WordPress Essential and Handy Plugins

WordPress Essential and Handy Plugins

The Plug-ins below are suggested for you to use or are being used by numerous Bloggers, I have also listed a few that make your Word Press site more secure. It’s not an exhaustive list; you may need a Plug-in to suit a purpose I’ve not included. Some of the Plug-ins below are also similar in functionality to each other so read the description before you install it to see if it does what you want. I would not install them all either just pick what you think you will need or your interested in.

Some like Ninja Affiliate and OIO Publisher are not free which is why they are not listed below.

Some of the links don’t go straight to the Plug-in page but to the creator’s web site, personally I’d just look for the names of the Plug-ins via the Admin page of your Word Press installation for ease of installation.

Remember to back up your Database and incorporate a backup plan for your entire site. I save my entire directory weekly those with more frequently visited sites may want to back up daily.

Always keep your Anti-Virus programs and Anti Malware programs up to date.

A couple of good programs that are free are Avast and Malwarebytes

AdSense Now! – Get started with AdSense now, and make money from your blog

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your Word press blog

Broken Link Checker – Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

Comment Luv – Plug-in to show a link to the last post from the commenter’s blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

Dashboard: Scheduled Posts – Displays scheduled posts on your Word Press 2.7+ dashboard.

Easy AdSense – Easiest way to show AdSense and make money from your blog.

Fast and Secure Contact Form – Fast and Secure Contact Form for Word Press. The contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Blocks all common spammer tactics.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plug-in will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

Homepage Excerpts WordPress Plugin – The plugin has two main objectives. The first one is to make blogs that use full posts on the homepage more search engine friendly. The second one is to give flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Login LockDown – Adds some extra security to Word Press by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range.

MiniMeta Widget – Word Press (Mini)Meta Widget with different logon types (form,link) and additional admin links. All links can enabled/disabled.

Secure WordPress – Little basics to secure your Word Press-installation.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, no follow and much more.

SEO Title Tag – Search engine optimize your blog’s title tags. Create a customized title tag for any post, static page, category page, UltimateTagWarrior tag page – indeed, any URL! And will auto-insert the tag name into the title on tag pages generated by UltimateTagWarrior plugin. Admin allows for mass editing of title tags.

SexyBookmarks – SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots.

SidebarTabs – sidebarTabs allows you to easily widgets into Tabs.

Smart Youtube – Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.

Stealth Login – Create custom URL’s for logging in, logging out and registering for your WordPress blog.

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker) – TAC scans all of your theme files for potentially malicious or unwanted code. (I’ve personally used this and it worked great, see my blog entry here)

Thank Me Later – Automatically send a ‘thank you’ e-mail to those who comment on your blog. This plug-in engages the visitor by reminding them to check back for responses or new blog posts. The plug-in is highly configurable with multiple messages, variable delay and restrictions.

Theme Tester – Allow an admin to test new themes without showing your blog visitors

Theme Tweaker – Tweak your theme colours (yes, any theme) with no CSS style sheet editing.

Top Commentators Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

Twitter Counter – Integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog to display the number of followers you have on Twitter.

Twitter Tools – A complete integration between your Word Press blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your Word Press admin.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

Viper’s Video Quick tags – Easily embed videos from various video websites such as YouTube, Daily Motion, and Vimeo into your posts.

Word Press Mobile Pack - The Word Press Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your Word Press site and blog.

Word Press Related Posts – Generate a related posts list via tags of Word Press.

WP-DBManager – Manages your Word Press database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

WP125 – Easily manage 125×125 ads within your Word Press Dashboard.

WP e-Commerce Plug-in – A plug-in that provides a Word Press Shopping Cart.

WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plug-in for Word Press.

WPtouch iPhone Theme – A plug-in which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android, Palm Pre and other touch-based smart phones.

I hope you have found something useful in this list.

Cheers

Aaron