Recommended WordPress Plugins
This is a follow up to my last post:
How to Install WordPress
After mentioning several plugins that I recommend every blogger use, I decided I would write a nice post that details exactly what they are and why I think they’re worth using. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what plugins you feel should be added to, or removed from, the list.
AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button: You’ll see my use of this plugin at the bottom of every post. Essentially, it’s a button that opens a menu allowing your readers to submit your posts to a vast variety of social bookmarking and networking sites. This is helpful because it can aid in your search engine optimization efforts and bring exposure to your website.
Akismet: This plugin is uploaded with your WordPress installation by default. All you need to do is register and get an API Key to activate it. It helps fight spam, quite efficiently, which protects your blog in a number of ways. Akismet protected this blog from 4,112 spam comments already!
All in One SEO Pack: The name pretty much gives this one away. It’s a plugin that helps to optimize your blog for search engines, which helps you rank higher. It’s extremely handy and can save you a lot of time.
AntiVirus: This is a simple security plugin that helps protect your blog from exploits and spam injections. Options allow you to have it run daily, and send a warning to an email address of your choosing if it finds anything, or simply run it manually whenever you please. It runs a scan of all theme-related files.
Contact Form 7: Not much to really say about this one… it’s a contact form. If you take a look at my Contact Me page, you’ll see it in action. It’s simple, but it helps create a line of communication between you and your readers.
Google XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps are useful for search engine optimization because they tell spiders where your content is at. This plugin creates a valid .xml sitemap and even notifies the major search engines whenever you update your content.
Login LockDown: Being the security conscious webmaster that I am, I jump on any plugins that will help protect my hard work, and you should do the same. LoginLockdown makes a timestamped log with the IP address of every failed login attempt. Once a certain number occurs, the IP address is locked out for a specified period of time. You’ll also have the option of manually locking out IP addresses, if you wish.
Redirection: This plugin will assist you by managing 301 redirections, tracking all 404 errors, and tidying up loose ends. Generally, it supports your SEO efforts and keeps things neat and clean.
Robots Meta: This one helps significantly with SEO and fights potential duplicate content issues. It can prevent the indexing of search results, subpages, the login, admin, and registration pages, certain archives, and more! I noticed very beneficial results after implementing this plugin.
SEO Slugs: Removing common words such as ‘a’ and ‘the’ from your URLs can help improve your blog’s optimization for search engines, and this plugin does just that.
WordPress Hashcash: I like this plugin because it helps verify that a comment is being left by a person viewing your website in a browser, and not a robot, which certainly helps cut down the number of spam comments you’ll have to trash.
WP Security Scan: Another fantastic security-improving plugin! This one helps ensure your passwords are not easy to figure out, file permissions are correct, and it even confirms that your database is secure. Furthermore, it hides your WordPress version, to reduce the exploitation of possible vulnerabilities, and even removes the WP Generator META tag from your site.
WP Super Cache: This is one of those plugins I certainly can’t live without. It helps cut down on server strain and resource usage by caching your files and serving them more efficiently to your readers. There are a lot of options that help make it work exactly the way you need it to, such as expiration dates for the cache, whether or not you want logged in readers to see cached files, whether or not you want the cache refreshed when you make a new post, etc. Definitely a must-have.
