So you did your arithmetic right and chose to have your dream website hosted on wordpress platform. Good. WordPress does makes life easy especially with plethora of free plugins available for almost every tidbits you may want.
Here is a list of 14 essential wordpress plugins that you may want to add to your site.
All in One SEO Pack: You have your website ready but you are no SEO specialist. This is a simple but powerful plugin that comes to your rescue.
- Easily add home keywords
- Use categories for META keywords
- Use tag for META keywords
- Dynamically generate keywords for the posts page.
- Use Noindex for categories, tags, archives
- Option to auto generate descriptions
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Easy AdSense: A best plugin for your adsense needs.
- It provides a very easy way to insert Google AdSense code into your existing blog posts.
- It gives you a widget to display ads in your sidebar, and another to show a Google Search box.
- Easily place adsense on top, bottom or middle of the post.
- Option to suppress adsense on any particular post.
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Google XML Sitemaps: A plugin to help you generate sitemap for your site with ease.
- It automatically notifies google, bing and yahoo.
- Automatically rebuilds sitemap whenever you make changes to your site.
- Option to exclude any particular category or post.
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Redirection: A very essential plugin to manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors.
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WordPress.com Stats: If you were earlier on wordpress.com, you would have missed the blog stats when you are in the dashboard of wordspress.org site. This is a plugin that brings back the blog stat that you used every now and then to see your blog statistics. Even if there are better comprehensive stats plugin than this, this plugin carries a nostalgic value for all those who migrated from wordpress.com to .org and also its clean and simple and has a concise interface.
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Contact Form 7: A plugin that provides a simple but neat contact form for your site.
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Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button: Helps people share & bookmark your content. It helps your readers to share, save, and subscribe your content resulting in easy distribution, more traffic, better rankings and extended reach.
- Comes with 5 different button option as well as option for customized button design.
- option top place the buttons on the posts, pages, feeds
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Sociable: One more plugin that enables your readers to share your posts, pages and rss feeds their favorite social bookmarking sites and to the rest of the world. Facebook,digg,mixx delicious or any other networking/social site you name it, the plugin supports it.
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Advanced Random Posts: You have so many posts buried in your site. This is an excellent plugin that you can place as a widget on your sidebar that generates randomly your old posts.
- You can set the number of posts that is shown at a particular time
- Set the excerpts length of the post to show.
- Option to set the first image of the post.
- Filter the categories
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Comment Rating: A cute little plugin that allows visitors to rate comments in a Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable thumps up and thumps down images. It also shows the counts of likes and dislikes clicked. Styling can be done with background color, fonts, etc. on the comment as well as the entire comment box.
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LinkWithin: A quiet popular plugin to display recommended stories and associated thumbnails from your blog based on categories and tags.
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NextGEN Gallery: One of the best plugin when it comes to displaying gallery images. It is packed with features and quiet easy to use.
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Subscribe To Comments: A neat little plugin that enables your readers to subscribe to comments and get notified when further comments pour into the posts.
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Smart Youtube: Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.
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Thanks for sharing the resources. I am also using some of them though on blogspot.
Other than the ones mentioned here, some I find very useful:
1. Badbehavior: Effective spam control in and out of wordpress
2. Comment Reply Notification: Notifies by email when there is a reply to a user’s comment
3. Google XML Sitemaps: Lets google/yahoo/etc know your changes instantly and update the index
4. Search Unleashed: An advanced search engine instead of the default
5. TinyMCE Advanced: A better interface for input
etc …
its complicated!!!
Thanks. That’s a very useful list.
Akismet is a good plugin for spam control that wordpress provides. It is very effective. You should also include it.
@ Abhilash
@ Rocksea
I have included comment reply and google xml sitemap in my list. Nice to know your other favs !
@ Sharath
It is not complicated actually this plugins makes life easier
@ Pramathesh
Ya ! Askimet is very effectie in keeping at bay most of the annoying spams
yes i see that you had mentioned the sitemaps. the reply plugin is different from that you mentioned. the one i use doesnt email every comment to a subscriber, but emails only replies to a specific comment.
Can you give us the link of the plugin that you use.
It is called “Comment Reply Notification”
url: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comment-reply-notification/
WP 2.9 is out. Upgraded? All seems to work fine at my side.
Thanks for sharing ! One issue is with this plugin, we need to individually reply to each comments, so that they get notification and cannot reply in one single reply mentioning the names. Ofcourse, the plus point is some reader won’t get irritated by getting mails for each comment pouring in…
btw, not updated yet to 2.9 Facing some issue, working on it. good to know that its all fine at your end
One more thing, I forgot as I was just giving a short look.
Use the Db-Backup Plugin. That is very important as anything can go wrong at any time.
As far as backup is concerned , I prefer taking backup from the server directly as well as the wordpress backup file manually
Thanks for mentioning the plugin, it might be handy for other readers !