As WordPress has become the blogging software of choice for most bloggers, it has also created a very active development community. Some development companies devote their entire existence to creating plug-ins for the blogging software system that is WordPress. With all of the plug-ins coming out on an almost hourly basis, it’s hard to know which ones are the best to use. So, we’re gonna save you some testing time and give you a list of some of the most popular, most used and best WordPress plug-ins that are currently available. This list is of course subject to change as plug-ins are updated, discontinued and newly created very often.
Akismet is service that fights spam for you in a WordPress plug-in. When a user (or in a lot of cases a spam-bot) posts a comment, a pingback or trackback hits your site, it gets sent through Akismets service, which then in-turn runs 100s of test and ultimately approves or disapproves it. As a safe-guard, Akismet doesn’t delete the post, instead the plug-in saves it on the server for up to 15 days so that it can be manually verified. This is nice for the occasional post which may get classified incorrectly (a rare occurrence). No spam service is perfect, though Akismet gets close. For the rare spam it misses, make sure to mark it as spam in the plug-in and submit it, helping Akismet and others avoid this in the future.
WP Super Cache is a WordPress plug-in which at its core does several things for you. First and foremost is that it speeds the loading of your pages…. significantly. Secondly it reduces your CPU overhead. Sounds good, eh? Super Cache generates static HTML files from your WordPress blog which is essentially dynamic PHP, that’s where the main speed increase comes from. Static files of your blog are sent out to unregistered users or users who haven’t commented on the blog at any point. The majority of users will get these static pages, the remainder will still benefit from the caching of content that has not been changed or edited.
NextGen Gallery is the most widely used gallery plug-in for WordPress. Galleries are a great way to add extra interest to your posts, or to serve as the basis for blogs that serve dual-purpose as a portfolio for art or photography, or even simply family photo albums. NextGen takes a lot of the hassle out of manually adding images and has more functionality than the built-in WordPress gallery system. It can be as simple as selecting a folder full of files and then giving it a gallery name. To add it to a post, click on the handy extra icon added to your post editor bar for NextGen gallery, and select the gallery that you want to display. There are three built-in ways to display them. There are also lots of helper plug-ins by other developers that can extend or enhance NextGen.
WP-DBManager, or WordPress Database Manager does exactly what the name suggests. It manages your database, enabling the user to optimize, repair, back-up, restore, or delete the database. It also allows for drop or empty tables and running of specific queries. You setup your plug-in to automatically backup and optimize your database. This a very handy plug-in for added security, and we highly recommend it.
These two excellent plug-ins are designed to help with the social networking of your posts. They make it very easy for visitors to your website or specific posts to bookmark and share your content with others. This extends the reach of your blog or business, resulting in more traffic and better ranking through this very easy click-able distribution system. Each plug-in basically does the same thing and are both highly rated, so the final choice will be based on how much you like the interface and the feel of the plug-in on your particular website or blog.
Google XML Sitemaps generates specific XML sitemaps which streamline and optimize the index of your blog for search engines such as Ask.com, Bing, Google and Yahoo. This enables search engine crawlers to better see and understand the complete structure of your website and thereby more efficiently retrieve it for indexing and display, and ranking. This works on WordPress generated pages and custom URLs, and makes sure to notify the all of the engines every time you post new content.
Google Analyticator sets up JavaScript code which enables Google Analytics to be logged with any WordPress blog setup. It also comes with very helpful widgets which display the Analytics data on your blog and in the admin panel. This is excellent for those of you who are constantly wanting updated feedback on your sites performance with Google.
WPTouch is a plug-in which transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone compatible style application theme automatically. This is complete with Ajax article loading and effects when viewed from mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android or Blackberry. Essential for pages you wish to be viewed with mobile devices or with a mobile-device influence, base or content. The pro version is not free but adds functionality and updates the plug-in for the upcoming 3.0 release of WordPress.
The Front-end Editor plug-in is a handy tool that allows you, the admin to make changes to your posts or other content directly from the site, completely bypassing the admin back-end. Need to correct a simple typo, like punctuation or a spelling error? Now you don’t have to go all the way through the administrative panel. Just double-click something to edit on it.
Fancy Excerpt replaces the automatic default excerpt generator standard with WordPress. Fancy Excerpt is content aware, analyzing the sentences to create an excerpt that will continue posting paragraphs up to the 30 words limit, and then completes the excerpt with a more… link. Very useful and it makes more sense than the auto-generated ones.
Tags: Wordpress Plug-In, Wordpress Plugins, WP Plug-Ins, WP Plugin