Essential Wordpress Plugins
When starting a new blog, as I have done with this one, it is important to get everything set up not only the way you want it, but the way that will allow your website to perform more efficiently for yourself, your visitors, and for search engines. Below are some of the initial plugins that I have installed so far on this blog, and I think you would benefit from as well on your own blog, whether it’s new or old.
All of the plugins listed below are free to download from the respective publisher at the time of this writing.
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This plugin is a great plugin for search engine optimization, that basically does most of the SEO work for you as soon as you install it. The only thing I changed was the Homepage description and keywords as I was satisfied with the default values that came with the plugin regarding post titles, etc. This plugin alleviates the need for the Duplicate Content Cure Plugin because it has those features included (nofollow attached to categories, archive pages, etc. —you also have the option to turn this on or off).
I’m a big fan of submitting my sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and Yahoo! Explorer because while there is really no way to prove it, it seems as though search engines treat your website as more “legitimate” when you have a sitemap submitted and your website verified through their services.
This plugin will generate a Google-compatible sitemap everytime you add a new post, and also has other features such as robots.txt generator, and the ability to use your Yahoo! API key to notify them whenever you update your website.
Do you have a large ping list that you have Wordpress call whenever you publish/edit a blog post? Well, if you do, you’ve probably noticed an annoying delay (feels a lot like lag) after you press the ‘Publish’ button. This delay is because all of those pinging services are being notified before letting you get on with your business, so this plugin calls the ping list separately (you’ll have to visit the website for more technical details on what exactly goes on) so there is no more delay that is caused by pinging your blog.
I personally use a very large ping list so this is handy. To see my current ping list for Blogging HQ, Click Here (txt file opens in new window).
If you’ve ever run a blog for a significant amount of time, whether it becomes popular or not, if you do not have some sort of comment-spam security, you’ll inevitably get bombarded with SPAM comments on your blog everyday. Even if you have your comments set to approve-first, it is still a very time-consuming and annoying process. My absolute favorite comment-spam preventer is reCAPTCHA, which is what you see whenever you post a comment to this blog.
Another great feature that comes along with the reCAPTCHA service is the ability to attach a human verification whenever you need to display your Email address. With this plugin, the only way to receive SPAM on your blog or to your Email address is if an actual human being comes to your website and does it manually. Thankfully, most comment-spam is automated by scripts. Since installing this plugin, I rarely ever receive SPAM, unless its a human trying to be clever.
This is a simple plugin that places a bar at the end of each post (or page if you choose) that allows visitors to easily bookmark your post if they like it. You can see it at the end of this post (at the time of this writing) and on the pages around the blog. I’ve yet to see if this plugin is worthwhile, but it doesn’t detract from the look of the blog and I figure it can’t hurt anything so if only ONE person ever bookmarks a post on this blog using this plugin’s icon bar that wouldn’t have otherwise, then it is worth it in my book.
I also haven’t been using this plugin long enough to say whether or not it is a great help; however, I’ve read on quite a few other established blogs that it is a good idea to remind visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed at the end of each post. This plugin makes that text (or image if you do some simple editing as I have done) automatically appended to each blog post. You can see it in action on this blog. Just scroll down to the end of this post and you’ll see an RSS reminder image. I had to do some simple editing of the plugin file to replace the image with text, if you have trouble doing this let me know and I’ll give you the code you need to make that happen.
This is also a great plugin, especially for those that are going to be running very informational blogs that your readers may want to print. WP-Print will render your post (after they click the Print icon) into a printer-friendly format. I only have a few gripes with this plugin so far, and that is it renders plugins that affect your post as well. If you click the Printer icon at the top of this post, you’ll see that the Sociable bookmark icons and the RSS-Remind image are rendered in the post, as well as their links listed at the bottom of the post.
I was going to disable WP-Print because of this, but I figure if readers need to print a post, the bookmarklet icons and the RSS-Remind is a lot less printer-intensive than printing the page as-is.
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That concludes my list of plugins that I think no blogger should be without. I have a few other plugins installed, but they are more personal preference than anything. The one’s listed above I feel are essential to performance in terms of you as the editor, your visitors/readers, and search engines—all of which are very important to the overall long-term success of your blog.
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