10 Useful WordPress Plugins That I Use
As we all know, WordPress is a great platform for publishing high quality content, it allows anyone and everyone to start a blog and customize it in many different ways. The great thing about WordPress is the plug-ins, they are really fantastic and allow you to expand and diversify your blog. I decided to share some of the WordPress plugins I use to make this blog the best it can be. Plug-ins can be great, but using too many can sometimes affect load time and overall performance of your site, so be careful.
1. Akismet
Akismet is a fantastic plugin that takes the work out of managing spam comments. It has defended my blog from literally thousands of spam comments and you should really be using it. (You need a Wordpress API Key, you can get this by creating a Wordpress.com account and attaining one from there)
Another great little plugin, allowing you to check your site for broken links, if there are any, they will be displayed on your dashboard. It is great because it gives you that extra little bit of insight and control over your blog.
This fantastic little tool allows you to track all previous and current feed subscriptions to your site and redirects them to your current FeedBurner feed, great for people looking for lost subscribers.
This plugin allows you to track visitors coming to your blog, you can find out, pageviews, posts clicked on, referrers and what visitors clicked on. Great if you are trying to identify what kind of content people like.
Another great plugin, this allows your readers to subscribe to comments on a particular post that they commented on, it is good because they can find out if someone responded to their particular comment or if they were asking a question in relation to the post.
A great plugin, allowing you to give some well deserved links to your top commentators, I currently display the widget on the homepage only (good for those who do not want to get slapped by Google).
7. Share This
Although I am using the JavaScript version of Share This, it is a great plugin that I highly recommend anyone use, it reduces the load time of my front page, I did not like the Sociable plugin because it just had too many images that needed loading.
If you are looking for something to populate your sidebar, or give some active participants some extra link love, Get Recent Comments will be a useful plugin.
This is a simple plugin, it adds the Google Analytics tracking script to your blog so you don’t need to go and fix or meddle in the theme files. It is really good if you are a person that likes things automated.
A great plugin that prevents spam comments, you must type in what the anti spam image displays otherwise you will be unable to successfully comment on the blog.
I use four or five more plugins, but these are my main ones. What WordPress plugins do you use? Tell Me About It Below by Commenting, Thanks!
No related posts.
Tags: akismet, feedburner feedsmith, google analytics, share this, wordpress plugins
Posted in WordPress News
Did You Enjoy Reading This Article? If Yes, Subscribe To My RSS Feed!
- 69 ways to jump on the online money market - Strip Blog | Strip Blogging
8 Responses to “10 Useful WordPress Plugins That I Use”
Thanks for the list! There are a couple on here that I have not added which will be really useful.
moneyloveandchange’s last blog post..Retirement savings part i - the 401k and pension
Thanks for sharing your 10 useful wordpress plugins. There are some I’ve never heard of, so I’ll have to check those out.
Randomguru’s last blog post..The Garden: After The Rains
Plugins make Wordpress great, but you need to know the good ones. Glad I could help you, Subscribe via RSS for more quality content always!
Thanks,
Fabien
Out host actually asked us to turn off the “Subscribe To Comments” plug-in the last time our traffic exploded thanks to Digg. Apparently, it was using a tremendous amount of SQL resources, and was made worse by the 50 subscribers that post had. Turning it off made a HUGE difference, and we haven’t turned it back on since..
Thanks for the heads-up on FeedBurner FeedSmith, I’ll definitely be checking that out.
Zander Chance’s last blog post..Affiliate Marketing and Income Taxes
Thanks for your comments Zander, I will probably leave it on for now because it is a useful tool for anyone wanting to keep updated. I’ll see how it goes with regard to future surges in traffic.
Many thanks,
Fabien (SF Admin)
I am late finding this post, but it is a good one. I do wonder what you mean by the statement below. I display the top commentator list in my sidebar so it does show on every page. Why is this considered bad by Google?
“I currently display the widget on the homepage only (good for those who do not want to get slapped by Google).”
When you calculate the amount of posts you have written, 500, 1000, 1500 or even more. Imagine those 6 to 8 outgoing links on each and every single blog post that has the right sidebar present. A huge amount of links to different web-pages are therefore present on each page, and you are spreading your link-power thin.
By the above I simply mean that you should limit the amount of pages to which you link to, and only link to them if they are relevant to what you are talking about and/or if you want the page to rank greater in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking PageS). I hope that answers your question, if it doesn’t do so fully, I encourage you to contact me via email so it can be explained further.
This only matters more for new blogs as opposed to blogs that have been around for a couple of years. New blogs are trying to get out of the Google SandBox and they can only do so if their blogs are not seen to be linking externally excessively.
For a blog like yours which has a Google PageRank of 5, it doesn’t really matter too much. Especially because you have a great internal linking structure. My SEO tools show that 254 internal links and only 24 outgoing links (this is fantastic, which is why you need not worry about the whole Google Slap thing).
The feared “Google Slap” only occurs to blogs which Google thinks are offering people to option to buy ‘paid links’ or are doing Sponsored or Paid Reviews and not using the “nofollow” attribute on external links within the post. Thanks again Will and I hope to hear from you soon. Kind Regards, Fabien.