Recommended WordPress Plugins

So my friend Garrett, thanks to his new blog, is starry-eyed over the possibilities of WordPress. Not too long ago, my friend Brandon voiced the same sort of enthusiasm when he started his bass guitar blog. As I’ve gained a certain reputation for being a WordPress guru around the office, I was more than happy to help them realize their respective blogs’ potentials.

Of course, the first and most important recommendation I had for both of them involved which WordPress plugins to use. Realistically, beyond tweaking the template, plugins are all you need to customize your blog’s functionality. The best part, of course, is that there are plugins to do practically anything; if your WordPress blog doesn’t already do what you want it to do, chances are good that someone has programmed a plugin to make it sing and dance for that purpose. I’ve found this to be true every time I went looking for one.

At any rate, here are the plugins I use and recommend to others.

• AdSense-Deluxe. Any experienced AdSense user will tell you that experimentation is the key to maximizing your AdSense earnings. This wonderful little plugin allows you to customize AdSense code blocks and drop them into your posts with ease. Of course, you still have to tweak the template to get them in your site structure, but in-post ads tend to have a higher conversion rate in my experience.
• Akismet. This one comes with the newer WordPress distributions, and it’s well worth enabling. Point in fact, I used to have a real problem with comment spamming. I tried manual moderation, image authentication, and a half dozen other tricks without much success. Believe me when I say that this is the best solution I’ve found. Not having to deal with spam is always a good thing.
• Angsuman’s Permanent Redirect. Anyone who knows a thing or two about SEO knows the importance of 301 redirects. If you ever have need to move posts or pages around, this plugin makes it much, much simpler to maintain link popularity.
• Extreme Video Plugin. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but WordPress 2.0 doesn’t seem to play nicely with copied-and-pasted code, like from Google Video or YouTube. Since I’m fond of posting machinima clips on a regular basis, I picked up this plugin to minimize the hassle of embedding them.
• Google Sitemap Generator. To paraphrase a childhood dinner prayer, “God Google is good. God Google is great. Now we thank him it for our food traffic. By his hands its links, we all are fed. Give us now our daily bread search. Amen.” Be nice to Google by giving it a sitemap, and it’ll be nice to you back.
• WordPress Database Backup. I try to back up my database at least once a week. Trust me; it pays off. Imagine having a month or more worth of work flushed down the drain. This plugin leaves you without an excuse not to backup frequently.
• Yes WWW. Here’s another no-brainer for the SEO-savvy. This plugin 301 redirects all non-www requests for your blog to the www version. No fuss, no muss, no messing with cryptic htaccess directives. Anything that lets me avoid dealing with regular expressions is a welcome addition in my book.

Of course, these are just the best plugins that I’ve managed to find. I’m sure there are hundreds of other good ones for different purposes. Feel free to post your own recommendations using the comment form below.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 7:14 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.