TheMikeHallSoftware Engineer / Web Designer

6 Must Have Wordpress PluginsFiled Under: Reviews

Wordpress is great. I can run their software on my servers, they give me all the source code, and it has a great community constantly improving and extending. When I install Wordpress, however, the first thing I do is install these six plugins. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most of these plugins are eventually packaged with Wordpress like Akismet is. The “Google Analyticator” is a personal choice for me, but the rest of them, no one should be without.

All in One SEO Pack

Search engine optimization is easy to overlook on a blog, especially if your not too serious about gaining traffic. You should do at least the bare minimum, because if you do write something that get attention you need to be in a position to leverage it that attention. When your writing a post, this plugin lets you add a meta title, description and keywords. So now you get to tell the search engines exactly what they are looking at.

Akismet

You must have a spam fighting solution for Wordpress. Comments are over 80% spam and you don’t want to go through all them by hand. Akismet is a great non intrusive solution. It can eliminate all your spam without requiring the user to decode obscure characters (CAPTCHA). It comes with Worpress! All you have to do is activate it.

Google Analyticator

Don’t you want to know who’s been reading you blog? Wordpress provides good statistics for subscriptions, but Google Analytics tells so much more. There are plugins for other analytics services, but i use Google Analytics for all my sites, and this made it very easy to just drop it in.

Plugin Manager

I use my desktop computer for ‘work’, i.e. building websites, writing software, that sort of thing. I prefer to add to my blogs on my couch with a laptop. I don’t have all my passwords, and ftp accounts saved on my laptop, so I found this plugin. It lets me completely administrate my blog from any computer. It lets me download and install any Wordpress plugin directly from my web browser. I love it.

Share/Save Buttons

Social bookmarking sites are a great tool to get traffic to your blog. You want to make it as easy as possible for users to share your posts. The Share/Save Buttons plugin lets the user share your post with any method they choose. Including all the social bookmarking sites and any email client.

XML Sitemaps

There aren’t nearly enough automatic sitemap generators. Why doesn’t Aptana or Dreamweaver automatically update my sitemaps? Well there is a solution if you use Wordpress. Whenever your blog is modified, this tool will not only update your sitemap, but it will also notify Yahoo, MSN, and Google, that there has been a change and they should probably come check it out. It also provides a method to add pages that aren’t a part of the blog.

Tags: review, wordpress