10 Great Plugins For Wordpress Blogs
One of the great advantages of using Wordpress as your content management system is the wide range of free (and commercial) plugins you can install that add extra functionality and enable you to do just about anything.
This article provides an overview of some of the best free plugins that you’ll want to get and use on your site. They’ll help make your site more secure, push it up the search engine rankings, and generally enhance the overall experience for your readers.
Akismet
This is quite an obvious one as Akismet comes pre-installed with Wordpress – however, it’s surprising how many people don’t activate it when starting a new blog. This might be down to the perceived hassle of having to get a Wordpress API key to enable Akismet, but it’s actually a very simple process and once you have your API key you can use it again and again on different Wordpress installations). This plugin is important to activate as it blocks spammy comments from appearing on your site and generally helps keep things nice and tidy.
All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack is a very useful plugin for optimizing your site for the search engines. Once activated, it allows you to easily add a title, description, and some related keywords to your post that will help the search engines understand more about the content of your pages and posts. This can work especially well if you do some keyword research and target “good” keywords to use (i.e. ones with a good amount of traffic and less competing pages).
cformsII
This is a great plugin that provides you with lots of flexibility when creating different forms for your site. This can really save you some time as you don’t have to spend hours building your own contact forms – instead you can install and activate this plugin and have nice and professional forms up and running in no time.
Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is another plugin that will potentially help you out when it comes to search engine rankings. It automatically creates an XML Google Sitemap for your site whenever you add new content – this is useful as it explicitly informs Google about all the different pages on your site, and increases the likelihood that they will be indexed and get some traffic.
Tweetmeme Button
This plugin allows your blog posts to be retweeted by your readers and also provides a count value of how many times your posts have been retweeted in twitter. Nice and simple, and does exactly what it says on the tin!
Social Bookmarks
The Social Bookmarks plugin is useful to install if you want to spread your content around social media sites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Stumbleupon and Technorati. This can have many advantages – obviously more people will be exposed to your content and will be more likely to visit your site, and it can also result in backlinks that can help push your site up in the search engine rankings. The plugin works by putting some graphical links at the bottom of your blog posts that makes it very easy for people to add your posts and articles to a social bookmarking site.
WP-cache
WP-cache is a very popular Wordpress plugin predominantly because it helps speed up the time it takes for your website pages to load. This helps to enhance your reader’s experience when they visit your site and will generally make it much nicer to use (nobody likes slow response times!). Well worth installing and activating.
WP-PageNavi
WP-PageNavi isn’t necessarily an essential plugin, but it does a nice job of allowing users to navigate around your blog posts. It works by replacing the standard previous and next posts links at the bottom of your posts with a more intuitive and helpful navigation system.
WP-DBManager
It is essential that you regularly backup your Wordpress database – if you don’t do this, you are at risk of losing large amounts of work if anyone managed to hack into your site. Whilst backing things up isn’t the most exciting of tasks, WP-DBManager helps make this easier and more manageable by automating the whole process – it also enables you to do lots of other things such as repairing and restoring databases, deleting previous backups (to save space), and to run queries on your database.
WP Security Scan
Wordpress blogs are regularly targeted by spammers – it’s therefore important to keep a close eye on how secure your blog is and to be aware of any vulnerabilities it might have so that they can be quickly rectified. WP Security Scan is a plugin that helps you do just that – it will inform you of all the areas on your site that need tightening up so that you can ensure everything is water tight.
There are lots of other plugins that are worth mentioning, but these are just ten different ones that I’ve found useful.
And remember – they’re all free to download! Can’t get better than that …
