The Best WordPress Plugins

Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 3:49 pm

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I recently taught you how to get started online by installing WordPress to get your blog underway. I hope you took action and now have your own blog with some content on there.

The next action to take with your blog is to get some plugins installed and activated. Plugins allow you to do almost anything with your WordPress blog.

Below I will explain how to install and activate Plugins on your blog and then I will list a load of plugins that I believe you may find useful with your blog. I’ll provide a brief description and also link to each for your convenience.

How To Install WordPress Plugins
First of all you will need to login to your blog at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/. Enter your username and password to get to your WordPress dashboard and then click on the Plugins link in the menu down the left hand side.

This will display a few options underneath the Plugins option. Click on Add New.

You will now see a new page with a search option. Simply search for the name of the plugin that you want and then click on the install option that displays to the right of the plugin description.

Once you have installed the plugin, click the link that says Activate plugin and then you are good to go.

A majority of the plugins will come with settings that you will need to configure. To do this, simply find the name of the plugin in the left hand menu of your WordPress dashboard, click on it and you will be taken to that plugins settings page.

Now go through all the options and remember to click save once you’re done.

There are a couple of plugins that cannot be installed directly through WordPress. In that case, you have to download the plugin and then upload it into your WordPress plugins folder (/yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/) using FTP software. I recommend using FileZilla as it’s free and pretty easy to use.

These first few are plugins that I would definitely install onto your blog;

Akismet – Akismet protects your blog against spam. Once your blog has been around for a while, people will begin to leave comments that have nothing to do with your posts topic, usually promoting their own site. This plugin prevents that from happening. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

All in One SEO Pack – This plugin optimises your blog for the search engines. The better your blogs SEO, the more likely you are to get loads of free traffic from the search engines.

CommentLuv – This plugin rewards your readers and encourages more comments by linking back to their latest blog post.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog. You will want to sign up for Google Analytics. It allows you to keep track of the traffic going to your blog, providing you with allsorts of helpful statistics.

Google XML Sitemaps – Want the search engines to know about your blog? This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap that will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc to index your site better. Every time you update your blog, this plugin will alert the search engines. Kinda handy eh?

WordPress Popular Posts – Allows you to display a list of your most popular posts on your blog. Not only does this entice visitors to browse around your site more, it also pleases the search engines because they like to see you linking around your site.

Sociable – This is a great plugin to help get your name out there. It allows your visitors to promote your site on their favourite Web 2.0 sites. When you activate this plugin, you can choose which of your favourite social book marking sites to place a link to under each of your posts. If someone really likes your post, they can click on one of the links and spread the word.

Top Commentators Widget – Just like the CommentLuv plugin, this encourages more comments on your blog. It displays a list of the top commenters on your site with a link back to their site giving them some publicity for commenting (if they comment often enough).

WP Super Cache – This plugin can help with the speed that your blog pages load. The faster your pages load the better. After all, you don’t want people leaving your site because your pages take too long to load.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This lists related entries under each of your blog posts. If a visitor has enjoyed reading your post, it’s quite likely that they’ll be interested in reading posts that are related to what they have just read too. This plugin also links around your site, which is good for the search engines.

The following are plugins that you may find come in very handy;

Contact Form 7 – Want your visitors to be able to contact you? Use this very simple, yet flexible contact form.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customisable sitemap.

Email commenters – This allows your site administrators to email everyone that has commented on a post.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin redirects all your original WordPress feeds to your FeedBurner feed so that you can keep track of all your subscribers.

FollowMe – This simple allows you to add a Twitter FollowMe badge onto your site.

Header and Footer – This plugin lets you add html/javascript code to the header and footer of your blog pages. This saves you from having to mess about with your themes coding.

Maintenance Mode – This comes in very handy if your modifying your blogs layout. It adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – If you make a lot of changes to a blog post, this plugin saves your WordPress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer.

Minimum Comment Length – Check the comment for a set minimum length and disapprove it if it’s too short.

OnlyWire for WordPress – Allows you to submit your posts to your favourite social book marking sites as well as allowing your site visitors to do the same.

RSS Footer – Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site.

Simple Tags – Extended Tagging; Suggested Tags, Mass edit Tags, Auto completion, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Related Tags, etc!

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted on an entry.

Thank Me Later – Automatically sends a ‘thank you’ e-mail to those who comment on your blog.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which allows your visitors to retweet your blog posts.

TweetMyBlog! – Updates your twitter account every time you publish a new post to your blog.

What Would Seth Godin Do – Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to returning visitors.

WP-DBManager – Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize, repair, backup and restore your database. You can also schedule it to backup/optimise your database at a certain time.

WP-EMail – Allows site visitors to email their friends about your WordPress blog post/page.

WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam.

WP Security Scan – Performs a security scan of your WordPress installation.

Once you have installed a selection of plugins from above, you should be well on your way to having a blog that the search engines love and that people will want to comment on.

In my next blog post, I will go into customising your blog to make it appear much nicer. Until then, I suggest that you create plenty of content for your blog to attract the search engines and hopefully lead to plenty of visitors.

If you have any questions regarding this post or if I have missed out a great plugin from the list above, please let me know by leaving a comment below.

Cheers

Pete

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