My favorite WordPress Plugins

I mostly use the WP Super Cache plugin, on whatever blog or website I'm building on wordpress. There's no getting around the necessity to speed up your blog and save on server time by caching your pages. Especially the often seen pages and blogposts. Do remember to enable Mobile device support and Super Cache Compression. If your server gives you trouble after doing this, disable super cache compression again.

Google is starting to reward fast sites and discourage slow sites officially in 2010. This means it is a priority for your blog to be, at the very least, somewhere in the middle. To do this, I've recently started using two extra speed up plugins:

1. wp minify to compress javascript and css.


2. wp smush it which compresses pictures without losing image quality. I had no idea that was possible.

The following is not a plugin, but still worth using:

It's worth it, for images you do not host on your wordpress blog, to have them go through puny png which compresses any images you have. Also without losing picture quality. Average decrease in file size? 42% on my images. Now that makes a difference in load times.

Another way to speed up your blog is to start using the Thesis Theme for WordPress. No kidding: makes a huge difference.

Alternatively you can use the W3 Totalcache plugin. It replaces Supercache and minify. It's also a bit harder to use, unfortunately. For beginner users I'd still recommend Supercache, but I've personally gotten quite addicted to the extra features Totalcache offers. Not enough to replace Supercache with W3 Totalcache on all my sites, but certainly enough to feature it here.

I used another related posts plugin at one point, but it slowed things down too much. This one does the job well without too much hassle at the server end.

Related Posts Plugin.

However, when I wanted to use thumbnails in my related posts, the above did not offer enough customization options. The YARP plugin DOES. Warning: customizing is not for the code challenged! I had to hand code (or rather adapt) PHP to get it to work. I do think it may have made my feed slower than necessary though. Watch those settings!

On my blogs I use both: wordpress stats which is based on the stats wordpress is collecting anyhow, and Google Analytics. Especially when you're migrating a blog it's good to have both up, because they will break in different ways in the migration process. Temporarily of course, but still. Always good to have a back up anyhow.

I like that with the wordpress plugin I can see my recent visitor numbers at a glance. With google analytics it's more about long term stuff, keywords analysis and stuff like that. Also useful, but I'm not obsessed enough to check it regularly. Good to have when I'm in analysis mood though.

Another google plugin I could not do without is the feedburner plugin. I can't really remember why we aren't supposed to stick with the wordpress feed, but the big advantage I do see to using feedburner is statistics: I know how many readers are subscribed to my feed. That's important information. I know what readers they're using and where they're from.

Regular readers are a very different subset of your general traffic. People who subscribe are much more devoted to what you have to say, so make sure you know as much about them as you can...

If you have problems with your feed, the first thing to do is check it with the Fix RSS Feed plugin. This is a plugin you install, use and can then uninstall (and you should: unused plugins only make your blog slower).

On any blog that's really a blog it's just good service to readers to show what your most popular posts are. It shows your readers your best work, and gives your readers an idea of what you have to offer other than what you wrote this week or this month.

This is a real find. The Simple Yearly Archive plugin just lists all the blogposts you've written in a year by year list. Very good for getting all your blogposts a link only two steps away from the main page, which is good SEO. And of course your readers get to see all you've written. I also like that the number of comments can be shown next to the blogposts, so the dynamic of online discussion is visible.

A real SEO wants to have full control over their metatags, making sure that google doesn't index archived pages (because you've made sure all content is available through tag or category pages) and so on. The Meta Robots wordpress plugin by Yoast does just that.

It does NOT fix the title tags and description tags, so it's a bit misnamed I think. However the following plugin DOES do that: SEO LIGHT (forked off the All in one SEO pack. SEO LIGHT is just as good as the paid All in One SEO Pack plugin).

I use both of course, though the meta robots plugin is unnecessary in Thesis and even SEO Light is only necessary for SEO obsessives like me. The options for changing your titles in Thesis is good enough for most blogs.

New kid on the block is Yoast's new SEO plugin for WordPress. It's almost out of Beta and won't make you wade through advertisements each time you want to change your settings. It bundles a few other plugins as well: breadcrumbs, XML sitemaps and RSS enhancements. It's a definite must have for the SEO obsessive.
One downside: whereas the Yoast breadcrumbs plugin automatically ads the breadcrumbs to Thesis, I could not get that to work with his SEO plugin. I used a work around to get that to work.

One of the plugins that almost everybody uses, the Akismet comment spam filter. I don't know what I'd do without it. And the miracle is: hardly any useful comments get caught in the filter. I don't know how they do it and hope they keep it up.

There are several social media plugins out there. I added this one after a reader asked me about it. I tried teh Add This plugin. Fully customizable so the first social media sites that get shown are the ones your readers are likely to visit.

However, I've uninstalled this one on most of my blogs, because people don't use them. I do get social media traffic, mainly stumbleupon, but that doesn't seem to have anything to do with this add on. And it slows down your blog considerably.

Instead I'm now trying the simpler Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share Plugin. It does NOT seem to slow my blogs down and it shows stats on how many people tweeted or facebook liked your post. Since facebook is such a large part of people's online lives these days, I felt I had to try a social plugin again.

Feeds usually come without much help. I want the feed to at least link back to my own blog, giving me proper credit. The Better Feed RSS plugin also makes it possible to add buttons so people can add your post to their favorite social media sites. I have to admit, I don't use that option. But since my feed is going online all over, I do make sure I have that link back to the original post at the bottom.

On my latest site I have NOT installed this plugin as the Yoast SEO plugin gives enough feed customization for my needs.

When I first saw how this plugin would look, I could not believe how beautiful it is right out of the box. I used this on a client website and she was very happy as well. The Next Gen. Wordpress gallery plugin.

A real help in SEOing your blog are breadcrumbs. They add the keywords of the category of your blogpost to the page as well as repeat the title. Both good. So how do you implement this? You use another plugin by my countryman yoast, the breadcrumb plugin. Unfortunately, unless you're using one of the child theme ready themes, like thematic (I use thematic) or Hybrid or Thesis, you'll have to edit your source code. I added automatically to both Thesis and Thematic and it worked like a charm. I did have to edit my CSS file to make it look good though.

As mentioned on this page before, Yoast has come out with an all out SEO plugin this year. It includes breadcrumb functionality. I could not get that to work automatically in Thesis though. Instead I had to use the Thesis OpenHook plugin to get it to work.

This is a simple variation on the 'What Would Seth Godin Do?' plugin. Instead of showing a special message just for every new visitor, I'm showing one merely to everyone who has just commented.

A blog with lots (say 10 or more) of categories will look way more professional if the order of the categories makes some type of logical sense, instead of being by alphabet. That's where the My category order plugin comes in.

This is really a must have plugin for anyone who likes to avoid coding, but still wants to customize the Thesis Theme for WordPress.

Thesis Open Hook makes it easy to put adsense code in just the right spot, put your own feedburner code in the header... etc.

This plugin from 2009 still works on the latest WordPress install and ads, among other things, a table editor to your WordPress posts and pages. Must have for some sites and I personally think it's rather weird that WordPress doesn't come with table functionality as a default option.

TinyMCE Advanced

See my full review

Unfortunately changes in my personal life, and in the way squidu is managed, have made me decide to stop answering questions on that forum. I'm also too busy to answer questions elsewhere.

I am available for consulting though, but that doesn't come cheap. For $99 you get a month of asking whatever questions you want and advice on your SEO strategy, link building, optimizing your blog etc. SEO consult online publishing.

If you aren't willing to pay up, you'll have to be content to stay updated on my Marketing Spiritual Blog where I am also willing to answer any questions related to the posts. It also contains a free ebook.

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