One of my initial posts was about the Best WordPress Plugins I had downloaded within a week of starting my blog. Now whenever I go to my PlugIns section I realize I have far more than those 5 and thought it is time I shared this with all you bloggers out there.
In my first post, I had mentioned these as my Top 5:
WordPress DB Backup
Akismet
Google SiteMaps
FeedBurner
All In One SEO Pack
All these are still on my top list of plugins, but as I progressed with my blog, visited other websites, read more articles, I have come across other plugins that I have found immensely useful to add to my website. Here are a few of them:
1. Google Image & Video Sitemaps – This is a plugin I read about in Amit Agarwal’s blog, and immediately found them very useful to index all my images and videos that I have included in many of my posts. This will again create 2 new files in your home directory – sitemap-image.xml and sitemap-video.xml. One another feature of the tool is it provides a direct link to your Google WebMaster account where you can go and submit your sitemaps to google.
2. Google Analytics for WordPress – I would say this tops my list now, helps me analyze my site performance, number of visitors, Bounce Rates, Average Time Spent on the Site, Any New Visitors, How many pages were accessed for a visit etc. This really gives you a great deal of information about your site performance and the internal links relevance.
3. Contact Form 7 – The Contact page was never this easy, with this plugin installed all you need to do is create a new page and write a one line code in the content. You are all set to go. It will create the Contact Form and also allow you to customize it anyway you please. Very helpful and flexible plugin.
4. Clean Archives Reloaded – I was looking for a good way to design my Archives page, when i stumbled upon this plugin. It is good for starters, gives you a pretty neat layout of all your posts and you can customize a bit by modifying the PHP file associated with it. I am still looking for a better presentation, but will live with this for now.
5. Add To Any – You surely want to see this plugin features. It allows you to add the Share button for your posts like what I have below:
You can choose from various skins the plugin provides to display this “Share” button. Also you can pick and choose from the numerous communities it lists by default. I found this very helpful to provide to my readers for easy sharing.
6. Platinum SEO Pack – I had explained about the All In One SEO Pack in my previous blog, a similar and upgraded plugin is the Platinum SEO Pack which includes more features like allows you to provide the ‘Index’, ‘NoIndex’, ‘Follow’, ‘NoFollow’ meta tags to any post/page.
7. WP-Paginate – A simple plugin to add Page numbers to your pages. I felt the need for this when my number of posts started increasing and the only way to access the older ones was through my new Archive page.
8. OutBrain – You might find this interesting to have it on your posts, it will allow users to “rate” your page and also has options to display related pages to the one they are just viewing. You can display these related content as text links or even as widgets.
For now, I think I have listed out all those plugins I have in my dashboard, see if these interests you and install them as easily as ever. Please dont hesitate from sharing your thoughts and any other plugins you are encountered during your blog creation.
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Nice updates Praveen. This will help lot to fine tune blog tools. – Manickam