I thought I’d compile a list of some of my favorite WordPress plugins. I am currently using each of these on this site and they are invaluable to making my blogging life a little bit easier.
It took me a long time to find most of these, but I finally did. Hopefully this makes things easier for you and can point you in the right direction.
1. Akismet Anti-Spam
For some reason, my blog attracts an inordinate amount of comment spam. So far, the Akismet plugin has prevented 100% of all the male enhancement and riverboat casino ads from ever making it to any of my pages. It saves a lot of headaches.
2. Google Sitemaps Generator
The Google Sitemap generator will make it easy for search engines to crawl your site and find all your pages. You can view my sitemap and see how it works for yourself. It updates itself automatically and is easy to setup.
3. FeedBurner Feed Replacement
You should sign up for FeedBurner to manage your feeds so that you know how many subscribers you get to your RSS feed. You can use this plugin to port your existing feed over to FeedBurner.
4. Another Wordpress Meta Plugin
With this plugin, you can specify unique meta tags for each page/post you write. You can create a separate tag for your homepage, too. This all goes for better search engine optimization so you should use it to increase your rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
5. Share This
With Share This, your posts will get a little green icon at the bottom that lets people easily share it with others. It supports all the popular social media sites as well as regular email. So if you like this post, you can test it out by sharing it with a friend!
6. URI Index Remover
This is my own plugin that I wrote not too long ago. It redirects any links ending in “/index.php” to their “/” equivalent. You can read more about it here: URI Index Remover
7. WP-Cache
WP-Cache will save a whole load of load on your server. Normally, WordPress has to go into the database for each page request and get the data from there. With this plugin, all the data is cached and stored in a temporary file where it can be quickly and efficiently accessed. You’ll probably experience faster load times and fewer crashes.
8. Top-Level Categories
This is a neat little plugin that removes “/category” from your permalink URLs when viewing category archives.
9. Subscribe to Comments
When people leave a comment on one of your posts, they’re given the option of subscribing to future comments. If I respond to them, it will send them a quick notification so they can come back and check it out.
10. Visualize Advance Features
With the new HTML editor in the dashboard, there are some hidden formatting features in a sub-menu. This plugin adds a little button that lets you toggle between showing/hiding it.
11. PXS Mail Form
This contact form plugin also uses the Akismet system to prevent spammers from emailing you using your site’s contact form. I’m using it on my contact page here and it works great.
12. AJAX Comments
The AJAX comments plugin lets people successfully post a comment without ever leaving the post’s page. When someone enters a comment and hits submit, it will automatically show up under all the other comments, without having to refresh the page.
13. FAlbum
The FAlbum plugin manages the gallery part of my site. It’s all handled automatically via the Flickr API so whenever I add new pictures to Flickr, they’ll show up here, too.
14. Optimal Title
This is another SEO plugin that changes your page’s title tags and flip-flops the order around. Instead of saying the default “Trevor Fitzgerald > My Favorite WordPress Plugins”, it will say “My Favorite WordPress Plugins > Trevor Fitzgerald”. It will look better on the search engine results pages and hopefully drive more traffic to your site.
15. Related Posts
The Related Posts plugin adds some links to more of your articles after every post. If you write interesting stuff, this might be a good idea so people can find more of your posts.
16. Related Posts for Your Feed
This plugin adds links to related posts in your RSS feed. It does the same thing as the above plugin but for your subscribers.
17. Syntax Highlighter
For the few times I might share some programming code on this site, the syntax highlighter plugin will make it look pretty good by formatting it with colors. It supports multiple markups, including PHP, CSS, HTML, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and more. There seems to be many others, and I’ve tried most of them but this is the only one I could get to work correctly with the current version of WordPress (2.1.x).
With more and more people using RSS readers to get content, it’s important that your blog’s feed be easily accessible. By increasing your syndication audience, your readers will be exposed to much more of your content.