Top (must have) WordPress Plugins - Part II

Back in January I wrote a post entitled Top (must have) WordPress Plugins. The post received quite a bit of traffic and is still one of my most visited articles. That may be due to Lorelle picking up on it and linking to it from her excellent blog. Thank you kindly Lorelle!

Moving on…I have a friend who recently started a Wordpress blog and was wondering what plugins he should use. While poking around my site he stumbled upon my WP plugins post and is using a lot of what he saw there. When he wrote me to inquire on a few of the plugins I revisited my post and thought, “Whoa…I don’t use half of these plugins anymore!”. Hence I have decided, for my benefit as well as my readers, to write Part II of my Top (must have) WordPress Plugins.

Here is my updated alphabetical list of Wordpress plugins compiled to save you time and research:

• Add Meta Tags - An SEO plugin that adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog. Its design is based on the assumption that the WordPress categories are used as tags, so it requires no user configuration in order to work. On the other hand, the latest versions include all those features a SEO-concerned publisher would need in order to have total control over those meta tags.

• Akismet - Kind of a no-brainer. It comes with Wordpress as a default plugin. Activate it and use it if you wish to be as spam free as possible.

• Dean’s Permalinks Migration - This has been a life save to me. I found out the way I originally had my permalinks set, was not SEO. This plugin allows you to switch your permalink structure, to be as SEO as possible, without breaking you old links.

• Feedburner Feed Replacement - Another must have. This plugin forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. Feedburner helps bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

• Full Text Feed - There is a huge debate on whether you want to use full text RSS feeds or partial RSS feeds. Decide for yourself, but personally, you should be using full. Change the option under Options | Reading | Syndication Feeds | Change from partial to full. This will work, but if you split your long posts with the <!––more––> tag, it may break. This plugin fixes that “bug”.

• Global Translator - My traffic has increased by more than double since installing a translator plugin. I like this one because it works and it takes up minimal space on my sidebar. Once installed for awhile, you’ll be amazed how many Google searches from different countries point to your blog!

• Google Sitemaps - Not sure what a sitemap is…don’t worry, I’m not sure myself. However, I am sure that it’s a good idea for me to have one. Install this plugin and forget about it! PS…I’m daring, I use the Beta version.

• Gregarious - The plugin author has deemed this, “The ultimate social bookmarking plugin”. Personally I agree with him. The Gregarious plugin allows you to submit, comment on, and “promote” websites and allows for seamless integration between your Wordpress Blog and social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Reddit and more.

• Related Entries - This plugin will output a series of “related” entries based on keyword matching. It’s a great idea to have this plugin for your Wordpress blog.

• SEO Title Tag - This plugin makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plugin, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong!

• Show Top Commentators - This one is a must have as well, and will help encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.

• Smart Archives - If you don’t have an Archive page on your blog, use this plugin to create one. Having an archive page gives your readers an “index” of all your past posts…it’s a truly awesome feature.

• Subscribe To Comments - This is the single most important plugin you can have to bring return visitors back to your website.  STC allows commenter’s on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenter’s to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.  There is a debate on whether to leave the check box checked or unchecked, but that is entirely up to you!

• Top Posts by Category - When I visit a blog, I always like to see their best material.  You can place this in your sidebar, or create an entire page dedicated to your best blog posts.  Personally, I’m a big fan of this plugin on the top of my sidebar; using it this way allows your readers to see all your best articles by simply visiting your home page.  See this plugin in action by looking at the top of my left sidebar.

• Ultimate Tag Warrior - UTW gives us much needed control over the tags we use on each blog post.  Using this plugin will not only allow you to boost your SEO value immensely, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.  I love this plugin and have witnessed it’s value first hand.  I would never have a blog without this plugin.

• What Would Seth Godin Do - Yeah, I know, what the heck is this plugin?  Well, while the name is quite funny, the plugin itself is a very clever way to boost your RSS readership.  Seth Godin advocates using cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your site.  The plugin author used Seth’s line of thinking to produce WWSGD, which basically places an RSS subscription reminder, for first time visitors, on your posts.  See it in action on the plugin website.

• WordPress Database Backup - We all know we should backup our databases daily, but seriously, who has time for that?  Enter the Wordpress Database Backup plugin.  This plugin is a life saver, literally.  It simply adds automatic daily backup functionality for your all-important database.  Your can have the backups placed directly on your web server, or emailed to you.  Either way, if you don’t use this plugin, you’re just asking for trouble!

• WP-Cache 2.0 - If you don’t use this plugin and then “get Dugg“, you’ll crash your website.  WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Wordpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

• WP-Cron - Add cron functionality to your blog.  You have to visit this site and see all the tools this will enable.  Here is a brief description from the site:  WP-Cron provides a rudimentary support for scheduled execution of actions; a sort of “delayed action” processing for WordPress. It is nowhere near as robust as the actual UNIX cron facility, but should be good enough to “do stuff” on a fairly regular basis.

• WP-Email - Help spread the word with WP-Email.  This plugin allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.

• WP-SlimStat - Lorelle has a great post on all the available statistics plugins for Wordpress.  Read her post to help you decide.  I myself settled on WP-SlimStat.  It is simply a helpful statistics plugin for Wordpress.

I hope you enjoy this post and find it helpful.  It takes a lot of research time and puts it all available here, in one spot!  If this post is helpful to you, please hook a brotha up!

If you're new here, or you just enjoy the content, you may want to subscribe to my Email Alerts or RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!