WordPress Plugins You Should Be Using

A plugin is basically a little piece of code that integrates with–or plugs into–your WordPress blog. Most plugins are open source and free, and can be found via the WordPress plugin directory. At this time there are more than 4,000 plugins available, from the very silly Hello Dolly plugin that comes with every installation of WordPress, to the more serious WP Super Cache, which makes your website load faster, so your readers don’t have to wait.

Here are the basic plugins that I use on every WordPress install I do for my clients.

• WP Super Cache: Like I said in the first paragraph, this plugin works behind the scenes to make your website load faster.
• Akismet: Akismet puts an end to spam comments and trackbacks on your blog. This one actually comes pre-installed with WordPress–it’s just that good.
• Bad Behavior: Bad Behavior catches the spam-bots before they ever even get to your site. It works by blocking known bad ip addresses and preventing them from seeing or commenting on your site.
• Contact Form 7: Contact Form 7 is a simple contact form builder. It’s simple to set-up and use, and is adequate for most sites.
• Google Sitemaps Generator: A sitemap is simply a way of informing the search engines about pages available for crawling on your website. This plugin automatically builds a sitemap and submits it to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com for you. You don’t have to worry about proper format or compliance, Google Sitemaps Generator takes care of everything for you.
• Platinum SEO Plugin: SEO (search engine optimization) is an important part of your website design if you want to get noticed by the search engines. Platinum SEO Plugin makes it easy to add the tags and attributes in the right places to get your pages indexed properly. It’s as simple as filling in a form.
• WordPress Database Backup: Does exactly what it says. Don’t rely on your hosting company for this. Servers fail. Don’t lose months or years worth of posts when your’s does. This can be as simple as scheduling a daily or weekly backup to be emailed to you.
• Remove Stopwords from Slug: A slug is the trailing part of the page address. In a blog, it’s generally the title of the post. This plugin removes small, insignificant words from the slug, leaving a much more search engine friendly address. For example, /wordpress-plugins-you-should-be-using becomes /wordpress-plugins. Shorter, and easier for the search engines to understand.
• Theme Test Drive: Theme test drive allows you to change your theme, tweak the colors and fonts and graphics, all without your visitors seeing. When you’re done remodeling, turn off Theme Test Drive, and your visitors will see a new site. They’ll never even have to look at the dust!
• WordPress.com Stats: This is a simple little statistics package for those who either don’t want the flood of information Google Analytics gives you, or who just want an easy to access graph of how many visitors they get in a day–maybe in addition to the flood of information Google gives you.

As I said at the beginning, these are just a few of the more than 4,000 plugins available for WordPress blogs. Share with us in the comments the plugins you use, and why you find them useful.

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Tagged as: comments, plugins, SEO, spam, stats

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