WordPress Plugins You Should Use
by Hal Major
If you have a self-hosted blog using WordPress, and you should, you’ll want to extend its capability using plugins. Plugins are scripts, usually created with PHP coding, that turn your plain vanilla blog into Double Chocolate Rocky Road with sprinkles on top. Okay, I wish I hadn’t written that because now I’m hungry.
Anyway, if you use your website as an actual blog with frequent posts and comments allowed, opposed to a static site with sales and squeeze pages, here are the plugins you should use.
tomsaint11
Must Have WordPress Plugins:
Click the plugin name to go to its download page.
Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” Usually comes pre-installed in WordPress.
Do Follow: Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. The basic idea of blogging is to share information and knowledge across the web. When someone leaves a good comment on one of your posts you should return the favor by allowing their comment to link back to their blog.
Feedburner/FeedSmith: Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. Google acquired Feedburner sometime ago. They are starting to redirect Feedburner feeds through Google feeds. I voluntarily switched mine over to Google a few weeks back and there has been no change in the service or use.
Global Translator: Automatically translates a blog in 34 different languages (English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Norwegian,…) by wrapping four different online translation engines (Google Translation Engine, Babelfish Translation Engine, FreeTranslations.com, Promt). You get more visitors and RSS subscribers if folks can read your posts in their native language.
Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. By generating an XML coded sitemap and updating it automatically with each new post or page helps the search spiders catalog your site quickly and completely resulting in better search engine rankings.
MBP Ping Optimizer; Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. By default WordPress pings whenever you post a new topic in your blog. That’s fine and that’s what we want. But do you know WordPress also pings whenever you edit and update any existing post? If you edit a post 10 times then WordPress will send 10 pings. It doesn’t matter how small or big a change you make, WordPress always pings whenever you edit. If you ping too much and often the ping services will block your pings – not good.
Platinum SEO Pack: Complete SEO solution for your WordPress blog. The most popular SEO plugin has been the All-In-One-Seo plugin, but it requires quite a lot of manually inserting of information for each post. The Platinum SEO Pack has automated some of this. I installed it about a month ago and never looked back.
SEO Post Link: Automatically makes your post link short and SEO friendly by removing unnecessary words from your post slug. Search engine spiders use “stop” words when indexing and crawling your site. The more stop words there are, especially in the post title, the longer it takes for the spider to determine what your post is about. Eliminate the stop words and the spiders immediately know and catalog your post resulting in more favorable search results.
SimplePie Core: Does little else but load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it. Many WordPress plugins use SimplePie. Unfortunately they may being using different versions. Installing the SimplePie Core it eliminates conflicts between multiple SimplePie-based plugins installed at the same time. And, makes it easier for people to get the latest SimplePie enhancements without requiring a new release from WordPress plugin developers.
StatPress: The most popular stat package for WordPress was WP-Stats. It’s good and I used it before I found StatPress. StatPress is more detailed and IMO easier to setup and configure. The other thing I didn’t like about the WP-Stats plugin that everytime I log in to the Admin area it would jump to the WP-Stats data at the bottom of the dashboard page. This is annoying if you log in several times a day but only check you stats once or twice.
What Would Seth Godin Do: You probably seen this plugin at work. You visit a site and there is a message either at the top or bottom of the post that reads: “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.
WP-DBManager; Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. If your database becomes corrupted you lose everything on your site. You heard it before “backup, backup and then backup.”
WP-Auto Tagger: Automatically finds tags based on your post content. Tags are like keywords. This plugin uses the Yahoo API to suggest tags based on the post content. You have the option to automatically tag posts on save or get tag suggestions with a single click. Auto Tagger will not replace your existing tags and you can manually add or delete tags.
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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In honor of Bastille Day, I am going to stage an uprising at work. : 07/14/09 05:09pm
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Comments
9 Comments on WordPress Plugins You Should Use
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vinay on
Wed, 11th Feb 2009 2:39 am
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Hal Major on
Thu, 12th Feb 2009 5:37 am
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The Blogger Source on
Thu, 12th Feb 2009 8:52 pm
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Jim Spaulding on
Sat, 21st Feb 2009 12:45 pm
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Hal Major on
Sat, 21st Feb 2009 2:12 pm
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NiceBlogger from DoFollow on
Fri, 4th Sep 2009 4:06 pm
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Zenmed on
Thu, 24th Dec 2009 10:54 am
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Hammad | Laptop on
Tue, 9th Mar 2010 6:13 pm
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wordpress on
Mon, 26th Apr 2010 10:07 am
I liked the plug ins. These make your blog look so much better. I only wish I could use some of these for my Blogger blog. These make your blog look so much better and help you bring your readers back and stick to your blog. Damn if had only started my blog on WordPress.
vinay’s last blog post..Commenting Is Good For Bloggers
Hi Vinay,
Thanks for the compliment on my site.
My blog is self-hosted on Hostgator. If you’re interested in doing a self-hosted blog let me know. I can get you setup for 6.95 a month.
You can then redirect your current blog to the new automatically.
Hal
Great list, they are all solid plugins that anyone using WordPress should and must be using.
The Blogger Source’s last blog post..Top 100 Blogging Tips
Hal,
Great recommendations here. I am running a self hosted wordpress site myself and use several of the plugins you mention: Google XML Sitemaps, WP-DBManager,Akismet, Global Translator. They are all among my favorite plugins in use and I definitely second the recommendation on all of the above. I am running the All-In-One-Seo and have wondered if I ought to switch up to the Platinum. After reading your review, I’m on my way to do it now.
Sincerely,
Jim Spaulding
P.S. One minor point: The links in your posts(including the gravatar link above this comment feild) open in the same window. Perhaps you have a reason for this, but it makes the reader work to get back to your site. Is there a reason for not targeting them blank?
Jim Spaulding’s last blog post..The Middleman
Hi Jim Spaulding,
Thanks for the great comment. I forgot to edit my comments.php for a blank target on the gravatar link. Done.
All the other links I have setup to open in a new window/tab. Checks out okay.
I’ll stop by your blog and leave a note.
See ya,
Hal
I just installed “What Would Seth Godin Do”,i wanted to installed for a long time but i always forgot about it.Great plugins list.
NiceBlogger@DoFollow´s last blog ..Digg Added NoFollow on All External Links 
I think that you have missed Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. It doubled my page views after installation.
Zenmed´s last blog ..Hello world!
It’s very nice post.
Hammad | Laptop´s last blog ..Disney Netpal Princess Pink Netbook Review
Some plugins are essential to a blog, for example, anti spam plugin, but being overloaded with plugins is not a good sign. When your blogs gets heavy and loading time increases, I suggest the first thing you need to do is disable some plugins. Plugins overload your website by adding unnecessary functionality.
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
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