WordPress works just fine straight out of the box. It has an impressive range of features. There are also modules which provide additional functionality. These are called plugins.

The following list of best WordPress plugins are those I have used (and in most cases still use) or have been highly recommended by others.

Comment SPAM

Akismet: Checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days.

SEO

Head META Description: Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.

Jerome’s Keywords: Allows keywords to be associated with each post, which can be used as meta keywords and for creating a local tag system. Also adds Technorati Tags into the sitefeed.

Optimal Title: Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. When this is implemented the Meta title of the front page becomes “Blog Name” | “Blog Description”. The Page titles become “Post Title” | “Blog Name”. I have used a slightly modified version on this blog by firstly changing the “|” for a “-” (personal preference) and secondly removing the “Blog Description” on the front page.

Google Sitemaps: Automatically create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This is updated every time a page/post is added or edited.

Social Bookmarking

Sociable: Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

Feeds

Smart Update Pinger: Replaces the built-in ping/notify functionality. Pings only when publishing new posts, not when editing. Significantly speeds up editing and helps prevent over pinging of feed services.

Feedburner Feed Replacement: Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents. Incredibly simple way of implementing Feedburner on your site.

Backup

WordPress Database Backup: On-demand backup of your WordPress database. This allows you to email your back-up file as part of the backup process. Many bloggers email their backups to their Google mailbox. A neat off-site backup option.

Change Your Theme Layout

Sidebar Widgets: Adds “Sidebar Widgets” panel under Presentation menu. This allows you to reposition elements in the sidebar by just dragging them to different positions. Saves a lot of time editing sidebars to change layouts.

Sidebar Widgets come with some standard widgets and there are a whole host of others here.

Ad Rotators

Ad Rotator: Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file. Probably the most practical when you have one blog.

Not a WordPress Plugin, but for multiple blogs I recommend OpenAds. This program is easy to install (separate database), well documented and provides some serious ad rotation functionality.

Translation

Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro: Translates blog dynamically (from English) to eight languages – German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese. The translated pages can be bookmarked for future use. Note: It assumes the base language of the blog as English.

You can decide to skip translating one or more sections of page content by enclosing them between comments. This works in a post / page as well as within templates; in short anywhere. This is the only plugin I have paid for. Saw an increase in traffic after it was implemented.

I had a few problems getting it going which were all tracked to HTML errors on my site. Received incredibly fast an efficient service to help pinpoint the issues.

Other

Related Posts: Can be used to display related posts at the bottom of your post page. See below for an example.

After installing this plugin there was a 10% increase in page-views per visitor on this blog.

Filed under: Blogging

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