole for that matter). You might say the Pareto Principle applies to all three. Do your research before spamming the backend of your site with plugins and dodgy code. Consider building functionality right in to your template, and get it right the first time around.