As of right now (February 2013), I am in the middle of revamping my website. Time has passed and my tastes have changed.
While working on my new site, I made sure to bring over my favorite WordPress plug-ins since WordPress is THE way to go. If you’re not familiar with WordPress, there are two different WordPress sites – wordpress.org and wordpress.com. The “.org” WordPress is, according to their website, “web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” The “.com” WordPress site is a blogging platform very much like Blogger. A majority of the websites you visit on the web are built on WordPress templates and themes (including this one).
Just about every business owner I know has a website through wordpress.org. In my opinion, it’s the most social-friendly of the website programs out there.
Enough about why I love WordPress.
For those who are new to WordPress, plug-ins are programs you can install on your website to enhance it and there are literally thousands of them out there that will do just about anything.
Here are seven plug-ins I cannot live without….
Tweet Old PostThis plug-in takes your old blog posts and tweets them out on a schedule you set. That way posts don’t get forgotten. Twitter is my #1 traffic driver to my blog and I can give credit to this plug-in for that.
FacebookWhat’s cool about the Facebook plug-in is that your content automatically posts to your Facebook page or profile. Like buttons are included and you can set up an optional recommendation box that pops up on your site with other blog posts that are similar in content to whatever the reader is reading.
AkismetThis is THE best spam blocker. It catches spam comments and blocks them from posting on your site.
All in One SEO/Yoast SEOI listed both of these because they are the two most popular SEO plug-ins. Type in your title, your keywords and go!
DisqusDisqus is a commenting plug-in. I love it – it’s very easy to use and read. You can see it at the bottom of this post.
pageMashDo you have a page you want published but not visible to the public? This plug-in is for you. The plug-in’s site says it has been updated in 2 years, but it still works fine on my site. pageMash lets you hide pages from the public that you don’t want to be seen.
ShareaholicHaving social links to share your content is very important for any blogsite. Shareaholic’s plug-in gives you many platform options to share on and it’s very easy to use.
If you have a WordPress site, what plug-ins can you not live without? I’d love to check them out!
I am a huge fan of pretty links. Link shortener using your domain URL with full click tracking in your WP dashboard. And it’s FREE
Oooh, I’d been meaning to look into how to set that up! Thanks for the tip!
I use half of the ones you mention – and I am going to install the other half. Thank you for sharing, Mandy! It’s very useful!
My favorite two new ones I recently discovered are “Widgets on Pages”, which lets you add widgets to specific pages and posts (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets-on-pages/), and Widget Logic (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-logic/) which lets you control which pages widgets appear on, so you can add a text widget to the side bar and with a little PHP script tell it to only appear on the ‘About’ page, say, or wherever you want. Sooo useful because sometimes it’s frustrating that WP makes you add widgets globally to the site when you add it in the sidebar.
Can you give an example of where you may want to use a widget on a page?
On a post for example, you might want to dump a text widget into a specific blog post (turn a text widget into an email sign up form or something), or on a page you could add a text widget (or any widget) to the page itself, instead of just the sidebar or whatever which allows you to do more than just add text and pictures to the main body of the page. Sometimes WP is frustrating as it makes it difficult to customize different areas of your site beyond the template.
You see on my ‘Contact’ page, I added a widgets_on_pages script to this page which allowed me to add a text widget with HTML (the part that says “stay connected” and shows the different social buttons is a text widget) http://www.samrexford.com/contact/ — It’s a nice way to customize stuff with out having to go into the CSS editor. By the way, my site isn’t ready for prime time 🙂 it’s under construction
I use All in One SEO and love it! Thanks for the great list of the other plug-ins you use.
I’m currently loving dp Maintenance Lite. It allows you to turn on a Maintenance Mode for your site – useful as I’m also doing a revamp. It looks slick, and you can even set a timer for turning it back on.
I love CommentLuv! I use the premium version and it has a number of plugins in one – I like that it simplifies maintenance and there’s hopefully less “chance” for issues 🙂
Thanks you..very informative! I am self-teaching MYSELF WordPress (I had someone build my site a year ago, and have been maintain it and learning as I go! So, I appreciate this info! Just started using SEO by Yoast..love it!
Janeen – I taught myself WordPress too! I’m a learn-as-you-go type 🙂
Hi Mandy,
Great connecting with you on your blog too…Go Bulldogs!!! YooHoo. I always like to check out which WP plugins people use. Love the interaction and recommendations on this post.
I’ve been seeing the livefyre plugin on some top marketing blogs. I just installed it on my blog as I write this. Has anybody here tried this plugin and do you like it? BTW it installed fine on my blog and I am technically challenged…LOL.
Which reminds me…”It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
Cheers 🙂