This is part nine of the One Week Blog Challenge series.
Jump, WordPress. Now roll over. Yeah, with plugins you can pretty much do that.
One of the great things about WordPress is that there are a ton of plugins out there that will let you integrate anything you want into your blog without having to touch too much code.
Over the years I’ve run and tested tons of plugins across dozens of sites and some plugins have proven indispensable. Here I will share some of my all time favorites.
- Easy Contact Form – Contact Form 7 is a simple but very useful and functional contact form that allows people to email you. It includes Akismet spam protection and is easy to integrate.
- Akismet – 90% of your comments will be spam. To fight it, install Akismet. It’s the best anti-spam too out there (and is made by the creator of WordPress). If spam becomes a problem and you want even tighter defenses, you can add Recaptcha on top of Akismet.
- Infinite Scroll – Automatically load posts and content as the user scrolls down the page, massively improving usability to retain visitors.
- Photodropper – Searches and adds free photos to your blog posts right from WordPress using Flickr’s API and Creative Commons licensed photos.
- Popular posts – Gives you the ability to show off your most popular posts. Requires Post Plugin Library.
- Similar posts – Gives you the ability to show off similar posts at the bottom of a post. Requires Post Plugin Library.
- Viper Video Quick Tags – Lets you embed videos easily from Youtube, Vimeo, and a ton of other video hosting services.
- Amazon S3 – If you plan to serve a lot of images and don’t want to get your server overloaded, it’s a good idea to integrate Amazon S3 hosting.
- W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache – Speed is important. Speed up your WordPress by caching a lot of files and reducing server load. Caching plugins are a little more complicated than the other plugins, so be forewarned.
- Tweetmeme retweet button – Shows how many tweets the post has had with a convenient retweet button to help people tweet your posts.
- Facebook Share – Add a Facebook share widget to your posts or even add more connectivity with Facebook Connect by Sociable.
- Disqus – Add social commenting to your site that allows people to login via Twitter, Facebook, and more before they comment.
- Amazon Affiliate Linker – Automatically makes your links to Amazon into affiliate links with your ID.
- Google XML Sitemap generator – helps Google index your site properly.
- All in One SEO pack – Takes care of your title tags, meta descriptions, and a bunch of other related SEO stuff. If you are running Thesis, skip this plugin since Thesis actually does a better job of taking care of this stuff natively.
Check out some other useful plugins at Yoast and Nettuts. If you aren’t afraid to jump into some coding and want to make your WordPress blog do anything you want, check out WP recipes, which has a lots of useful code snippets (if you run Thesis though, you should use hooks and custom functions instead of touching core WordPress files).
Next up – Social Media Sharing tools
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A serial entrepreneur behind AU Interactive with an interest in travel, photography, and social media. Follow me at @markus941.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I’d add “What Would Seth Godin Do?” to the plug in list as well.
And P.S. if you advertise Disqus as a great plugin, why don’t you use it as well? Hahaha!
Have a great one, Markus!
Brett
Good suggestion, Brett. Thanks. I haven’t decided whether or not I want to use disqus on the site yet.
the plugin infinite scroll is excelente!
Great post. Exactly what I am looking for. I am a photographer and I am looking for a good wordpress theme that I can use to display my pictures. I will like to use some of these plugins with my site. Any suggestions?
You can use Thesis and this photo blogging plugin (made specifically for Thesis) to create a quality photography site. If you don’t want to use Thesis, check out these photography specific themes.
If you want Facebook Connect functionality, I recommend trying this plugin instead of those:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-facebook-connect/
I had some of these plugins already, but a few I had to get, Disqus for instance, is one I wasn’t even aware of. Ha! Thanks!
Well, you missed Related articles plugin. I can’t imagine a blog without it.
you (obviously) recommend all of these on top of thesis? //g
Each one has it’s place. All in One SEO pack isn’t needed if you are a ninja rocking Thesis. ;)
Yeah, I agree with Nick – they’re all dependent on your needs. For instance – you don’t need All in one SEO pack if you have thesis, infinite scroll is kind of optional, and you may or may not prefer having disqus handling your comments
I use most of these.. lol But have to say SEO Pack and Super Cache help me the most day to day.
I just found out in the Thesis review on this blog that the all in one SEO pack is not required for Thesis! That was one of my favorite plug ins for my Blog.
Great info here. Its full of valuable info.
All of your posts have been extremely monumental in aiding me in my decision too create a blog… Thank you soo much! My only question is, is has this been able to make you a comfortable living, with no day job. And what could I do to make this a full time venture, and live comfortably?
You have Disqus on the list but your not using it for your blog comments. Any reason for that?
Old Blog post.
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