WordPress takes a lot of the work out of website design, coding, monitoring, and SEO, by allowing you to install plugins to accomplish a variety of tasks for you. There are WordPress plugins for almost every conceivable task. There are plugins that can automatically add meta tags, generate internal links, check for broken links, and more. In this Appendix, we'll cover some of the most helpful and powerful plugins that can help you take your WordPress site to the next level. Keep in mind, however, that plugins are only available for self-hosted WordPress sites; plugins are not available for WordPress.com websites.

So what's changed in the plugin environment for WordPress over the past few years? First, plugins have become generally more sophisticated and stable, which is good news for the webmasters. Second, there has been a growth in the scope of many plugins. For example, in previous years you might need a general SEO plugin for controlling titles and meta tags, another plugin to clean up the WordPress head (like the HeadSpace plugin), and yet another for controlling the noindexing of category and tag pages. Today, the Yoast SEO plugin performs all these functions.