Recommended WordPress Plugins of all time
Last update: 15th September 2009 at 12:35 AM [GMT+7]
Blogging might be just a hobby. But, when you come to know that a huge number of people from different countries around the world are making their living by writing blogs, you obviously decide to give it a try. 99% newbies jump to blogger.com to start their new blog. They put adsense immediately after creating the blog and they write some posts not in a specific niche. They don’t do any search engine optimization and that brings frustration to them and they start thinking, “No, this job can’t be done my me.”
Actually, blogging was started as a hobby. But later, it became a profession of millions of people from around the world. Blogging consists of several things. Even if your content is original and unique, you have to do some optimizations to your blog in order to get attention of success. And WordPress engine is the best way to grab success in blogging. That’s why the largest number of bloggers are hosting wordpress.org engine on their blogs. The popularity of wordpress is easily conceivable once you use it. It’s thousands of plugin will reduce your coding works. By using wordpress as your blog engine, you can get much more time to pay attention in writing the content of your blog. WordPress makes it easier to customize your blog and plugins make optimization easier and enables other features as well.
Since I’ve started blogging in my own domain and hosting, I didn’t think twice to install wordpress. After the installation was done, I searched online for useful plugins. There are a lot of posts floating around which will recommend you to use some plugins. But, I found some plugins which were not highly recommended. I used them on this blog and found that they are truly useful and I thought to myself why not write a post recommending my readers about the plugins?
So, as I planned, here you go:
Top WordPress plugins
If you are warned not to forget using these amazingly useful and must-have wordpress plugins in your blog.
Akismet
By default, akismet is installed in your wordpress blog and you just have to activate it. After activation, you will have to provide it an API key which is required for it to work. Akismet protects your blog from spam comments. It automatically recognizes spam comments and filter them into the spam filter. But, the akismet API key is a must.
Akismet API key is available if you have a wordpress.com blog. If you aren’t using wordpress.com, create one right in a moment and visit this address when you are logged in. You will find your akismet API key in this blog. Copy it and provide it in akismet configuration. It should be working now.
Note: Never ever share your akismet API code with anyone. Keep it as secret as a password.
All-in-one SEO Pack
Search Engine Optimization is the most necessary job in order to make a blog globally more visible and gain lots of unique and returning visitors. Using this awesome plugin, you can easily add meta tags and description to all of the posts without even messing with codes. You can also add meta keywords and description to your blog’s homepage at your ease. Along with adding meta contents, you can also edit Post & Page title format, Description format, 404 title format, Additional page, post and home header etc. Give it a try.
Add to Any
You must make it easier for your readers to share the post with their post on social medias and bookmark it for future reading. Social bookmarking/sharing are the second biggest source which will send you the largest amount of traffic. Obviously the first one is Search Engine. With this Add to Any social sharing and bookmarking plugin, you will be able to place a button/text/image at the top/bottom of each posts which will let your readers share it on social medias like Facebook, Twitter etc and bookmark it on several place. This button will also let your readers email the link of the post to anyone they want. This is also a must-have wordpress plugin that no blog should miss out.
Google XML Sitemap/Sitemap Generator
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Once your blog has got a sitemap, search engines will be able to index your newest posts and recent post updates faster than usual. The plugin options will let you manually choose what to include in the sitemap and what to not. This is also a highly recommended plugin.
Google Analyticator
Google Analytics is a great free service of Google that lets you have an insight look on what’s going on your blog. The visitor analysis, traffic sources, search engine traffic senders, most read posts etc can be checked from inside Google Analytics. If you are using Google analytics, you can simply use this plugin to track visitors’ details of your blog. You won’t have to mess with codes. Check it out. Don’t forget you must have an overlook on what’s happening, who’s coming and where the largest number of visitors are coming from.
WordPress related posts
Don’t you want your readers to stay more time in your blog and read multiple posts? If you do, then this is a plugin that you must use for your blog. This plugin will include related posts’ links under each posts. The plugin finds out related posts according to their tag, category, and title. A great plugin that helps you keep your readers longer time in your blog.
Login LockDown
Though they are hidden, the number of hackers around the world are not that less. To keep your blog protected, you can use this plugin to protect your blog from hack attempts. Whenever someone will try to login using different passwords, their IPs will automatically be blocked temporarily. By default, failed login attempts for five times within five minutes will result the IP concerned blocked for an hour. However, you can change the value of attempts, time, and how much time will the IP remain blocked. You can manually unblock any IP from the settings page at anytime.
Plugins for communication
It’s important to keep in touch with your blog’s audience. With these plugins, you can make them attracted to your blog and indirectly force them to leave a comment. This will help you gain more readers and will definitely turn first time visitors into returning visitors. Check them out.
Contact Form 7
You must create a way to make direct communication with the readers of your blog. This will make you more personable and your readers will love to come back again and again to your blog. This plugin will help you create cool contact forms with extended features. If you hold a contest on your blog, you can create a new contact form for that. This plugin will let you create as much forms as you want. You can include drop-down menu, check boxes, file uploading feature etc. Once you activate the plugin, you will be able to create and edit existing contact forms or delete older forms from options menu. This is a recommended plugin for communicating with your readers which is important for your blog’s growth.
NoFollow Free
Activating this plugin will encourage readers to leave a comment on your blog. By default, comment links are “nofollow”; that means your PageRank won’t cast vote for that link. But, while the nofollow tag is removed, it is worth leaving a comment for the comment author to get a backlink to his/her blog. By activating this plugin, you can remove nofollow tag from comment boxes. More options will let you choose which link to make dofollow.
TweetMeMe
Twitter is the most powerful micro-blogging community on the Earth. Its popularity is too much because of its simplicity of use, wider range of audience and lots of amazing features included. Everything in Twitter is limited to 140 characters. Yet, it rocks. So, it is highly recommended for bloggers to have an account in twitter. This plugin will let each users Re-Tweet (Publishing the link of that post in a status) the post on twitter easily. Top ranked blogs are using this plugin to make it easier to share the link on twitter. It is highly recommended that you use this plugin to spread the link of your blog inside twitter network. If a reader likes your post, he’ll definitely retweet it. And that’s when a re-tweeting button is necessary; which is provided by this plugin. Simple.
WP Greet Box
Enabling this plugin will greet your visitors with different messages and icons depending on their referral link. For example, if a reader comes to any of your posts clicking from facebook, they will be greeted with a facebook icon and will be prompted to share the link of that post on facebook with their friends. So, it makes even easier to attract your first time visitors. Also, RSS subscriber’s number can increase with the advantage of this plugin. Recommended one!
Thank Me Later
This plugin is a thank you email sender. Most of the time people come to your blog from search engine or social networks. They find a topic interesting, leave a comment, and then they are gone. But, you can remind your comment authors after a certain periods of time saying Thank you for leaving a comment on your blog. You can edit the email in the settings page and there you can ask them to come back and check if their comment has got any reply. Keep in mind, you must reply to all of the comments you get. This helps your readers stay connected with you.
Additionally, you can use this plugin to send Thank you messages to all of the current comment authors. But, be sure that you use that feature one time only.
CommentLuv
This is another plugin that provides a great feature encouraging readers to become a comment author. When commentLuv is enabled, someone leaves a comment with his blog address in the website box, the comment will include the link to his blog’s latest post. This increases the visibility of comment author’s blog’s post and that’s why he will love to leave a comment. You need more comment, don’t you?
WordPress Thread Comment
This plugin will provide you the ability of editing everything about comment in your blog. It gives lots of features all about comments. When I was composing the description of this plugin, I had to check again and again to remember the features this plugin provides. Enabling this, you will be able to manage everything about comments. For example, who can comment, how will be the comment notification email etc. A lot of features that you yourself have to explore. I strongly recommend to use this plugin. The most special feature that is provided by this plugin is AJAX. You can enable AJAX. If AJAX is enabled, the comment will be shown immediately at the end of the post or will be nested if replied to another comment without reloading the entire page. It makes commenting easier and makes the comment author feel comfortable to comment. Helps increase the number of comments.
Related Plugin: Subscribe to Comments
Top Commentators
This is another plugin to encourage your visitors in transforming them into comment authors. The plugin shows the name and link (if added) in the sidebar widget of those who left the largest number of comments on your blog. Keep in mind, after activating this plugin and inserting the widget in the sidebar, the number of short-hand comments like “Thank you for this nice article”, “I loved this one, expecting some more from you”, “Awesome! Thank you. Nice writing.”, “Nice one, keep the working up” etc will be increased and you will have to delete them. Keep your widget show the good number of commentators. Beware so that someone don’t get a place in that widget after leaving one or two comments.
Helpful Plugins
These are the plugins which will make you feel more comfortable to use wordpress. Below is a list of miscellaneous plugins of wordpress blog.
All-in-one Adsense and YPN
If you’re blogging for money, then most probably you’re using AdSense. This plugin will make it easier to put adsense or YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network; similar to Adsense but applicable for US publishers only) inside the posts without the need of working with codes. This awesome plugin will ask you for your adsense or YPN publisher ID. And you will have the facility of choosing size and place where you want the ads to be shown. If you’re using adsense, this is a strongly recommended plugin. I’m using this plugin to put ads inside posts. [Related Post: Put Adsense ads inside wordpress posts]
PS: If you want your ads to be shown on sidebar, then you have to create an ad unit from your adsense dashboard and paste the code as a text widget.
MobilePress
I think you do know or you can guess the number of people who use/browse internet using their mobile phone device. So, don’t you think you should make a mobile-friendly version of your blog so that those people browsing your blog from mobile device can feel comfortable reading your blog posts? This plugin will instantly turn your blog into a mobile-friendly version. It will be shown on mobile phone’s browser instead of full version. However, the visitor will have the option to convert the mobile version to full version. A handy guide and details instruction on this plugin is available here.
Maintenance Mode
Do you update your blog regularly? Do you need to improve your blog’s feature constantly? Then you are on the right way. But, while editing something i. e. theme or posts, you may want your blog to be invisible to the readers. How do you do that?
This plugin comes to answer and solve out that situation. Once you activate maintenance mode from the settings page, the visitors will see a “Maintenance Mode” message instead of your original blog. You can also specify the time how long later the blog will be visible to everyone. You are also enabled to edit the message as you want.
However, while you are logged in as an administrator, or editor, you can still watch out everything on your blog. And while the Maintenance mode is activated, a message inside your wordpress dashboard will be reminding you to deactivate it as soon as your work is done. A nice one for those having lots of readers.
WordPress.com stats
This is just another plugin that wordpress.com uses. You’ll need to be registered in wordpress.com in order to obtain the API key for this plugin to work. Most of you maybe are not really satisfied with the report of Google Analytics although Analytics report is the best. You may need to know how much visitors you got today, which of your posts got popularity and most hit etc without signing in to third-party website [analytics is obviously a third-party website]. So, Wordpress.com stats comes with the help. Activate it, give the same API key that you have given Akismet to work. It will start counting on your blog. I’ve just installed and activated it on this blog.
WordPress Popular Posts
Why don’t you show up the most popular and most read posts on your blog written by you? This plugin will let you show up the most popular posts (including pages, if you want) on a sidebar or theme. You have the settings to choose what to show and how to show. But, it won’t be working immediately after you install and activate it. It will start showing up the most popular and most viewed posts after it is activated.
WordPress Admin Bar
This will give you an admin bar at the top of every page (including your original blog, any post or page) from where you can directly access to any administrative action such as creating a new post, adding a new plugin, checking the comments page etc. If you have used wordpress.com free blog earlier, then you are surely familiar with this. But, in your own hosted blog, you can add as many options as you want in your wordpress admin bar. This makes navigation easier for you.
IntenseDebate
IntenseDebate is a powerful third-party comment system that will take care of your blog’s comment system allowing your visitors to comment using their twitter, facebook, or IntenseDebate account. They can also comment as a guest without any logging in. This requires a registration with IntenseDebate. For a smarter comment section, IntenseDebate would be useful.
Click here to read a relevant post on this topic. You can also choose Disqus Comment System alternatively which is similar to IntenseDebate.
Sociable
This is another plugin similar to Add to Any. This will provide sharing buttons at the end of each and every post and page. Additionally, this will let your readers create a pdf version of your blog. There are a lot of social bookmarking sites enlisted in it. From settings page, you have the ability to choose which buttons to show.
WassUp
Track your visitors along with Google analytics. This is another visitors statistics plugin which will show you the ip addresses and the currently online visitors’ details. You can also show up the number of currently online visitors at the sidebar with a widget.
Buy me a Beer
You can ask your readers for donation or rewards at the end of each post (option can be overridden in individual posts). You set a message to be displayed in a sidebar widget and/or at the end of the post. Those who want to donate or reward you will be able to click it. Donations or Rewards will be made through PayPal. You have to be a PayPal account owner in order to receive donations or rewards.
Conclusion; this is not it
I’ve created this post especially for those who have just stepped into the blogging space and started with wordpress-powered blog. I’m certain that the abovementioned plugin are the top useful plugins of all time and all bloggers are going to need that. But this post will be updating furthermore. I need information of other useful plugins so that I can use them and recommend them in this post if I find that necessary or useful.
Have Your Say
But, no doubt I’ve missed some more interesting and useful plugins. If you are using any special plugin in your blog and think that plugin should be enlisted in this post, kindly leave the name and description or the name only in the comment space. Also, you are requested to leave a response what do you think about those plugins and which one you are already using and which you are about to install.
Share this post
If you like the list of the top recommended wordpress plugins, please don’t forget to let your friends know about it. Hover your mouse pointer at the share button and you’ll find a list of social bookmarking site. [Plugin: Add to Any]
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