Top 5 Must-Have Wordpress Plugins
Today’s blogosphere is ran primarily off of Wordpress. It’s a fact. Of course, that isn’t such a bad thing. Wordpress is customizable, secure, takes almost no effort to set up, even less to operate, and has tons of cool plugins that can be downloaded and installed in minutes. Of course, finding those plugins isn’t always that easy. To make matters worse, some plugins are pretty shotty compared to the rest. So, here are the top 5 must-have Wordpress plugins.
This plugin allows you to execute PHP code directly inside of your posts, without it being removed. That feature makes Wordpress almost completely customizable, assuming you don’t wish to just open the Wordpress source code files and edit those.
Exec-PHP has plenty of possible uses. To start, tutorials would be great with this, because you could have examples of what you just taught your viewers to make. You could also turn your Wordpress into an RPG style site, and have different pages for the stores and battle areas (Though, it would be a lot easier just to code your own damn script.)
Be careful using this plugin, however. You don’t want to add security flaws, or go against the Wordpress script.
On the typical Web 2.0 style internet that many people are beginning to expect, social bookmarking is taking a bit part. Sites like Stumbleupon and Digg are many sites primary source of traffic, bringing fame and profits to the webmasters who make it to the top of the lists.
Of course, those sites aren’t just going to throw you into their lists for free traffic. You need to work on it. The more ‘Thumbs Up,’ or ‘I like it’s,’ or whatever the social bookmarking site uses, the more traffic you will get. If you have good readers, they will bookmark for you. Of course, sometimes they need reminders.
The easiest way to remind your viewers to bookmark you is to make it extremely easy for them. One such way to do this is to install the Social Bookmarking plugin for your wordpress. What this plugin does is automatically insert your choice of over 50 social bookmarking website’s images at the end of your post, so they [your viewers,] only have to click one button to bookmark you.
As your blog starts getting bigger, you will quickly notice that it’s loading times will slow dramatically. Although you can improve this by deleting old posts, that is a really bad method. The best way to speed up a slow blog is probably to start cacheing your pages.
What this plugin does is take your posts and turn them into HTML pages, updating every so often. Those HTML pages are then loaded instead of the PHP pages, saving your server tons of wasted bandwidth.
Askismet comes default with Wordpress, but it is still one of the best plugins out there. What it does is filter through your comments and make sure nobody advertises their penis enlargement programs on your blog. You require a Wordpress API Key to use this one.
Yes, it does take some balls to put this plugin in the number one spot, in front of the all-to-famous Akismet plugin. Related Posts quite simple makes a list of the posts related to the one you are currently reading show up on your blog. The reason this is such an awesome plugin is because of the accesibility it adds to your website.
Users don’t want to sift through every post one by one to find stuff related to a specific category. Although you can patch that by adding categories, the problem still exists. Personally, I hate it when blogs don’t have this plugin, and I find that people stay on my website on average 500% longer when I have this plugin installed.
Tags: Akismet, Exec-PHP, Related Posts, Social Bookmarks, top plugins, Wordpress, WP-Cache
