Essential WordPress Plugins That I Use?
April 1, 2011
Here’s a great question that one of my subscribers asked me recently…
“What WordPress plugins do you use on your blog?”
Below I’ve listed the plugins that I use on this blog and a brief description of what they do and why you would want them. The plugins are listed alphabetically, and not in order of importance.
Advertising Manager (free)
At the time of writing this post, I don’t have any contextual ads running from Google Adsense or other advertising networks. But if I did want to do that, this plugin is installed and ready to go.
The Advertising Manager plugin is very easy to use; simply enter your publisher id and specify where you want your ads to appear. Advertising Manager does the rest.
Works with all the major advertising networks like AdBrite, Yahoo!PN and Commission Junction.
Akismet (free)
This is a MUST have plugin for any WordPress blog. Akismet automatically filters out spam blog comments for you.
To give you an idea of just how bad an issue spam comments are, my blog currently gets over 50 spam comments every single day! It would be a huge time-waster having to delete all these spam comments manually.
All in One SEO Pack (free)
If you were only allowed to have one plugin for your blog, this one would be it.
The All in One SEO Pack plugin helps you to optimize your blog for the search engines. It allows you to specify the title, description and keywords you want to use for each post or page.
With the help of this plugin, you can rank higher in Google and get lots of free, targeted traffic.
CommentLuv (free)
CommentLuv plugin is an add-on for your Comments area. It allows anyone that has their blog registered with CommentLuv to have their last blog post appear as a link next to their comment.
This helps to encourage other blog owners to comment on your blog posts.
This is a win-win situation for everyone. You win because you’re getting new, fresh content on your blog, and they win because they’re getting more exposure and backlinks to their blog.
Contact Form 7 (free)
The Contact page on this blog uses this simple plugin to create the form and set where the submissions get sent to. Very easy to use and also customizable.
DoFollow (free)
This is another important WordPress plugin to encourage people to leave comments on your blog.
By default, WordPress will flag all the Comments links on your blog as a ‘no follow’ link. This means that your readers don’t get any ‘link juice’ (or any other words, no recognition in the eyes of Google) for the backlink.
The DoFollow plugin will change the setting for all blog comments to ‘dofollow’.
Facebook Comments for WordPress (free)
This is such an important plugin. Facebook Comments for WordPress helps your blog posts to VIRAL.
There’s many times I’ve seen one of my Facebook friends will make a comment on or ‘like’ a blog post and I’ll go and read it myself. The more you can integrate your blog with Facebook, the more traffic you’ll get.
Facebook Like (free)
(see above)
Global Translator (free)
Why limit your blog readership to only one language. This plugin automatically translates your blog content into 48 languages!
Google Analytics for WordPress (free)
Knowing where your visitors are coming from and what content is attracting them is super important.
Why? Because you can focus your time on creating the same type of content and/or getting more traffic from those sources.
Google Analytics for WordPress allows you to add your Google Analytics tracking code across your entire blog and any new content that is added. To make this work, you’ll first need to register for a free Google Analytics account.
Google XML Sitemaps (free)
This plugin is important for making your blog more SEO-friendly. Search engines, like Google, love sitemaps and having one will help you improve your search engine rankings.
Google XML Sitemaps will automatically create and update your blog’s sitemap.
cbnet Ping Optimizer (free)
Whenever you add new content to your blog or make changes to it, the changes are ‘pinged’ to indexing services (like Google). This is a way of letting them know, “hey, I’ve got new stuff on my blog!”
If you make regular changes to an existing blog post or page, you may be seen as a spammer if you’re constantly pinging them. That’s what the cbnet Ping Optimizer plugin is for. It will only ping new additions to your blog and not minor, frequent changes to content.
PopUp Domination (paid)
Just installed this plugin a few weeks ago on this blog and have noticed an increase in optins by 33% right away 
PopUp Domination allows you to easily add a pop-up optin form to your blog. Lots of configuration options give you the ability to customize it any way you like.
Pretty Link Lite (free)
If you have large ugly affiliate links, or other long links, that you’d like to hide or shorten then this is a great plugin.
Pretty Link Lite asily creates customizable redirect links and also has tracking built-in.
SexyBookmarks (free)
Graphically-appealing social bookmarking buttons that allow your visitors to share your content on dozens of sites, including Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.
Simply Show IDs (free)
Very handy tool that easily reveals the IDs of your catergories, tags, posts, pages and more.
Subscribe To Comments (free)
This plugin causes a checkbox to appear below the comments area of any page so that visitors can be notified of any follow up comments to that specific thread. This helps to encourage more comments on your blog.
TinyMCE Advanced (free)
Excellent toolbar that is added to your text editing area when setting up a new post or page. Allows you to easily add more advanced features to your content, e.g. tables.
TweetMeme Button (free)
This plugin places a nice ‘Retweet’ button above (or below) your posts and pages. It also shows how many times the content has been tweeted. Helps to encourage viral, word-of-mouth free traffic.
WordPress Related Posts (free)
The WordPress Related Posts plugin adds a new section to the bottom of a post. It lists other posts that are related to that one.
The advantage of this is two-fold; one, it encourages your visitors to read more content on your blog, and two, it is great for SEO.
If you’d found this post helpful, please leave a comment below or hit the ‘Like’ button. Thanks!
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I like this list.
I am using Dreamweaver – considering to install WordPress .
Thanks for the info
Thanks Ez Dav
Yup, I definitely use many of the plugins mentioned here.
Along with Akismet, I use a plugin called Conditional CAPTCHA. When a comment is marked as spam by Akismet, this plugin will take the commenter to a page that require CAPTCHA. If the commenter enters the CAPTCHA correctly, the comment go into the moderation queue. Really great plugin.
As for managing affiliate links. We’ve created a free plugin that shorten your affiliate links and helps you track it on Google Analytics. We are so proud of it
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Areej´s last [type] ..The Best WordPress Membership Plugin
Thanks Areej. Will definitely take a look at Conditional CAPTCHA.