RSS Reader
In a Galaxy not too far away - do pioneering research. Join Galaxy Zoo and help classify Galaxies and other Stella phenomena.
Essential WordPress Plugins
Essential WordPress Plugins
Top Plugins Every Blog Should Have
by Philip King
Why are the WordPress plugins listed here essential? Well although the standard install of WordPress is excellent when you want to push WordPress a little (or a lot) further, plugins become a necessity to extend its functionality. Especially if you are considering using WordPress for eCommerce.
The following list of plugins are my minimum recommendations which apply to every WordPress installation, you will also need to install any specialist plugins pertaining to your website needs. If you know of any better solutions, as always, let me know.
Essential Tip: Read the instructions…
- AdRotator WordPress Plugin
- Advertising Manager Plugin
- Akismet
- All in One SEO Pack
- Contact Form 7
- Deepest Sender
- FeedBurner FeedSmith
- Google Analyticator
- Organizer
- ShareThis
- Simple Tags
- WP Super Cache
- WP125
- WPTouch iPhone Theme
- YARPP
AdRotator WordPress Plugin
Rotates your AdSense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
Advertising Manager
This plugin will manage and rotate your Google AdSense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google AdSense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.
Akismet – Stop Spam
Once your blog starts gaining visitors it’ll be hit by comment spam and Akismet is about the most effective plugin at catching these. This one comes bundled with WordPress and almost every WordPress blog has this installed. All you need, to get this working is an API key which you can get by signing up for a WordPress.com account.
All in One SEO Pack – Improve Your Ratings
Author: hallsofmontezuma. Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization – SEO). The All-in-One SEO” plugin takes your blog to the next level of search engine power management. This plugin should be at the top of your list, a must have. All in One SEO allows you to add in your own meta description, title tags and keywords for individual blog posts and pages.
Contact Form 7
Author: Takayuki Miyoshi. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple mark-up. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, simple but flexible CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Deepest Sender
Deepest Sender is a blogging client that runs inside Firefox, SeaMonkey, and XULRunner. What does this mean? Well, it means that instead of having to go to the Update page on LiveJournal/WordPress/Blogger/whatever, or loading up a separate client program, all you have to do is hit Ctrl+\, or click the button in your toolbar, and you can start posting.
FeedBurner FeedSmith
You need some way to manage your feed, keep track & analyze your feed traffic and FeedBurner is just that. After you register with FeedBurner, download & install FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin to forward your local feeds to FeedBurner. This ensures better tracking of every subscriber.
Google Analyticator
Every WordPress blog needs some kind of statistics system to keep track of things and Google Analytics is an advanced stats system that can be a bit overwhelming to beginners. Nevertheless I think you must sign up for it right from the beginning and you can analyse your traffic more in depth later on after you get used to things. For Google analytics to work, you need to put in the tracking code into your WordPress template by editing it. But instead this plugin Google Analyticator can add the tracking code to your blog without having to edit the template.
Organizer
Author: Imthiaz. Use this plugin to organize, rename, resize, and manage files in your image-upload folder.
ShareThis
If your readers find your post valuable, they might want to send it to their friends or submit it to social media websites. ShareThis plugin for WordPress adds a button at the end of your posts to make it easier to do this.
Simple Tags
Versions from WordPress 2.3 and on support native tagging but lack the administration to manage these tags in anyway. Now, there are many plugins for this purpose but Simple Tags is the best among these in terms of its features and simplicity. This plugin can do a lot more than just manage tags – it can tag pages and feeds, suggest tags based on the written content, add related posts, generate and display tag clouds and lots more.
note: Do this if using ‘all in one seo pack’ – go to ‘Options’ and under ‘Meta Keyword’ make sure the ‘Automatically include in header’ option is unchecked.
WP Super Cache – Don’t Overload Your Site
This plugin is responsible for saving lots of downtime and server crashes for blogs overloading with traffic.WP Super Cache plugin increases the page/post loading time and reduces the resource consumption on your server.
WP125
125×125 Ad Management plugin for WordPress. If you sell ads directly on your blog using block advertising (125×125 ads), then you will know how time consuming it can be to administer the advertisements. This plugin will not only reduce the administration time but manage the rotation of ads so giving your advertisers equal exposure.
The WP125 plugin can help you manage your ads more efficiently. The plugin adds a new "Ads" menu to the WordPress admin, featuring submenus for tweaking display settings and adding and removing ads.
WPtouch iPhone Theme
Unfortunately most sites don’t look that great on an iPhone but the WPTouch plugin (theme) makes your blog completely accessible and easy to read through the iPhone. If you’re interested in this part of the market this is definitely worth checking out.
YARPP
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) Don’t let your old posts die and get lost for ever. Try adding YARPP to the bottom of your post and show a list of your older related posts as well. This brings new traffic and attnetion to your older posts.
You may also be interested in the following:
Your Comments
Every one of us has our own way of looking at life. We all have our own way of seeing things. Do you have a view that others would like to hear? Lets have your view, just enter it below (each comment also gets a link back for the search engines). Thanks - Philip King.