If It Weren't For These Wordpress Plugins I Wouldn't Get Out of Bed

Summary:
A review of my favorite Wordpress plugins, because life's just not worth living without them.

1. All in one SEO pack

   Solves some duplicate content issues with Wordpress and allows you to enter Title, Description, and Keyword meta tags for each post/page.

2. Maintenance Mode

   Put your blog in maintenance mode so that visitors get a “down for maintenance” message when they visit, but you, when logged in, can still view the blog as normal.

3. Akismet (of course)

   I hope this doesn’t need explaining, and it comes with Wordpress, but it’s absolutely essential, so I included it here.

4. Feedburner Feedsmith

   Redirect your rss feeds to their counterparts in Feedburner. This allows you to track all subscribers to your feed through Feedburner instead of tracking some through Feedburner and not knowing about the rest that access your feed through http://yourblog.com/feed/

5. Recent comments

   Displays list of recent comments.

6. Recent posts

   Displays list of recent posts…why doesn’t Wordpress do this automatically?

7. Search meter

   Tracks searches through your blog’s search form. Tracks search terms, number of results for each search term, successful and unsuccessful searches. This is a killer way to find out what your visitors want to see on your blog. If you don’t have it, write about it, if you do have it, make sure they’re finding it successfully through your search form.

8. Show top commentators

   Displays a list of the most active commentators with various options, like linking to the top commentators’ websites.

9. Similar posts

   Displays a list of posts related to the current post. This is great for displaying relevant information and encouraging visitors to explore your blog further.

10. What would Seth Godin Do

    This little piece of gold displays a message the first n times a visitor arrives at your blog. The message can be displayed before or after posts and you can select how many times to display the message. Encourage new readers to subscribe to your feed or email newsletter, or just hop on one foot…whatever floats your boat.

11. wp-Super-Cache or wp-Cache

    Have you ever been taken offline completely because you got Dugg too hard? If you had this plugin that might not have happened. This saves pages on your site into static pages as they’re loaded. Then, when another visitor tries to view that page, instead of querying the database again (multiple times for each page), which can be resource heavy, the static html page is loaded from the cache. This dramatically decreases the load on your server and speeds page load times. If you have problems with wp-Super-Cache, wp-Cache may work for you.

 

2 Comments so far ↓

1. Captain Clean Boat says:

   December 6, 2008 at 9:50 pm

   Nice and usefull post, thanks, this is one for my bookmarks!

   Reply
2. paul says:

   June 1, 2009 at 5:03 pm

   Just to point out, it’s sad you wonder why wordpress doesn’t list recent posts automatically. It does in fact do this, you just need to learn a very minimal amount of coding.

   Learn to use wordpress, before you complain about what it does, or does not do.

   Reply