We’re massive fans of WordPress on Scottish Business Blog. This site is built on it afterall! We thought we would kick off a few posts about how to get the most out of WordPress and what better place to start that giving you our view of the best WordPress plugins.
We honestly believe that most small businesses should give WordPress a try. The learning curve isn’t massive and you can actually produce some stunning results. The fact it’s also open source and free is a huge plus point and it’s support is second to none with a very strong community around the globe. So without further a do we give you our top five 
Contact Form 7 – WordPress isn’t blessed with a great contact form but this plugin is probably the best around. You can create as many different contact forms as you like and add them to any post or page with a simple tag.
Disqus Comment System – Again another area where WordPress could be better is comments. Thankfully the Disqus comment system fills that hole brilliantly. We’ve only just switched to this on Scottish Business Blog but we did lots of research before deciding this was the best option.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – We didn’t come across this one on our own buy it came highly recommended by Dan Frydman of Inigo (thanks Dan!). Joost De Valk the owner of yoast.com is regarded as one of the best developers of WordPress plugins in the world (so who are we to argue!). Brilliant plugin and covers the whole SEO angle on your WordPress site.
Mailchimp List Subscribe – Hopefully most people will know of Mailchimp. It’s probably the best email newsletter software on the market. It’s free version also allows you to build a list of 2000 subscribers before you have to move to a paid version. This plugin adds a widget to your sidebar that creates a subscription form for people to subscribe to your list (You can see it top right on SBB!).
Akismet – You need to have a system for beating spam with WordPress and there’s nothing much better than Akismet. It tends to catch most spammy comments and makes your job much easier as a webmaster.
So that’s our top five must haves. Do you think we’ve missed anything out? What WordPress plugins would you consider to be must haves? As always leave your comments below
