You want to customise your site, but where do you start? We present the 10 best WordPress plugins around, for adding social features, ecommerce capabilities, and more.
WordPress is both the world’s most popular blogging platform and the widest used Content Management System (CMS). And one of the reasons it's so popular is that it happily supports templating and plugins, making it highly flexible and customisable to suit different website needs.This flexibility, alongside the platform’s huge popularity, means there’s thousands of free plugins available on the web.
That's the good news. The bad news is that sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a real challenge. So below we’ve chosen 10 of the best WordPress plugins to add functionality to your website - and as the icing on the cake, are all available free of charge!
01. BuddyPress

BuddyPress itself is also extensible, allowing you to further extend functionality to include document upload, integration with other social media streams, create membership-only websites and much more.
If you’re looking for a user-led or project-based system that encourages collaboration and interaction between visitors to your site, BuddyPress is an ideal solution and one of, if not the, best WordPress plugins for social networking.
02. WP e-Commerce

The system enables you to upload products into different categories and offers customers a shopping cart system to allow them to build an order. It handles calculation of shipping, payment capture and all the email confirmations associated with buying and selling on the web.
The plugin is free, and while you can buy additional upgrades to the system, it’s open source just like WordPress - so it’s perfectly possible to extend the cart’s functionality yourself. It's for these reasons that many champion it as the best WordPress plugin for ecommerce.
03. Vimeography

Vimeography is arguably the best WordPress plugin for video, although note that only supports content from Vimeo. And that's not likely to change soon because the developer believes Vimeo is the best platform to displaying portfolio-quality content (ie without advertising or unnecessary platform branding).
04. SlideDeck

Content supported includes Twitter feeds, YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr and more. The slides are presented through a template system, referred to by SlideDeck as a “lens”, which can be configured to match your site design. The premium version of the plugin adds more lenses, but the free version does allow you to develop your own.
05. HTML5 jQuery Audio Player

HTML5 is used as the default delivery method, but to ensure backwards compatibility it also features a Flash-based fallback. As a consequence, this will happily work across desktop and mobile devices without breaking a sweat!
The plugin also connects with FetchApp, enabling you to sell your audio tracks directly from your site. Which makes it ideal for musicians or podcasters who want a reliable way to deliver their audio through their website.
06. Seven Days

07. WPTouch

It allows you to serve a different theme to users on mobile device such as an iPhone or Android phone, providing a user-friendly and small-screen-optimised version of your content instead of forcing mobile users to navigate a desktop-orientated design.
Installation is very simple, and the plugin can be configured to match your overall design aesthetic relatively easily. This is a great quick-fix solution if you don’t want to get into designing your own mobile theme.
08. JetPack

09. Price Table

The system offers a straightforward solution to editing price table content, without the need to understand the underlying HTML and CSS - making it ideal for websites being maintained by non-technical users. Being built entirely in CSS, the design is easy to theme too, making Price Table highly recommended!
10. NextGen Gallery

This plugin offers a great deal of flexibility in creating gallery content, including the ability to watermark images, create slideshows, organise content into albums and use different themes for display of your images. And, like all those on this list, it's absolutely free!
Words: Sam Hampton-Smith
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