20 Best Must Have WordPress Plugins

WordPress is without doubts the most professional and outstanding blogging platform, it meets everyone’s needs from an individual blogger to a company and from a company to a corporation. WP has become a business and a platform which provides A to Z resources for making your website looking the most beautiful on the web. However, you need to take extra care of your overall WordPress content management system, because this is all in your hand and you can do many tasks to make your WP site user friendly and awesome i.e security measures, search engine optimization and the designing etc. This post will cover all the basic WP tasks by using the best plugins available for free in the default Plugins library. I’m using all these plugins myself for maintaining my blog’s security, SEO and speed of my blog. So I’ll share these must have plugins with you in order to improve your WP site/blog.

Top 20 WordPress Plugins every blogger must use:

The plugins list I’m giving you here is used by me for last 2 years and I update the plugins time to time as well as I remove and add the plugins if they have any problems, so you can do the same yourself. However, the plugins I’m sharing on this page are producing great results for me, so you can use them without any fear. Moreover, these plugins will cover the following aspects of your WordPress website:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Securing your blog from being hacked
• Designing your website
• Customizing your website
• Speeding up your site
• Socializing your site
• Protecting your blog from spamming

I’ll mention the category of the plugin with the name of the plugin for example if a plugin is used for SEO then there will be (SEO) in the bracket. Now Here is the list of the plugins one by one.

1. Akismet (For Spam comments)

This plugin is installed by default when you get your WP dashboard, however, you can activate it as soon as possible, it will protect your blog from spam comments and will save so much of your time. You must activate it by first going to get a key from Akismet website and then verify it.

#2. All in One SEO Pack (SEO)

This plugin covers all of your search engine optimization tasks for WordPress websites, you can install it for free, it will set your MeTa tags, description for home page as well as single posts. You can also make its setting according to your needs i.e if you want to noindex any specific page or you want to change the post frequency or priority for any content. Overall, it will cover most of the SEO for your WP site.

#3. Chap Secure Login (Security)

This plugin actually hides your password during the login to your WP dashboard, most of the WP sites are hacked using tools to catch the password, and this plugin therefore, make it very difficult for hackers to see your password.

#4. Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox (Social Media)

This plugin is very helpful if you want to increase your Facebook fan page likes/members via your blog/site, This plugin actually shows your FB fan page like box in a pop up box to the new visitors, you can make its setting to any period of time you want. Very useful for sites having less likes in the starting.

#5. Google XML Sitemap for Videos (SEO)

The best plugin for creating video sitemap on WordPress, you must install this plugin if you have YouTube videos embedded into your site, this plugin will make your job super easier. Here is the guide how to use Google XML sitemap for Videos.

#6. Google XML Sitemaps (SEO)

The sitemap for each and everything of your site on WP will be created and sent to search engines by this plugin (Google XML Sitemaps), this plugin is already used by millions of webmasters. So do use it from the starting.

#7. Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin (For avoiding spamming)

Spam comments is one of the worst things in WP, most of the time people use your comment form to post spam comments having their dirty links automatically, so you can easily stop this by using above plugin, this will actually add a Captcha which is only readable by humans, so no one will be allowed to post spam comments automatically using any bot/software.

#8. Login LockDown (Security)

This plugin actually does a simple job i.e making sure someone can’t try to login multiple times, you can only allow 1 to 3 time login attempts to each IP, so they failed to login then this plugin will block that IP for a specific time as per your setting.

#9. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) (Performance)

This Plugin will run a scan and will let you know how much memory and speed time does every plugin take while your site is being loaded in the browser, so you can remove some complicated plugins in order to make your site more speedy and fastly loadable.

#10. Primary Feedburner (Email Marketing)

This is a necessary plugin which will make your email list for your business, you can simply install & activate it and then copy and paste your FeedBurner URL in the box where it is asked, now from the widget area just add it in the sidebar of your site, visitors will subscribe to your upcoming posts via email.

#11. Replace WP-Version (Security)

This simple replaces your WordPress version, because mostly hackers try to find your WP version at the backend and then find the bugs in the plugins or somewhere and then attack, so this will change the WP version and hackers won’t be able to find the actual WP version you are currently using.

#12. Robots Meta (SEO)

If you want to noindex or nofollow any links, tags, Archives, categories etc which make duplicate content then you must use Robots Meta plugin to do this job.

#13. TablePress (Designing & Customization)

This plugin is best for you if you want to use Tables in WordPress pages or posts. You can simply create tables and then include wherever you want.

#14. W3 Total Cache (Speeding up)

This is one of the must have plugins, this will speed up your WordPress site and users will see a very fast site during browsing. It will cache everything i.e Database queries, Objects, Media, images etc when they are once viewed from a user’s computer, so it won’t let the browser request to the server again and again and using this plugin you’ll improve the loading time of your site by 20% to 40% very easily.

#15. Wordfence Security (Security)

This is another great plugin that looks after all security factors of your site i.e plugins, databases, malware attacks and many things more, you must use this plugin in order to be always on safe side.

#16. WP Smush.it (Speeding Up)

This is one more plugin that speeds up your blog by compressing your images and reducing their size to a reasonable amount. You can improve your blog speed by using this simple plugin.

#17. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (Relevant Posts)

This plugin is the best when you want to show the relevant posts below each post of your blog, this will display related stories to the visitors with a thumbnail of that post, if you want to increase your Page views then this plugin is the best solution for you.

#18. BackUpWordPress (Backups)

After all of your customization, optimization and security measures, you still need to always have a ready backup of your site, so whenever something goes wrong, you can easily restore the backup. This plugin does the job for you.

#19. Combine CSS (Speeding up)

This plugin will simply combine all of your CSS files into one, so the browser will only read the one file and will apply it on the page. It will save a lot of time and the page speed will be up.

#20. Combine JS (Speeding Up)

This plugin does a simple job by combining all of your JavaScript files into one file, so it makes it easier for browser to only one time request a single file and render it.

#21. Floating Social Bar (Social Media Sharing)

This plugin is also necessary because it will let the visitors share your posts over major social media networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. So you must install it as well.

Final Advice: 

I use all these plugins currently on my blog and they are working just fine for me. However, you can install all of them or some of them according to your own requirements. If you want to just install any of the above plugins then copy the name of the plugin and search in the plugin directory on your WP dashboard, you’ll find the plugin, now just click install and then activate that plugin. Its all very easy as 1,2,3. I hope you’ll get great results soon.

Kindly share this post with all of your friends on Social media and ask your questions in the comment form if you have any question related to this post or related to this blog. Thank you for Reading! Happy WordPressing 

How to Add a Contact Form in WordPress (Urdu Tutorial)

I recently admitted that without a beautiful contact form, a website will miss huge potential in terms of collaboration with big brands and companies as well as potential revenue. Furthermore, the blog can also miss the feedback by valuable readers and visitors. Therefore, I added contact forms to all of my live blogs. And have decided to create a video tutorial in Urdu/Hindi to let all my readers know that they can also add a beautiful and simple contact form to their WordPress blog very easily.

How to Add a Contact Form in WordPress?

It’s very easy to do thing, just go to your WordPress dashboard, then go to plugins and click “add new”, on the next page, simply search for a plugin called “Contact Form 7“which is one of the easiest and simplest plugins to install on your WordPress. You can install any other similar plugin if you like, but I have used this one myself and I’m satisfied with the result so far. And after all, it’s a free plugin and you have nothing to lose.

If you are still confused then don’t worry, I have a video tutorial in Urdu/Hindi which you can watch to practically understand about adding a simple contact form to your blog. Please watch the video tutorial below.

Advantages of Installing Contact Form

There are many advantages you can have after installing a professional contact form. First thing first, your site/blog will look very responsible and professional, because without a contact form; how people will be able to contact the site owner?. I myself was doing this mistake on some of my popular blogs/sites. But now I’ve added contact form to all of my blogs and will recommend you to do the same.

There are many high quality advertisers who are looking for new opportunities to advertise their product, they might be very interested in your blog, but if they can’t find the contact information on the first place then you’ll miss potential partnership and revenue. Sometimes, your readers need to contact you, and the easiest way for them will be the contact form. Last but not the least, the contact form will send all the information straight to your Gmail or Yahoo address which you can easily add in the “Contact form 7” setting in WordPress dashboard.

If you have any further questions on this, please let me know via comment box below or you can also contact me via the contact me page on this blog. Thank You!.

Creating WordPress Themes Using Tools & Frameworks

WordPress websites have become common and favorite of all of us. We give preference to wordpress over the blogger and various other platforms for creating personal and professional websites. The contents are easy to upload, and themes can be managed conveniently. Another plus point is the presence of a lot of templates, designs and styles in the wordpress make it easier for us to choose the best and most suitable designs as per the niche and subject of our blog or website. This is why, we thought to share some of the best tools and frameworks with you in order to use them for creating your own WordPress themes, and below is the list of all of them. However, we’ll happily try to create video tutorials for WordPress theme development and theme creation in Urdu as many of you already have requested that and we are working on it rapidly.

Creating wordpress themes

There are different strategies and ideas to create wordpress theme. Usually the web designers and developers are familiar with these ideas but the current article is written for those who are not expert, so that they can get to know how to create beautiful and professional wordpress themes.

Use of responsive wordpress theme ideas

You can style and design your wordpress theme by selecting the wonderful responsive ideas. Such ideas can be browsed on the internet. The consistency of your website is dependent upon the fact that your wordpress theme is consistent and equipped with plenty of features. The responsive web designs and wordpress theme designs are of great help. These can make your way to a successful and highly appealing website with a lot of options and web pages available.

Create WordPress themes using Frameworks

This is the time for us to give a try to different responsive frameworks which are of great help in creating awesome wordpress themes. When you will start looking for the best themes and framework ideas on the internet, a pool of templates and software will be right before your eyes. I have chosen the following best frameworks which are really helpful in creating wordpress themes and anyone can make use of them.

YAML.DE

This is a multi column and fully featured responsive framework. It comes in a lot of supportive plug ins and designs so that you can choose the colors, designs and ideas as per your desire. It is highly supportive for jQuery plug ins and can help you create personalized and professional wordpress theme in a shorter time frame.

GetBootStrap.Com

Bootstrap is a twitter friendly responsive framework. This lets you create more than twelve column grids in your wordpress theme. It also includes plenty of features and layouts for the users to choose from. You can add toggling tabs and many other options into your theme and then upload it easily in your wordpress to get amazed with.

foundation.zurb.com

With foundation responsive framework you can create awesome and top notch wordpress themes. It helps you create the themes with varying screen sizes and options. For example, if you want to create a theme for an online cookbook then the pre-packing styles and designs will allow your format your theme in the kitchen style. In the same way if your website is going to be a business site, then its theme can be created with foundation in a stylish yet professional way. In addition to this you can easily and quickly design as many themes as you want and upload them onto your wordpress instantly.

Create WP Themes using Tools/Generators

The above frameworks we shared on this page are not easy to use for everybody, because they require some programming knowledge from installation to set up, which can be easily done by people having web development background, but for newbies that will not be easy. However, we will not leave you alone here, below are some software/tools/generators which anybody can use to create WordPress themes without having any programing knowledge. Some of the tools can be accessed online as well.

Artisteer.com

Artisteer is a very easy to use software for creating WordPress themes, not only WP, but you can also create Joomla Themes, Blogger Templates and designs for Drupal CMS. It’s free to download and use on your desktop, it has all the features what you need to create a WordPress theme or blogger template from absolutely scratch. How to use it? You can find the guides on their website for using this tool more effectively.

GenerateWP.Com

This is a WP code generator, which you can use to generate codes for different WordPress theme sections, it’s free to use and a team of web developers is working for you day and night. What you need to have is; just a basic knowledge of using WordPress and you’ll be good to go with this awesome platform.

WpThemeGenerator.com

This another online tool which you can use to create your own WordPress theme for free, You design a theme and it will automatically generate the code for you. You can even generate codes for e-commerce WordPress themes if you like. The basic features of this website are free to use but if you want to use its full functionality then there is a small fee.

Top Web Hosting Providers 2017 (My Review)

Web Hosting is the first important thing for a long term website. I run websites since 2010, and during last 7 years, I’ve used many web hosting companies including NameCheap, Hostgator, Site5 and particularly a Pakistani company called “HosterPK”. If the hosting service is poor, it’ll hugely affect your site. therefore, it should be carefully evaluated beforehand. Today, I’ll share my experience with you about SiteGround which I’m using myself since last two months, along the way, I’ll give you a list of the top 5 web hosting companies. 

Why I transferred my sites to SiteGround?

As I earlier mentioned, I was using HosterPK a Pakistani company for almost 7 years. In the start, they were providing a good service including up time and customer support. But in the recent months, that company became very poor in handling issues related to down servers. The customer support also became terrible. so I decided to find another company where I could safely move my sites.

I had Bluehost and Hostgator in my mind, but when I researched online, I found that SiteGround has more good reviews, and found the prices very competitive. Therefore, I decided to join SiteGround, but you can look into all of the below mentioned web hosting providers, and check which is one is good for your needs and budget.

Grab SiteGround Hosting

Grab HostGator Hosting

Grab Blue Host Hosting

Important factors to look in web hosting

There are many factors you may want to look into before choosing a web hosting company. The most important one is up time which means if the hosting company is keeping your site live and running all the time. That’s very important in modern day websites, because visitors browse the internet in speed like rockets. A few more factors that one should look into before purchasing a web hosting are following:

1. Up Time Guarantee (99.99)
2. Server Speed
3. Security
4. Competitive Pricing
5. Customer Support (The most important)

These 5 are the top pillars in web hosting. there are hundreds of other features that you can see on the home page of every web hosting company, and can compare with one another.

You should further look into your needs and traffic on your sites, and you should select a web hosting according to your budget and requirements. For example, if your sites receive less than 100,000 monthly visitors then SiteGround is a good choice for you, if your sites receive more visitors then you should probably go for HostGator or BlueHost.

Top 5 Web Hosting Providers

There are at least 20 hosting providers which are considered the most popular among bloggers and website owners. However, I’ll select only 5 out of them, and you can select the best one according to your needs and budget. Please watch the video at the bottom to understand the importance of web hosting for long term websites.

My 5 favorite web hosting providers: 

1. SiteGround (I’m using this)
2. HostGator (I’ve used it)
3. BlueHost (Friends are using)
4. GoDaddy (Friends are using)
5. NameCheap (I’ve used it)

Why I recommend SiteGround?

The simplest reason I’m recommending SiteGround is that I’m using it myself since last two months, and it’s a world class web hosting with responsive customer support which I love. Furthermore, the pricing is very competitive. SiteGround also has WordPress + Joomla dedicated web hosting which includes extra benefits. I’m satisfied with this web hosting so far, and that’s the reason I’m recommending it to my readers. However, you are free to choose from above 5 which is according to your needs and budget.

Note: If you buy the hosting from my link on this page then you’ll get the hosting on the same price or may be with some discount, but at the same time I’ll get some commission. so if you decide to buy then do buy from my link on this page. Thanks.

I’ll update this article if there are changes in list of web hosting providers, so that we can discuss it here. I’ve always shared the best web hosting companies after testing myself. and currently, I think the above mentioned are perfect.

Please watch my web hosting review below in Urdu/Hindi to properly understand the importance of web hosting and other factors that can be used to decide which hosting provider to choose.

Complete jQuery Video Training in Urdu/Hindi

AJAX Using PHP & jQuery Tutorials in Urdu/Hindi

AJAX is a web development technique which is used massively almost by every popular website, Ajax means (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), this is not a programming language, but yes, this is a technique to use the existing web programming languages all together in order to make the web browsing experience much faster and much better. Google initially adopted this technique when its developers were working on the Gmail application, and today this technique (AJAX) is the widely used technique by web developers. Many of our students requested us to create tutorials on this in Urdu, and today I’ve created some basic tutorials with practical examples in Urdu, so you guys can now easily learn AJAX.

How to use AJAX & how does it work?

AJAX is a magic, all popular websites are using this technique i.e Gmail, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, YouTube and many others. AJAX can be used by two different ways, JavaScript and jQuery. Both methods of using AJAX are different, with JavaScript method, You must work on online server, because the HTTP request which AJAX sends to the web server is only possible when there is an active web page on the web with (http) extension. However, with jQuery method, you can use AJAX on local host (Local computer) because here, we don’t create an http request directly, that’s done by jQuery. And we’ll use AJAX on local host in this tutorial, so you can also practice that.

AJAX simply sends a request to the server in background, and updates the part of the page where an event was occurred by the visitor, therefore, it will work without reloading/refreshing the web page, and that’s the beauty of using AJAX in web development.

A simple introduction of AJAX by w3schools.com is this one: 

AJAX = Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

AJAX is not a new programming language, but a new way to use existing standards.

AJAX is the art of exchanging data with a server, and updating parts of a web page – without reloading the whole page.

And I think there is no better introduction than the above one.

AJAX Tutorials in Urdu/Hindi

Now, here I have video tutorials for you in Urdu/Hindi, these are just a few tutorials, but I hope you’ll like this effort, in this series of video tutorials, You’ll learn the basic understanding of AJAX as well as a small registration form project using AJAX, and We’ll also use jQuery and PHP in this tutorials series. So if you liked this series then share it with others and also post your questions in the comments section.

Video Tutorial #1 – Introduction

Video Tutorial #2 – Ajax environment

Video Tutorial #3 – jQuery Post & Get Methods

Video Tutorial #4 – Registration Form Project

Video Tutorial #5 – Ajax function itself

After watching this series of video tutorials, I hopefully can say that you understood the basic concept of AJAX, and if you have any question or suggestion about upcoming tutorials then please do ask them in the comment section, and furthermore, I’ll add the source code of this tutorial to this page very soon, so then you can download that as well. Happy Web Development!

Complete jQuery Video Training in Urdu/Hindi

jQuery is one of prominent library of JavaScript which aims to “write less, do more”, We already have published a basic jQuery tutorials series in Urdu back in 2013, but this time, we’ve created a complete course of around 60 video tutorials in Urdu/Hindi. jQuery has been massively used in web development projects for several years, and today, it has the same volume of usage as it had several years before. For every web developer, it’s essential to learn jQuery in order to take their web development skills to the next level. There will be times when you’ll be stuck in a web project, and only jQuery will work there, because JQ can be used altogether with Ajax and PHP. It’s neither a server side language nor a scripting language, but yes, it’s the library of JavaScript which is a popular client side scripting language, but more importantly, jQuery can pass requests to server when used jointly with Ajax and that’s the beauty of this small library.

jQuery Updated Video Tutorials in Urdu

Apart from the basics, in this course, you’ll learn many new things such as creating an image slider, creating plugins, creating widgets and much more. This course will cover all the basic & advance usage of JQ according to the current scenario. Below is the small outline of the course which you’ll learn while watching the video series on this page:

• Introduction to jQuery
• Downloading jQuery
• Implementing jQuery
• Basic Syntax
• The Events
• The Effects
• The Selectors
• All Basic Functions
• Advance Functions
• Creating an Image Slider
• jQuery UI Plugins
• Using jQuery with PHP + Ajax
• Much More….

The above are some points from the course, but the course is more longer than the points mentioned above. This course is created by one of our key instructors “Shahzaib Kamal”, and now we have a team of almost seven (7) instructors/professionals who will create courses in Urdu continuously for onlineustaad.com. And you can find the list of courses we have created so far by visiting Buy a DVD page.

Important Note: 

This is a playlist of video tutorials from YouTube, so if you are located in Pakistan then first open YouTube and then come back to this page to watch the videos, you can use “ZenMate” extension for Chrome/Firefox browsers to watch the course, just go to Google & write “zenmate”, you’ll find the extension link, install it on your favorite browser and then come back to this page, you’ll see the videos.

jQuery Video Tutorials in Urdu/Hindi

Now, after watching this series of tutorials, I hope, you have learned something new from this course, but meanwhile if you want to get an advanced version of this course with source files + plugins etc then don’t forget to visit this page.

If you have any questions about this course or anything related to this blog then do ask in the comment section, but let me assure you that I’ll be sharing some more great new stuff in upcoming days with you, so be in touch for updates and some exciting news.