WordPress Plugins For All Sites
After experimenting with a lot of WordPress plugins over the past couple of years, I’ve realized that there is definitely a core group of plugins that every WordPress site can benefit from. Here’s a listing of them with a brief description of what they do:
Askimet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. I once didn’t have this plugin installed for a couple months and literally got hundreds of spam comments.
All-In-One SEO
Let’s you customize the title tag, META descriptions, META keywords and more for each post or page.
Breadcrumb NavXT
If you have many child and sibling pages, you might want to keep your user in the know as to where the heck they are within your web site. This highly customizable plugin allows you to easily add a simple Breadcrumb link trail anywhere on your site.
Classy Body
This will add page ID specific classes to the body tags of all pages and posts. This is extremely useful if you want so stylize a particular page.
Disable-WPAutoP
Certain versions of WordPress add a lot of random <p> tags all over the place when writing or editing a post, even in HTML mode. This plug-in gets rid of this nuisance.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines better index your web site. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
Head-Meta
This allows you to add anything to the head of an individual post or page. This is very useful if you have to insert some javascript on a particular post for something exclusive to that page, such as an audio player. Ordinarily, you would have to put the script in the header.php file, but this plugin comes to rescue for this scenario.
Search Everything
Typically the search feature of WordPress searches just the blog posts. With this plugin, you can expand the searchability to include tags, categories, comments, and pages.
Sociable
With this little nugget, you can add a subtle “Share This” section to your blog post. Simply check off which of the 99 (yes, 99!) different social network, news, and feed based sites you want to allow people to choose from. The logos that will appear at the bottom of the blog posts are about the size of a favicon and have a transparency of about 60%. When you hover each one, they increase to 100%.
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache speeds up your blog by generating html files that are served directly by Apache without processing the comparitvely heavy PHP scripts.
Viper’s Video Quick Tags
If you like to add videos to your blog posts, then this plugin is for you. Now, when grabbing the “source code” from sites like YouTube, the code is often inflated and definitely not valid (X)HTML. This plugin inserts YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video buttons — whatever video source you want — into your editor. You can then just click “YouTube”, paste in the URL, and the video gets embedded with cleaner and valid (X)HTML. You can even specify the default widths for all of your videos so that you don’t have to keep readjusting them.
February 9th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Thanks for sharing this info….super helpful. I’m gonna go download a handful of these suckers.