My 5 Favorite WordPress Plugins
By Andrew Houle | Stashed in Tools & Resources
You can inexhaustibly extend the features of your wordpress blog with over 2,200 plugins. But, that is only if you are using a wordpress.org site; and not the more limited, but free (no hosting costs) wordpress.com site. The differences are not in the scope of this article, but you can learn more here.
Depending on your blog you may find many of these plugins are very useful and others serve little purpose for you. Below are my top five (which are liable to change tomorrow, when I find something else I love!):
My Fav Five
- All in One SEO Pack
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important things you can do for your blog. By optimizing title tags, meta tags, sticking to web standards and other small details you can increase the probability that your site will be found on important search engines like Google and Yahoo. Web Designer Wall has a great article on SEO this week. This plug-n helps you optimize all your tags. - Google Sitemaps – Append UTW Tags
This is another plug-in built with the idea of SEO in mind. After activating this plug-in it will produce Google XML Sitemaps after every post is published. SEO Zeal Group provides a nice explanation of the importance of sitemaps. - Bookmarkify
A good way to increase your blog’s traffic is to get involved in social media websites like del.icio.us and digg. This simple widget places all the social media bookmarks you want after each post. - WordPress.com Stats
If you want a simple, consise stats about visitors and what posts are successful, then I would suggest this plug-in. This plug-in focuses on the stats most bloggers care the most about. For more in-depth statistics check out Google Analytics or read my article on how to set that up. - cformsII – Contact Form
This is a very useful plug-in to help you set up a flexible, customizable contact form. Complete with AJAX capabilities.
Did I miss one of your favorites? Post a comment about what your blog couldn’t do without.
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CONTRIBUTE
Gilberto Galea
May 28, 2008
One of my favorites is, “All in One SEO Pack”, the others I haven’t used yet, but I will really keep attention to, they may be useful for my blog.
Lisa Bennett
August 27, 2008
We just released a new plugin that allows you to add interactive video capabilities to your blog! Enhance your blog with both basic and advanced video capabilities. Upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix video content, enable video responses, manage and track your video content and much more…
Check it out and download it here: http://corp.kaltura.com/wordpress_video_plugin?campaign=wp-comments
Examples and pictures are on the plugin forum: http://community.kaltura.org/viewforum.php?f=4
StumbleUpon
August 31, 2008
Great information! Thanks for writing this. It is an honor to participate in the discussion.
Company Logos
April 25, 2009
Hey thanks for sharing this but i was actually planning to build up a free one through WP. I didn’t knew much about WP as to what coding editing and all. But if i ask you about the freebie stuffs then what are they???
Designer Forum
June 21, 2009
Well thank you sharing it but do you have any idea about friendster plugins, they also uses WP but i cant use it there, so i will try to use this ones in my other WP blog.
Richard
March 30, 2011
Cheers Andrew,
Will be using CformsII on client blogs from now on … just the plugin I’ve been needing for client sites … already use the first two on your list …
Thanks .. Richard
Bill
March 30, 2011
I have tried a few different seo plugins and I keep coming back to all in one seo. Its definitely the least buggy and does not interfere with any other plugins in my experience.
I’m going to try out your stats suggestion. I hadn’t come across that one before and want to give it a try.
I also agree that cformsII is a great contact form. I use it on all my blogs
AJ
April 12, 2011
Hi Andrew,
Nice post and I am going to use new plugins for my site soon.
Jimmy Sorenson
April 13, 2011
My personal favorite wordpress plugins are “Backup Buddy” and “All in one SEO pack”.
Though backup buddy is a paid plugin, it work wonders for you. You can easily backup and restore all your coding and data with this plugin. You can even migrate your WP site from one hosting to another without losing any data.
Talking about “All in one SEO pack”, there are many SEO plugins but nothing works better than this plugin as its simple and easy to work with.
Jimmy Sorenson
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Steven Browne
April 19, 2011
I am still learning about WordPress as I have just been playing with Squidoo and Blogger for the past 3 months. It looks more complicated than the rest but according to nearly everyone its better as you have more features? I need to get more info on these plugins what people are talking about so any info would be much appreciated.