Top 10 Wordpress Plugins

28. Oct, 2008 0 Comments

Top 10 Wordpress Plugins

I thought it would be helpful for people to have something like this if you’re using Wordpress.

These plugins are more for SEO, functionallity and usability of your site. Having these wordpress plugins will help with SEO efforts, spam and of course the “end user’s” experience.

Obviously the Top 10 are my opinion but I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions on other wordpress plugins that should be in the list. Maybe I can even add to this list!

Here we go… Top 10 Wordpress Plugins.

1. Ah yes, the All in One SEO Pack. Love this plugin.

Some features:

Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
Generates META tags automatically
Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

2. Google XML Sitemaps – Easy 1 Click Sitemap Installation.

This is a very important wordpress plugin for any blog. This should just be required for crying out loud! It gives your site the ability to display a nice little road map for the search spiders to crawl through your whole site.

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

3. Akismet – Life saving spam filter

Send those damn comments to the cleaners. I’m so over all of the spam I get on a daily basis. This spiffy little wordpress plugin checks against Akismet to see how dirty the comments really are. If they look at all suspicous… peace out nasty comments. Brilliant, you’ll love it.

When you install the Akismet Wordpress Plugin there is a bit more setup then adding the plugin to your (wp-content/plugins directory) and hitting activate. You will need to setup a wordpress account. Once you do that they will give you an API key which you will enter to complete the installation.

Don’t worry it’s very simple and like wordpress always does they hold you hand along the way… making installation much easier for you.

4. Share This – Post to Social Media Sites in Seconds

Let’s face it… We are some social SOB’s! The society is taking it all in and laying it all out.

I like this wordpress plugin over other Social Media wordpress widgets for two reasons.

1. It doesn’t take 10 million years to load all of the fancy logos and what not. I have used Sociable and others in the past, but they were bogging down my site like no one’s business.

2. It offers more then just allowing users to post to social media sites like the others. You know like Digg, Propeller (Netscape), Stumble Upon, Reddit, etc. You can also post it to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter. And the last thing is you can simply email it if you like.

I think that offers much more to the user, especially since everyone might not have accounts setup with the usual social sites. I like having options…

5. Tweet This – Allow users to Tweet your Posts

This plugin fetches a shortened URL from Th8.us for each of your blog posts’ permalinks server-side, then displays a link to Twitter for each post, with a cute icon. This is done automatically for each post as needed, but the shortened URLs are permanently cached (as a custom field in the postmeta table) to keep load times fast.

6. Related Posts – Show related posts at the end of a post

WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.

7. cformsII – Easily add a contact form

This is a must for your contact page! It’s also very easy to integrate.

cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

8. WP Polls- Get your users involved with Polls

WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

9. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – Save some brain cells.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

Wordpress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.

Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.

Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.

Puts the site in maintenance mode.

De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.

Upgrades wordpress files.

Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.

Re-activates the plugins.

The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.

10. WP Super Cache – Cache like you’ve never cached before!

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts…

…As this plugin is based on the older WP-Cache plugin you can switch off the Super Cache static html caching. Caching will still be performed, but every request will require loading the PHP engine. In normal circumstances this isn’t that bad, but if your server is underpowered, or you’re experiencing heavy traffic you may run into trouble. Super Cached html files will be server more quickly than PHP generated cached files so there’s very little reason not to use the Super Cache feature.

Did that make sense to everybody? Basically, you should install this plugin because visitors & subscribers of your blogs will have a much more enjoyable experience when they don’t have to wait for everything to load when they visit your site. Your pages will load much faster as Super Cache does it’s magic, creating a much better blogging party.

Well there you have it

I hope that was informative and helped point you in the right direction. This might be more of a beginner’s post but you’d be surprised how many people don’t take advantage of these simple plugins.

I would love any feedback on other plugins. I am sure I am not utilizing all of the plugins I should be using as well.

More to come…