WordPress Plugins Used on My Law Firm’s Websites

I have used WordPress to create 11 websites (put your cursor on the menu text above that says “My Other Websites” to access one of my other sites), ten of which I created to get more clients and revenue.  The only WordPress site I created that is not for my law firm is one called “F-4 Phantom,” a site about my five years flying the F-4 Phantom supersonic fighter bomber in the United States Air Force.

If you want to know why I use WordPress to create my law office websites read my article called “Why I Love WordPress for My Law Firm.”  In that article I say that the biggest reason I love WordPress for the law firm is because WordPress has over 19,000 free plugins that allow a WordPress administrator (you should be your site’s administrato) to add cool features to your WordPress blog or website.  A WordPress plugin is software written to accomplish a specific task or add a feature to your WordPress site.  My guess is that somebody has already created a free plugin that will do  everything you could possibly want to do with your site.

Do you want to have message forums or a list serv on your site?  Would you like your site to have a gallery of photos or videos that are displayed to viewers in the order you select for the number of seconds you select?  Would you like to require a visitor to type a captcha before he or she could send you a message?  There are numerous plugins that provide all of these features right out of the box.  That’s cool and free, but the second neatest thing about WordPress plugins is that when you see one you want you click twice and the plugin is installed and working on your WordPress website.  IT ONLY TAKES A FEW SECONDS LITERALLY TO INSTALL A PLUGIN.

The following is a list of plugins in alphabetical order that I always install on every WordPress website or blog I create:

• Akisment – used to prevent comment spam.  It automatically deletes spam comments of which there are many.

• Bad Behavior – another spam preventor.  I use Akismet and this one.

• Broken Link Checker – A must have program.  It alerts you to broken links and makes it easy to fix them

• Contact Form 7 – Use to create web forms to collect contact information and message text so visitors can communicate with you or your firm’s personnel.  See one of my contact forms.

• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin makes a map of your website every night and sends it to Google and other search engines to help you get better search engine rankings.

• Sharedaddy – It creates icons and links to share your content with other sites like Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn and Twitter.  You can see this plugin at work at the bottom of every one of my posts.

• Smart Youtube Pro – This plugin lets me insert and position a Youtube video any where on my site just by copying the Youtube share URL and pasting it where I want it to go on my WordPress site.  It also requires me to add “vh” just before the colon in the Youtube URL.

• Sociable – I use this plugin to send a post to our Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn pages.  Although you can configure it send every new post we have it set to send posts only if we want to send it and then it only goes to the other sites we select.

• Subscribe to Comments Reloaded – Use this plugin to allow people who leave comments to chose to receive copies of all future comments and replies made to their comment.

• Websimon Tables – WordPress does not do tables so you need a plugin.  I have tried a number of table plugins, including one I purchased, and my favorite is Websimon Tables.  It comes with 9 pre-configured tables.  Everything about a table can be customized easily.  It is also easy to move rows and columns.

• WP-DB Manager – This plugin does all your back ups of your data, including the site’s MySQL data.  It also zips backup files and emails them to you.  I also use it to optimize the WordPress site.

• WP-PageNavi – This adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog or website.

• WP-PostViews – It counts and displays the most popular posts and pages on your site.

• WP-Print – Gives your visitors a better printed output than was is inherent with WordPress.

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This one displays other posts on your site that are similar to the post a visitor is viewing.

To learn more about these plugins and the 19,000+ other free WordPress plugins go to the WordPress plugins page.