Every blogger has a set of “must-have plugins” that they install on all their blogs. We wanted to share with you the plugins that we love and use the most on our various blogs.
First off, we posted previously that if you don’t want the hassle of managing word press plug-ins then we recommend semiologic. The maintainer of semiologic, Denis de Barnady, works very closely with the wordpress team and always keeps his semiologic plugins up to date. Denis includes every plugin you could possibly want in his package.
However, if you want to install your own plug-ins here are our choices of must-have word press plug-ins.
- ShareThis allows your readers to share your blog content. Unlike other bookmark plugins, it does not slow your site down with a lot of java script. It also has a Reporting Dashboard where you can see the number of page views and widget views.
- Similar Posts Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. This is a great way for automatically generating internal links on your blog.
- TweetMeMe allows your readers to tweet about your content on twitter. It also displays the number of times your blog post has been tweeted.
- DoFollow removes the nofollow tag in the comments people make. You effectively become a Dofollow blog and are more likely to get blog comments.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith Originally authored by Steve Smith and now maintained by FeedBurner, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible RSS subscriber.
- Google XML Sitemaps This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
- No Self Pings Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.
- WP-Sticky Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. This allows you to keep your pillar or cornerstone content always on your front home page.
- WPtouch iPhone Theme A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android and other touch-based smartphones. Also allows your blog to be viewed on the Amazon kindle.
- All in One SEO Pack Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
- WP Super Cache Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. By default the php code of wordpress is very slow and the slowness creates a very bad user experience on large blogs. This plugin will address the problem.
UPDATE: I previously recommend WP Auto Tagger for auto tagging, but was unhappy to discover that this plugin randomly posts advertising links into your Blog Roll links, also as far as Google is concerned auto tagging is regarded as spam. In fact I recommend that people avoid downloading plugins and free templates from wordpresssupplies.com as their “free stuff” appears to contain a lot of adware that will be displayed on your website when you least expect.
What are your must-have plug-ins? Let us know in the comments below.
About Danny Sheehan
Danny lives in Hong Kong but is originally from Australia. He is Married to Maggie and together they have two children with whom they enjoy sharing and enjoying an exciting life with daily. Danny's passions are freedom, adventure and discovery, mainly in nature and science but also spiritually. He is a great believer in living in the NOW.
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