The 12 Best WordPress Plug-ins By: Jeffrey L. Wilson

Supercharge your WordPress-powered site with these plug-ins.

Content creators have flocked to WordPress since its 2003 debut (version 3.0 alone has been downloaded over 10 million times since its June release) due to its ease of setup and use. Over the last seven years, a rich universe of plug-ins has emerged, giving the already user-friendly publishing platform the extra flexibility to tweak SEO, the ability to display popular posts, and much more.

There are over 10,300 plug-ins available at the current count, which can make it a chore to discover plug-ins that would be beneficial to your site. If you visit WordPress’ Most Popular Plug-in Directory to see the top 15 most download plug-ins of the moment, you’ll find some great stuff. But there are plenty of other great plug-ins that don’t make the list.

We’ve dug through the site and created our own list of a dozen that will help your WordPress-powered site perform like a champ. Please note: Plug-ins can only be installed in self-hosted WordPress sites—if WordPress.com is your host, you won’t be able to add plug-ins. If you’re ready to super-charge your WordPress installation, check out these 12 can’t-miss plug-ins.

Akismet

By Automattic
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/akismet/
Comment and trackback spam are an unfortunate price of website success. The more traffic you accumulate, the more likely you are to be inundated by fake comments. Automattic’s Akismet checks comments and trackbacks against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam. If the comments and trackbacks are deemed bogus, they’re automatically shuffled over to your WordPress installation’s spam folder. Clicking Aksimet Stats (located in your Dashboard) shows a breakdown of your spam, missed spam, ham (Akismets term for real comments), and false positives (legit comments and trackbacks mistaken for spam by Akismet that you’ve since flagged as genuine).

All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Widely considered a WordPress essential, Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Pack should be one of the pillars in your search engine optimization efforts. With it, you can give your page an SEO-friendly title (which shows up at the top of a Web browser), homepage description (which appears beneath your URL when people search for it via Google or other engine), and keywords related to your topic. Warning: Be careful with your keyword density. If Google suspects that you’re stuffing keyboards or using black-hat SEO techniques, your search engine placement may be penalized.

Dagon Design Site Map Generator

By Dagon Design
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/sitemap-generator/
Dagon Design’s useful plug-in generates a fully customizable sitemap that helps search engine spiders easily rifle through your content. Dagon’s tool manages this through multilevel categories, pages, and permalinks support. The plug-in lets you choose which links to display, their order, comment counts, and post dates. In short, this is everything you need to create a highly searchable WordPress site for both people and search engines.

SEO Friendly Images

By Vladimir Prelovac
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/seo-image/
SEO Friendly Images, designed by Vladimir Prelovac, is a WordPress optimization plug-in that updates your uploaded images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. The ALT attribute is considered an important part of SEO as it provides an image description to search engines, and helps create a match when someone keys in a search query. The TITLE attribute plays lesser role; the text associated with this attribute appears when a visitor mouses over an image.

SEO Smart Links

By Vladimir Prelovac
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/seo-automatic-links/
Vladmir Prelovac’s other must-have plug-in lets WordPress automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your site. After installing the plug-in, you simply open its configuration option and enter the keywords you use the most often and the links that you’d like to associate to them. So, for example, if you want to link the word “cat” to “cat.com,” the plug-in can do this automatically. SEO Smart Links lets you determine how frequently a single keyword or phrase is linked within a single post so that you don’t end up with link overload

Ultimate Google Analytics

By Wilfred van der Deijl
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/ultimate-google-analytics/
Google Analytics is the favorite site-analytics tool of many webmasters due to its meticulously detailed graphs, charts, and traffic numbers—it’s also free! Wilfred van der Deijl’s Ultimate Google Analytics plug-in adds JavaScript to each page (without making any changes to your template) so that you can track outbound links, downloads from your own site, mailto: links, and more without requiring you to install the code manually. Simply sign into your Google Anaytics account to see your traffic data. The only downside? Google Analytics doesn’t supply real-time traffic numbers. See the next plug-in for that.

StatPress Reloaded

By Manuel Grabowski
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/statpress-reloaded/
Created by Manuel Grabowski, StatPress Reloaded (an improved version of the original StatPress) displays real-time information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, operating system, and more. Unlike Ultimate Google Analytics, StatPress ReLoaded immediately collects information so you can view up to date traffic numbers at any given time. Use it in conjunction with Ultimate Google Analytics for a solid handle on your traffic, past and present.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

By Viper007Bond
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/vipers-video-quicktags/
If you’re tired of copying and pasting HTML into your site’s backend when you want to embed video, this plug-in can simplify the process. After you install Viper007Bond’s plug-in, icons representing your favorite online video respositories (YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and more) appear above the main content area. Clicking one of them lets you enter the video’s URL and dimensions. Clicking “Okay” inserts the video (centered) into the blog. It’s just that easy.

WordPress.com Popular Posts

By Frasten
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/wordpresscom-popular-posts/
This is one of the few plug-ins that actually requires the use of another plug-in—WordPress.com Stats. But once both are installed, Frasten’s WordPress.com Popular Posts can work its magic by displaying your site’s most popular posts and pages over the course of a user-selected number of days. You can exclude select posts and pages, show excerpts (when applicable), and select the number of posts to be shown.

WordPress Database Backup

By Austin Matzko
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/wp-db-backup/
Consider this the ultimate WordPress safety net for when disaster strikes. This sanity-saver backs up all of your files to either your server, desktop, or inbox once you select the frequency (hourly, twice daily, once daily, or weekly). The speed with which your file is restored depends on the amount of content that’s been backed up (it once took me two hours to restore my personal site, 2D-X after a mishap), but I was more than happy to wait, given the alternative. You shouldn’t go without Matzko’s excellent plug-in.

WP Greet Box

By Thaya Kareeson
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/wp-greet-box/
Thaya Kareeson’s plug-in is all about welcoming new visitors and building loyalty. It displays a user-defined greeting to fresh readers depending on the referrer URL. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they might see a pop-up that asks them to digg your post. For new visitors who don’t come from any matching URLs, you could set a message that suggests that they subscribe to your RSS feed.

Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in

By Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/yet-another-related-posts-plug-in/
Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in (YARPP) displays a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, which introduces readers to other relevant content on your site. Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s plug-in uses a user-customizable algorithm that weighs post titles, content, tags, and categories. It also lets you select the relevance limit in order to display more or less closely related posts

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 11:06 am and is filed under Opinion. 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.

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