My WordPress Plugin List

I claim no expertise, but I have tried and tested a lot of WordPress plugins on this blog and the fol­lowing remain on my ‘essen­tial /​ must-​​install’ list. I have provided links to each of the plugins, so you can find out more. But if you want to try them on your own site, it is far better to use the WordPress admin inter­face to search for the names of the plugins (‘admin->plugins->add new’) and install them from there. If you do it this way then there’s no need for FTP; they’ll get installed cor­rectly and you’ll get auto­matic upgrades.

And when I say ‘essen­tial’, I obvi­ously mean ‘used by me’ and ‘jolly handy’.

Comments and Spam

Akismet

Owned by the pub­lishers of WordPress itself, you’ve already got this one if you have a WordPress blog. Akismet does a great job of detecting spam. Partly a crowd-​​sourced effort, since every spam comment rejected by users goes into the service’s database. Needs some backup, though, since you tend to get a lot of stuff to check on the ‘sus­pected spam’ list every day. Definitely keep it installed and active, though.

[addendum: I am tri­al­ling WP-​​SpamFree, as recom­mended. A previous version created a couple of false pos­it­ives, so feeling cautious and checking the logs.]

Back-​​Type Connect

Helps to join-​​up the dots when dis­cus­sion of your post takes place on Twitter or FriendFeed, or even another person’s blog who cites your own post as an influence.

Subscribe to Comments

Lets readers who leave comments elect to receive emails if further messages are posted to the current comments thread. A bit of a no-​​brainer. Can’t imagine why it isn’t built into WP in the first place.

Housekeeping

Broken Link Checker

The web is ever-​​changing and the stuff you linked to yes­terday may not be there tomorrow. Keeping dead links alive is poor service to readers and weakens your cred­ib­ility with Google. This plugin flags up broken links to readers with the [del] attribute and creates a handy to-​​do list (*yay*) at the back-​​end for you to re-​​link or delete.

FD Feedburner Plugin

This redir­ects requests for your RSS Feed to the Feedburner version, allowing you to collect stats from readers who prefer the RSS edition of your work and adds the results to Google Analytics reports. This version, rather than the official one, seems (at the moment) to work better.

Front-​​End Editor

Obviously, the moment you notice that glaring spelling error comes exactly 1.4 moments after you press the ‘Publish’ button and are ready for a well-​​deserved cup of tea. Going back into the admin inter­face is a pain. This (frankly amazing) plug-​​in lets you simply double-​​click on the post from the front — like the name says — and make your changes right-​​there in an AJAX-​​ey mini-​​edit box.

Google XML Sitemaps

Allegedly entices Google, Bing and the rest to more accur­ately and fre­quently spider your site for new content. Looking at my logs, they’re round here all the time anyway, espe­cially those buggers from Microsoft. I keep it activ­ated as much as a rabbit’s paw than anything else.

Redirection

This blog has been going for nearly four years now, if you include earlier variants on Blogger etc. I realised recently that I had some­thing like 20 cat­egories, with most posts belonging to 2–5 of those. Slimming it down meant merging and deleting some cat­egories. This plug-​​in stops visitors (and search engines) getting frus­trated by redir­ecting them to the new address.

WordPress Mobile Pack

A suite of plug-​​ins and themes that mean mobile users get a mini version of your site that will look OK on their phone’s browser and load quickly. My mobile traffic has risen by 5% since installing it last month and now equates for over 10%. ‘Nuff said.

WP Super Cache

Makes WordPress a lot faster for your visitors by serving them up pre-​​prepared pages. Should you get a traffic spike (haha) then your server will not dis­con­nect you as quickly. This is good.

On Page

Similar Posts

There are lit­er­ally dozens of similar/​related post plugins (i.e. the bit that says ‘you’ve read this, why not look at these?’ at the end of posts), but this one is doing great service. Its rivals seem to either find very poor matches or take up so much pro­cessing power that they either fail or result in really slow page loads.

Sociable

The ‘share this post on social media sites’ thingy that appears at the end of articles. This one has the benefits of (a) looking nice and (b) not loading images and scripts from another server – some­thing that will slow your site down considerably.

[addendum: I have switched to Light Social. Not as pretty, but it does render valid CSS and is even quicker.]

WP-​​PageNavi

Makes the handy-​​dandy this page out of X /​ go forward /​ back nav­ig­or­ator at the bottom of most pages. Looks cute and is appar­ently good for letting Google sniff-​​out your content.

Sidebar Widgets

delicious-​​plus

There’s a dozen or so deli­cious sidebar widgets avail­able. This one seems to be the most reliable. Delicious (like Twitter) only accepts a limited number of calls to the source per hour, so you want a widget (like this) that doesn’t go to the source on every page load, but rather caches it away for an hour or so.

flickrRSS

Can be tricky to set up – or it was for me — you need to set the cache folder up on your server to be read/​write. I’m not a pho­to­grapher, but the benefits are def­in­itely worth the effort, non­ethe­less – the official widgets from flickr will baulk half the time and delay page loads for the rest. Also allows flexible styling through CSS, as not seen here.

Linkable Title Html and Php Widget

Bit of an unwieldy name, but really useful. Lets you create widgets from XHTML and Javascript that stay in style with the rest of your site, without CSS, rather than sticking out like a sore thumb. And also allows PHP queries within a widget – like the Featured Posts widget above-​​right (“show last ‘X’ entries with the tag ‘Y’”, in that case). Okay, a bit nerdy. But you will want it at some point, I promise.

Twitter Stream

Again, there are a billion variants. Most poll the Twitter API on load which leads to delays and frequent failures. This one caches for a little while and doesn’t look like cat-​​sick.

WP-​​EasyArchives

Nifty looking archives with col­lapsible bits. Who wouldn’t want that? OK. Maybe not strictly essen­tial.

WP-​​RecentComments

The recent comments sidebar widget that looks less-​​bad than the default. I’m of the opinion that letting visitors see that people do actually comment on your site encour­ages them to comment them­selves. And that is – most often – a good thing in itself.

SEO Plugins

Nothing.

I’ve tried a few search-​​engine optim­isa­tion plug-​​ins and may do again, but my current thinking is that, unless you have adopted the worst WordPress theme ever and have no under­standing about search and your content is terrible, you’ll be fine with what WP offers out-​​of-​​the-​​box.

[addendum: a couple of readers recom­mended All-​​in-​​One SEO. Digging around a little, I dis­covered the fast-​​developing young pre­tender Light SEO, which does the same thing but with less of an overhead. Bit hard to tell how it’s doing, of course, but it’s made an improve­ment to my title tags at the very least.]

Any recom­mend­a­tions?

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