If you’ve ever delved into the WordPress.org plugins directory, then you know that there are literally thousands of plugins available to download. Some are indispensable to the blogger who wishes to run a clean vibrant blog, while others will slow down or even crash your system. I am providing a list of five plugins that I believe everyone using WordPress will benefit from.
This list will comprise the core elements of your blog’s plugin features. Adding additional plugins should be done with caution and only when necessary.
Akismet is the absolute pinnacle of must have plugins for WordPress. Anyone who has been blogging for a while will understand the frustration caused by comment spam. Most of these are just generic enough to pass as comments at all. Others don’t even try to mask the spam behind full sentences and will dump a load of links into your carefully cultivated comments.
Akismet will end all that! In my experience, it is capable of filtering out 99 out of a 100 spam comments or more, with only a few friendly-fire losses. To use Akismet you will need your Wordpress API key.
Providing a sitemap.xml for Google and other search engines to access will substantially improve the ranking of your site and will facilitate indexing. The sitemap.xml pages for content management platforms like WordPress are notoriously difficult to maintain. This plugin will do all the work for you by regularly building and then compressing the necessary xml file.
WordPress.com Stats is like a watered down version of Google Analytics. No, it does not provide the same in-depth, detailed information. Nor does it provide the stats that die-hard webmasters will need, but it does provide a clean, informative look at the activity on your blog.
It’s perfect for all of the bloggers out there who really don’t feel the need to know the distribution of browser use among their visitors but who would like to see where their traffic is coming from. I strongly recommend incorporating Analytics into your blog also, but that’s for another day.
To use WordPress.com Stats you will need your Wordpress API key.
One of the biggest issues that bloggers run into with hosting on shared servers is that a large jump in traffic will often cause the server to shut down. Digg is the biggest culprit here. Not that anyone is complaining, you just need to be prepared. In this way, WP Super Cache is absolutely indispensable. Rather then providing each page through processing of the WordPress .php scripts, it generates and serves an html file. This will greatly reduce the load on your server and mitigate the issues surrounding traffic spikes.
The All in One SEO Pack provides bloggers on the WordPress platform with the opportunity to tweak and refine the SEO on their site. Among other other options, it allows you to specify titles, descriptions, and keywords, both for the home page and for each additional page and post.
Let me know what your core plugins are.
If you feel there are other plugins that should be on this list, let me know. Each blogger has unique needs and requires a unique set of tools. What are your top five plugins?
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05.17.09
Super-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again – taking you feeds also, Thanks.