Most Important Wp Plugins (Beside the Usuals!) Must SEE!!!!

Greetings everyone! Wordpress Wordpress Wordpress! It's simply the best platform ever! So many plugins and themes to choose from, so much hacks and customizations available!

Anyway, after one of my post here in digital point about which wordpress plugins you should NOT use, I got two PMs asking for which important plugins you should use beside the usual All in One SEO, Akismet, Feedburner feedsmith and Google XML Sitemaps. The answer of what different plugins you will need can be broken down in two scenarios, one based on the type of theme you are using and the other, what type of blog you have. Some plugins are more suited to traditional blogs and some are more suited to CMS blogs or magazine blogs.

I am sure most of us are objective oriented and want to have good traffic and an efficient SEO for the blog. We also want a good number of RSS subscribers and want visitor comments every now and then!

For SEO purpose All in One SEO does the job smoothly and for Google/Yahoo! Spider related crawling, XML sitemap generator is simply irreplaceable. Spam can be whacked pretty well with Akismet alone but if you are over conscious then you can always use the Recaptcha plugin for comment control.

1) Now comes the interesting part! Some people always wonder how one shows a colorful, bold, Subscribe reminder plugin like in Problogger or even in my site. When you google it you will see the plugin named “Subscribe Reminder” pop up which really is kind of lame compared to what you see in most good blogs. The actual plugin for subscription reminder for visitors is actually called “What would Seth Godin Do” or WWSGD. In WWSGD you can control the colors through an easy interface and can also stylize the borders, links, actual comment etc. If you are new to CSS then I advice you to check the W3Schools.com or Tizag.com tutorials, they are easy and straight to the point. In both places you will find the information on how to stylize your own subscription reminder plugin so that it looks like a part of the blog and also stands out as a highlighted content drawing attention. Be creative!

2) Next comes one of the most important and overlooked plugins of all time, Wp-Security! With almost one new thread popping up every hour in every forum saying that the blog was hacked, this plugin is a must have for any blogger. What it does is that it does a simple security scan regarding permissions and mysql queries, and in easy English tells you what you need to do to be safe!

3) Third, you can use the plugin called Hyper Cache, which is really an awesome plugin for high traffic blogs. Like Wp Cache and Super Cache it does the same, but it reduces the queries much more efficiently! Setting it up is super easy compared to wp cache or super cache! So all high traffic blogs who are complaining that wordpress is a resource hog, check this out immediately!

4) Fourth, if you embed videos in blogs directly then you should check out Wordpress You Tube 2, embedding you tube videos in wordpress just is as easy as a pie with this one. You can even change the colors of the video player’s frame, but that’s optional of course!

5) Fifth, you can use Popularity Contest! It simply shows the most popular posts according to some predetermined algorithms. Also there is a hack of this plugin available where you can disable the link of “?” from all posts. You can also choose to disable showing the percentage of popularity in single posts and show it only on the sidebar as a widget.

6) For banner management in your blog, you can check out the plugin called Adservers for Wordpress. It is a standalone plugin and serves the basic banner management of wordpress blogs pretty well. You can rotate your ads, specify dimensions etc.

7) “The Excerpts Reloaded”, one of my most favorite plugin which simply cuts off the post intelligently with a Read More thingy on the main blog homepage, static or dynamic. Pros, it is super lightweight! You can also use the multi function “If you Liked That” plugin for read more purpose, it is much easier to implement and also serves “related posts under you post by categories or tags” and “random posts”. The plugin is kinda medium weight as you would reckon cause it has multi function properties built it in by default.

8) For adsense, there are quite a few plugins like Adsense Injection, Adsense Manager, Adsense Deluxe etc. However, I personally like to edit the “single post” directly when it comes to adsense. (Don't only use adsense for monetization, check out this thread for a list of high paying CPM Networks!)

9) Another important plugin you can use is the “Page Link Manager” which shows the pages you want to display on the main navigation. As for example, you might not want to display the disclaimer or privacy policy on the main page navigation, but only want to display them in the footer. This plugin can do the trick for you.

10) If you want to increase the number of comments at your blog then you should use Brian’s Threaded Comments which really is one amazing plugin! It turns your comments template “Forum like”, so one can reply to someone’s comment directly by pressing Reply Here and the reply will nicely nest below the original comment.

11) If you are a SEO freak like me then you can also use Image Alt Tags for Wordpress, it simply assigns alternate attributes to images and the alt tag is generated automatically from your post tags or categories.

12) Gravatars is another plugin which you might use, it shows the gravatar obviously! However, you can also select random “Wavatars” in the gravatars plugin, what it does is show randomly generated emoticons for comments that have no gravatar issued.

13) Then then then, you can use Simple tags! It can show a tag cloud in your sidebar, link pre-specified tags automatically, generate related tags, etc. It is a great plugin for internal link building of your blog.

14) For social bookmarking you can either use Share This (uses javascript) or Socialable (which I use at my mobile blog, uses no follow links)

15) For database backups, you can use Wp Database Backup as it serves the purpose very well. It can generate, repair and email you the wordpress database every night from wordpress admin dashboard! Easy to operate!

16) If you ever suspect that you want to ban someone from visiting your site or blog then you can use Wp-Ban. It can ban specific email addresses or ip addresses from entering your blog. Very useful sometimes to be safe from hackers and fierce competitors.

That’s all I guess, if I am missing something then feel free to add your recommendations!

Cheerios!

 

Thanks for a great post godsofchaos, im going to take a closer look at Wordpress Youtube 2.

 

WOW Great stuff man.. what an awesome post.. makes me really want to take the plunge and start a blog type site, so I can play around with these plugins...
Unfortunately, I am only just starting to come to grips with plane ol HTML, and want to sorta get comfortable with that first..
But I have the feeling that when I eventually do, I will be saying... why didn't I do this years ago!

Cheers
James

 

Thanks a lot pipes! Wordpress YouTube is really awesome Am using it in my blog as well.

 

Lol thanks dude! But seriously you should go ahead with wordpress NOW, you dont have to learn any html or php for wordpress. I dont know anything about HTML honestly, but still blogging lol

 

Thanks for this list, I will download a few plugins I'm missing.

One simple plugin I never really hear of is easy-reply. It's very useful when you have a lot of comments since it lists automatically the latest commenters to reply to. Saves you the hassle of writing each commenter's name etc.

 

great read, thanks.
highlight the plugins word.

 

You are welcome bro... I have uploaded the plugin for you.. The normal doesnt work with the latest wordpress 2.5.1, so this is a tweaked version which works much better.

popularity-contest_080437.zip

 

Easy reply is quite good, however, if you use threaded comments then it will work the same, even better! and you are welcome!

 

Thanks for the list..rep to u
I have nearly used all of them

I want to add 2 at this moment

17) OneClick Installer :Install all themes and plugins directly by pointing the zip file URL
Will be useful if one want to install lot's of plugins and themes

18)WP-CodeBox: A must have plugin for syntax highlighting and AJAX advanced features for embedding source code within pages or posts.

 

This thread will be better if links can be provided to show us as where to get those mentioned plugins.

 

Nice compilation..
Rep Added..

 

Yeah but OneClick Installer is a must have like All In One Seo... or Sitemaps lol... hence didnt add it...

Codebox is one which I honestly forgot to add! My bad!

 

The mentioned plugins, well you can get all of them in wordpress Plugins directory!

Cheerios!

 

Thanks a lot Glad you liked it!

 

Thanks for this list. I'm just starting out and am totally fascinated. Been working as a designer for years and it is really eye-opening seeing what drives traffic around the web.

 

I found them all very easily by pasting the name in Google...

 

Is there anyone out there using those cache plugins, successfully, with GoDaddy hosting?
And yeah, I saw the fix, but it's still not working well for me.

 

tnx for sharing matei like your blog too.its pretty nice.just want to ask if its a plugin on your your articles there.i mean on your post topics.its kinda organize.i like it!!!