Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins

WordPress is definately my favourite new toy at the moment and I can not for the life of me understand why I did not start using it long before now.  In the past I have always opted to develop my own software from scratch, often simply to see if I could manage it but more and more I am finding myself opting for an existing piece of software and just adding a few customisations to meet my requirements, as in the case with WordPress.

Now that I have had a chance to play around with it properly and have a look to see what other people like and dislike about it I have compiled a list of what I consider to be the Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins.  Each of these are listed below and keeping with the spirit of Lots Of Freebies you will find that each of the plugins are absolutely free:-

Akismet

This comes already packaged with WordPress and just need to be activated.  Akismet checks comments that are submitted to your blogs to see if they resemble spam and filters them accordingly.  These spam-flagged messages are filtered away under a “Spam” option in the “Edit Comments” screen so you can review them to ensure no authentic comments are deleted, after which you can feel free to delete all the spam comments that are left.

I have only recently started my blog (it went online in December 2008) and I have already has several comments which have been marked as spam so I can imagine that this plugin will seriously reduce comment administration on any site that has a reasonable number of visitors.

NoFollow Free

Shortly after installing WordPress I found that links to external websites in the comments have a ref=”nofollow” attribute included with them which stops search engines like Google from acknowledging that the website links to the external website.  Personally I do not like this as when I comment on a blog and leave my web address I not only want people to click on it to get to my website but I also want Google to pick up on it and in turn give me a better search engine ranking.

For this reason I feel it is only fair that I should allow the same to visitors who comment on our blogs, so as a result, all comments which are approved on our blogs will use dofollow so that the search engines can pick up the backlink to your website and hopefully help to improve your search engine rankings.

CommentLuv

In addition to dofollow, another plugin to give something back to your visitors is CommentLuv.  CommentLuv is a teaser of sorts.  When a visitor posts a comment to your blog CommentLuv tries to check and see if the visitors has a blog and if they do it appends a link to their latest blog post to the bottom of any comment they make.  Any subsequent visitors will then see the comment that was left plus the title of the commenters latest blog post and they will be able to click on the link and go directly to that blog post should the post be of any interest to them.

Google XML Sitemaps

SEO, SEO SEO… that’s all I seem to hear about these days and one suggestion I see constantly popping up is to create Google sitemaps so Google can index your pages quicker.  This seems to be especially recommended for websites which are not very link linked internally and although WordPress does seem to have a good internal linking structure the little extra help that the Google XML Sitemaps plugin can give would do not harm.

Redirection

This is a must for anyone who uses affiliate links to generate income or simply to give a more professional look and feel to the website.  As an affiliate you want your visitors to click your links so you earn commission for any sales that are made, however if the visitor can easily see the web address you are linking to they may choose to remove your affiliate id which would remove the chance of gaining any commission from that visitor.

Redirection is a simple plugin in which you enter a web address of a page you would like to use to link to the affiliate site and the actual affiliate link.  For example with Affiliate Window I would want to use http://blog.lotsoffreebies.co.uk/go/affiliatewindow.com as the local web address and link this to my Affiliate Window referral web address which is http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=3&id=80214.

By entering in these 2 web addresses into the appropriate fields you can quickly and easily redirect http://blog.lotsoffreebies.co.uk/go/affiliatewindow.com to http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=3&id=80214 without exposing the affiliate link to the visitor.

If you are not an affiliate then you may wish to do this to give your visitor peace of mind as some more cautious visitiors may not wish to click on a link to an external site they do not know, however if you use this redirection plugin it would appear to them that they are linking to another page internal to your website.

In addition to Redirection also has a hit counter allowing you to see how often each of your redirections are used.

Conclusion

So there you have it…  The Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins, at least in my opinion.  Please feel free to leave any comments or suggestions such as other plugins which you have found to be essential.

Tags: word press, wordpress

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Website Improvements. 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.