Top 10 WordPress Plugins

The 10 plugins listed here are not the only ones that I use.  They are, however, the plugins that are installed on nearly every new Worpdress site I setup, so they are the most important ones for me.

1. Akismet – this is the free spam killing plugin that comes pre-installed.  It’s an absolute essential for any blog because it will trap most of the spam comments and send them to the trash. 

2. Google XML Sitemaps – the grand daddy sitemap plugin for WordPress is still the best in my opinion.  It has a wealth of features, like being able to exclude specific pages from the sitemap, rebuilding the sitemap when new content is added, plus loads more. 

3. Headspace 2 – I originally used Headspace as my "SEO Plugin", but switched to the All In One SEO plugin over a year ago because of problems I was having with Headspace.  Well, in the last few months I have gone back to try Headspace again.  Not only is it working properly now on my sites, but it has also had a stack of new features included.  One of my favourites is the ability to add boxes for Site Name & Tagline to each post (as well as a lot of other stuff if you need it).  You may wonder why that is cool..  Well it means that if your WordPress theme is using the Sitename for the header logo, you can have different sitenames on different pages of your site.  Again, you may wonder why that is cool.  Well, imagine on your blue widget review page, instead of having the logo of the site saying "My Blog", you can have that page showing a header of "Blue Widget Review".  You can then add a uniqe tagline for that post, which will display below the header.  Headspace 2 has a lot of nice features like this which make it my top pick of SEO plugins.

4. Share and Follow – There are a lot of social plugins available, and I have tried a few.  Share and Follow is my current favourite, and you can see if on this website.  On the right of the screen you can subscribe to my feed, my Youtube channel, or Twitter feed  (there are a lot more things you can add to that menu if you want). Also at the top of every post you have the Tweet icon allowing readers to retweet your posts (plus the little thumbs up icon if oyur readers like your post).  This feature allowed me to drop a separate ReTweet plugin I was using.  At the end of each post you have social bookmarking icons.  Overall, a very useful, elegant plugin that I highly recommend.

5. WP-DBManager – This is a long time favourite.  It allows me to do a number of database related tasks, but most important for me is tha automatic backups that it takes of my WordPress database.  I get these backups sent to me via email on a weekly basis, so if any of my blogs go down, I have backups.  This is a vital plugin for anyone using WordPress for building websites.

6. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – I have been using similar posts plugin for a while, but it required a second library of code to work.  Recently I had some problems with it on a new installation, so I went looking for alternatives.  This one is a great plugin that does what it says.  You may need to tweak the threshold value to make sure your related posts show up, but otherwise its a great plugin that works as described.

7. What Would Seth Godwin Do – This is an unusual plugin that I am using on more and more sites.  It basically allows you to insert a "message" at the top of bottom of each post on your site.  Now, why is that nice?  Well, for starters, you can define how many times a visitor will see the message, and then switch to another one.  Imagine having a message at the top of each page trying to get your visitor to signup to your newsletter the first 3 or 4 times they visit your site, then switch to another message trying to pre-sell a product. That’s quite cool..  You can see this plugin working at the top of this page on the site, promoting (at the time of writing this) Shane’s excellent Backlink Battleplan course.  I don’t have the message switching to a different message after so many visits though.  That is just another nice feature that is available to me if I wanted to use it.

8. WP-Sticky – One of the more recent WordPress versions introduced Sticky posts, but I never really tried it because I had heard it was very limited in what it can do.  Therefore I still rely on WP-Sticky to "Stick" posts at the top of category pages.  This allows me to write a page of content for my "blue widget" category, and always have it at the top of the page.  You can see this in action on this page of my diabetes site.  Ignore the Google ads at the top, then look at the content of the post.  That content will never change when I add new posts to this "Type 1 Diabetes" category.  The new posts just get added below it.  This allows me to structure my WordPress sites in a more traditional manner (using the principles of silos), and make them less blog-like.

9. Include It! – This is a big favourite of mine.  Coming from an HTML background, I was heavily into the use of Server Side Includes for rapid, flexible, site-wide changes to my sites.  For those who don’t know what server side includes are, they really are exceptionally useful and make updating a site really easy.  If I wanted to change an affiliate link that appeared on 100 pages of my site, I just updated the server side include that held that link and all pages updated immediately.  With WordPress, Server side includes were  difficult to work out.  Thanks to this plugin, I now have all that functionality again.

10. My Review Plugin – this is the last plugin in my top 10.  It’s last for the simple reason that it is not free.  However, it has become one of the first components I install on every new site I build, especially if it is a review site.  I won’t go into the details of this plugin again, as I have written about it before as well as created a short primer course on using it here:

Integrating a Review System into with WordPress – Part 1
Integrating a Review System into with WordPress – Part 2
Integrating a Review System into with WordPress – Part 3
Integrating a Review System into with WordPress – Part 4

If you have any favourite plugins, please leave a comment at the end of this post with your recommendations.

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