I’ve been blogging for almost a year. I feel that it’s time to share my knowledge with all of you potential bloggers out there. I’ve tried various plugins over the past year or so, but eventually have ended up using the ones that I found most useful. You can also find more plugins for WordPress – that is not a problem. The trick is finding the ones most relevant and useful for the kind of blog that you are doing.
Hope you all find these plugins listed below very useful.
- Akismet: A very useful plugin by Matt Mullenweg which checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under the Comments section on your WordPress dashboard.
- All in One SEO Pack: Another plugin which is useful to bloggers by Michael Torbert. This plugin optimizes your posts for SEO or Search Engine Optimization, which optimizes your posts for search engines like Google and Yahoo.
- Daily Top 10 Posts: A useful plugin with 2 useful sidebar widgets by Andrew dela Serna. This plugin counts the amount of views for each post visited on your blog and makes the stats available for use in the 2 widgets. One widget displays your Top Posts for the Day, the other widget displays your Top Posts of All Time. This provides valuable navigation options to your readers and certainly increases the time spent by first time visitors on your blog.
- Digg Digg: This plugin by Yong Mook Kim is really helpful. This gives the blogger the option of placing a Digg button, Reddit button, Dzone button and / or Yahoo Buzz button onto each of their blog posts or pages. You can also control where you want the button(s) to appear on the posts and choose a style for each button.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith: This plugin by Feedburner detects all ways to access your original WordPress RSS feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. Quite helpful and a way to make sure a potential RSS subscriber finds their way to the correct RSS feed for your blog.
- Google Analyticator: Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics. After enabling this plugin on your WordPress Dashboard you will be required to visit the settings page and enter your Google Analytics UID and enable logging. Google Analytics is a very useful website tracking and statistical tool for both webmasters and bloggers alike. This is a plugin by Spiral Web Consulting.
- Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin by Arne Brachnold generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo. Very useful plugin, which also has an option to manually refresh your Sitemap for your blog.
- Post-Plugin Library: A plugin by Rob Marsh, SJ which does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins. If you are going to use this plugin, make sure you have the latest version of this plugin. This is very useful, no need to write out your own related post links on your posts anymore, this plugin does that for you (which is totally awesome).
- Simple Tags: This plugin by Amaury Balmer is for extended tagging for WordPress 2.3, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 Used for auto completion of tags, suggested tags, tag cloud widgets, related posts and mass edit of tags. Very useful if you want your standard WordPress Tag Cloud to look different.
- Sociable: A plugin by Joost de Valk which automatically adds links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites (like Digg, Reddit, etc). Easy setup and easy customization and quite user friendly. This plugin is essential for any blogger who wants to give his readers the choice of sharing a post with others if they find it interesting. You can see an example of Sociable at the bottom of this post (all the little icons for different websites).
- Subscribe to Comments: The first plugin I ever installed on WordPress. This is essential, no blogger can operate without this plugin (unless they live on Mars where there is no Internet). This plugin is based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess by Mark Jaquith. Subscribe to Comments allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry that they commented on. This generates traffic and is probably the number 1 reason why most bloggers use it (because traffic is your “friend” when you’re a blogger).
- Tweetmeme Button: The plugin by fav.or.it. adds the Tweetmeme button into your posts and RSS feed. This button allows the Twitter users to “tweet” your post to their followers, which also generates traffic (and yes, traffic is your “friend”). Nowadays most Internet users are on Twitter and Facebook, so plugins like this one are actually convenient and reduces reader’s stress levels (I hope).
- WordPress Automatic Upgrade: This plugin by Keith Dsouza allows a user to automatically upgrade the WordPress installation to the latest one provided by WordPress using the 5 steps provided in the WordPress upgrade instructions. This was very useful recently when I had to upgrade my WordPress installation from 2.5 to 2.7.1. If you have been using an old version of WordPress I’d recommend using this plugin (just make sure you backup your WordPress first, in case something does go wrong).
- WordPress Database Backup: This plugin by Austin Matzko enables an on-demand backup of your WordPress database. Very useful plugin since you can schedule an automatic backup (if you have tendencies to forget doing manual ones once in a while) which can be e-mailed to an E-mail address of your choice. Thanks Kikolani for recommending this one.
- WordPress Related Posts: A very useful plugin by Denis which generates a related post list via tags. This plugin seems to working well for my blog.
- WordPress Super Cache: Easily customizable plugin by Donncha O Caoimh which enables very fast caching for you blog. In Layman’s terms: “This makes your blog load faster”. Very useful indeed. Thanks Kikolani for recommending this plugin as well.
In conclusion: I don’t have all the answers, I’m learning every day. If anyone out there has better recommendations, plugin-wise, please feel free to suggest and comment on this post. Any feedback, positive or negative is welcome. After all, it’s mentally and physically impossible for a human to have all the knowledge in the world, there’s always something new to learn and one is never too old to learn. Photo courtesty of GraphikConnexions.com
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s a nice list of plug-ins, great for people just setting up Wordpress and wondering where to go next for more functionality.
~ Kristi
Kristi: Thank you. I think I’ve found the few plug-ins that are essential for my blog