Got WordPress?  You’re not alone.  The ubiquitous open source publishing and content management system (CMS) is used by an estimated 40-60% of the world’s websites including your favourite digital marketer 🙂

Based on PHP and MySQL, this highly successful website publishing platform has achieved worldwide dominance because it is robust, intuitive, and supported by a global community that are constantly developing and updating powerful plugins for the platform.

Plugins, aka extensions or add-ons, are little software packages that improve or extend the performance of your existing website.  If you’re not taking advantage of the huge array of free and powerful plugins available for your WordPress website you’re making a mess of your life.  Get your life back on track and take your website to the next level with these famous 5 FREE plugins for WordPress:

WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

This is the last word in SEO for WordPress sites.  If you are remotely interested in optimizing your website for search (getting found on the web), you need to install this puppy pronto.  The free version looks after everything you’re likely to need such as; post titles and meta descriptions, robots meta, canonical config, xml sitemaps, API docs and more.

Google Analytics for WordPress

This badboy sets your website up with the latest and greatest Google Analytics tracking code so you don’t need to fiddle around with the source code or get a developer to look after it for you.  Once you’ve got it setup and tracking traffic you also score extra analytics features that Google Analytics doesn’t offer by default, such as tracking pdf downloads and outbound clicks.

Custom Favicon

If you don’t have a custom favicon for your website you need to clear your schedule for the next 15 minutes and get on it!  Favicons are a small but important component of the branding of your website.  They appear beside your page title on your web browser tabs and in bookmarks in browsers and touchscreen devices.  Having no favicon, or a generic favicon, is a quick and surefire way to lose professional credibility.  After using this very handy little plugin to install yours, just be aware web browsers cache in different fashions, and your favicon may not display for sometime after installation.

W3 Total Cache

Speaking of caching, make sure your website is – caching that is!  Use this plugin to improve user experience and SEO by markedly improving page load speed times.  This plugin is used by a heap of pros like Mashable, Yoast andCSS3 so you know it’s the goods!  Stop wasting your website visitor’s time and install this plugin now.

Facebook Like Box

This social plugin helps you build your Facebook brand page like count.  The Like Box enables visitors to your website to see which of their friends have already liked your page and displays their own Facebook profile pic to them, a cunning bit of personalisation.  You can custom the appearance of the Like Box to match your website theme and can choose to insert it in a footer or sidebar.

What’s your favourite WP plugin?

Let us know here.