5 must-have WordPress plugins
Sure, WordPress has a lot of great features right out of the box, but what about the serious users who are always looking for more? As many of you probably already know, there are tons of user-created plugins available for WordPress. To help you sort out the gems, I’ve compiled a list of the 5 must-have WordPress plugins. If you are serious about blogging and increasing your readership, you really should be using these plugins.
- Akismet – Akismet is like a junk-mail folder for the comments on your blog. There are lots of spammers out there flooding blogs with comments linking back to their site. If your blog is even mildly popular, you will get comment spam. It’s a major pain to try and sort through all those manually. Just like your junk-mail folder in your email automatically filters the spam out of your inbox, Akismet filters what it thinks are spam comments into a separate area where you can review it or completely ignore it. Since installing Akismet, I’ve yet to see any comment spam make it through.
- WP-Cache – A simple to use yet powerful caching module. Enabling caching of your posts can help your blog survive the “digg effect” or other surges in traffic because WordPress doesn’t need to query the database as often.
- Sociable – This plugin automatically adds links to your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like digg, del.icio.us, and reddit. Getting good exposure on these sites can help to increase your readership. The extra traffic brought in by these sites can also bring you in some extra income if you have any sort of advertising on your site.
- Related Posts – Displays a list of (possibly) related posts. This makes it easy for your readers to see other articles you have written that may interest them. The easier you make it for people to find your content, the more likely they will be to actually read it.
- Postie – This plugin greatly enhances the post-by-email feature of WordPress. By default, this feature is fairly limited (posts have all their html tags stripped, no support for attachments, no tagging abilities). After installing this plugin, it is pretty simple to setup a cron job to run the script at a regular interval to check for new posts. Now that my post-by-email options have been opened up, I’ve found myself writing quite a few posts this way. Anything that increases your options when it comes to posting will be good for the health of your blog.
There you have it. 5 must-have WordPress plugins that no self-respecting blog should be without. There are plenty more out there worth mention, but I just wanted to touch on what I feel are the most important ones; the ones that will make the most difference for your blog. They won’t help you write good content, but they will make it easier for readers to find what you’ve written. And isn’t that what we’re all here for?
This article was originally posted on my personal blog – brandon wood
Download Design
November 2nd, 2006 at 7:44 pm
I’m not sure you’re on track with #3. One look at all the top blogs on Technorati will show a very small minority that utilize social bookmarking buttons. I received so much flack on my site that I added some Javascript to hide and show them!
I’d put the Contact Form in at #3 and shamelessly promote my Spam fighting modification:
http://douglaskarr.com/2006/09/22/wordpress-contact-form-with-spam-protection/
Doug
November 2nd, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Doug, you say that a very small minority of the top blogs on Technorati utilize social bookmarking buttons. I think one reason for this is many of those blogs were already popular when the whole social bookmarking revolution began, so they don’t need to beg for attention. For some of us newer kids on the block, we need every bit of help we can get!
November 7th, 2006 at 11:43 am
I’d say BadBehavior 2 + SpamKarma2 would be a good thing too.
Feedburner plugin, Gravatars, Sitemaps (to submit to search engines)
I don’t use #2 and #5, #2 is fine for serious high traffic blogs, and I personally don’t post by email.