Ten WordPress plugins I cannot live without
One of the best things about WordPress, like Firefox, is that there are developers all around the world making plugins to increase its functionality. As with Firefox, some are good, others less so.
What your site needs depends on your particular requirements - if you have no interest in podcasting, for example, you won't need me to recommend you a plugin for it (although for some reason WP comes bundled with one anyway).
These are the plugins I install every time I launch a new site, no matter what its remit or scope. They help with security, troubleshooting, speed and SEO, and should take about half an hour to get up and running. In no particular order, they are:
It can be quite a laborious process getting plugins installed. Download the file, unzip the file, upload the files to the correct directory. This plugin bypasses all the nuisance stuff, leaving you to just activate the plugin and go. It also works for themes, and comes with a Firefox extension so you can right-click on a download and have it working on your site in seconds.
As the name suggests, this makes an xml file which Google and other search engines can use to index your site. Very useful, and a must for anyone even slightly interested in search engine optimisation.
Easily displays which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave.
4. WP Super Cache.
Bypasses the need to load the php engine to serve cached pages. If this means nothing to you, you just need to know that it's faster than the built-in WP cache.
5. WP Security Scan.
This plugin looks for holes in your setup. Because you don't really want to leave your site vulnerable, do you?
A no-brainer, this one. This plugin creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. They can be sent to an email address of your choice, so you now can have a complete backup of your site sent to a dedicated Gmail account nightly, and never have to worry about losing your data again.
7. PHP Speedy.
Enables automatic compression for a range of files, which promises to greatly reduce the load times of your pages.
8. Bad Behavior.
Prevents those pesky spambots to keep your pages and sitelogs nice and clean. Useful to have in addition to Akismet, WP's official spam blocker.
9. Jerome's Query Diagnostics.
This rather fancy-sounding plugin allows you to see how many php queries are being made by your site with every page load.
If your site seems particularly slow, it may be due to two or more plugins conflicting. This puts a short message in your page source to let you know how bad things may be (I had over 180 queries at one point, reduced to 30 when I eliminated a dodgy plugin conflict).
10. CSS Compress.
Works simply and makes your css files smaller by removing comments, new lines and tabs, and gzip compresses the file. They claim the default Kubrick theme will be reduced from 8k to 1.7k with no setup needed.
11. ?
Over to you. What's the one plugin you simply must have? Remember, this list is about getting your site working most effectively, rather than adding too much extra functionality (maps, adverts, video and so on). In fact, I'd argue that all of the above should be preinstalled to WP as standard. They'd certainly be more useful than the pointless Hello Dolly plugin (the Sympathy For The Devil one is much better, anyway).
Honorary mentions:
Akismet, as it's preinstalled with WP as standard. That's not to say it's not essential (which it is), but it does the job without needing anything more than an API key.
WordPress Automatic Upgrade, which makes the otherwise tricksy process of moving to the latest WP version a relative breeze. It remains mostly deactivated for most of the time, though, which is why I forgot it when compiling the initial list!
All in One SEO Pack. While I've used this on other sites, I'm not entirely convinced of its usefulness. Doesn't Google ignore keywords and instead looks at page content to decide how it should rank in search results? I'm not sure - somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
Tags: wordpress
June 30th, 2008 at 11.11am
There's a handy plugin called Get Recent Comments that lets you place your most-recently-made comment on the sidebar of your blog.
Then there's the snappily named lbcd78 Plugins View, which lists all the plugsin you do use (like the one I have at http://www.almostwitty.com/colophon/)
There's also Subscribe To Comments and WP-OpenID