H-Y-P-H-E-N Plugboard and site design blog

Wordpress plugins to improve site navigation

Good navigation is a vital part of any site- if visitors have to hunt for what they’re looking for on your site, chances are, they’ll give up within the first 20 seconds of looking and leave, never to return.

The default navigation features of Wordpress is far from sufficient and too basic. Here a list of plugins which help improve upon the basic navigational features offered.

1. PixoPoint Menu

   
   PixoPoint Menu creates search engine-friendly drop down menus which lists subcategories and subpages, allowing your visitors access to them without having to visit the parent category first.
   Download – Plugin Homepage

2. Category Order

   
   Wordpress allows you to sort categories by name, post count, etc.. But what if you want to have them sorted in no particular pattern a script can recognize? Category Order allows the sorting of categories via a simple drag and drop interface. It works for subcategories too!
   Download – Plugin Homepage

3. My Page Order

   
   The default Wordpress page ordering system is too inefficient- if you’d like to change the order of one page, you might have to change the order count of many others. My Page Order lets you order your pages through a simple drag and drop interface.
   Download – Plugin Homepage

4. WP-PageNavi

   
   Get rid of those ugly “Next” and “Previous” links which forces visitors to sift through multiple pages before finding the one they want. WP-pagenavi will display the current page and the total number of pages available, allowing visitors to get to the page they want with a single click.
   Download – Plugin Homepage

5. Yoast Breadcrumbs

   
   Adds an easily customizable breadcrumbs path to your site.
   Download – Plugin Homepage

6. Search Everything

   
   Allows your visitors to find what they’re looking for more easily by making the search feature comb through tags, comments, and a variety of other fields that you’ve defined in an easy-to-use settings page. Search Everything even allows you to exclude posts from results and allows for search tag hilighting.
   Download – Plugin Homepage

7. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

   
   YARPP displays a list of similar posts that your visitors may be interested in, by matching tags, post text and post title with the current post that they are on.
   Download – Plugin Homepage

8. Permalinks Moved Permanently

   
   Migrated from one permalink structure to another and now scared that visitors who have clicked on a link to your site will be greeted with a 404 error? Fear not- as long as you have not made any changes to your post slug, this plugin will automatically find and display the post.
   Download – Plugin Homepage

9. List Category Posts

   
   The Wordpress archives and category pages are more like an index page with alternative styling. List Category Posts lets you make more practical archives and category pages by listing all the posts in each category.
   Download – Plugin Homepage

10. Google XML Sitemaps

    
    A sitemap helps both visitors and search engines index your site by listing all your available content on a single page. This plugin builds an XML-compliant sitemap that is easy to read and supported by most major search engines.
    Download – Plugin Homepage