My favourite 10 WordPress plugins

I get a lot of e-mails from users that always have this problem when installing or configuring a new blog from scratch. They don’t know what plugins to use.

I do want to mention that these are just a few of the plugins I like and use and they do not form a definitive list of what a new blog should have installed.

Here they are:

  1. Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports

    Basically, what this plugin does is to generate reports from your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts and integrate them in your blog’s administration screen. It’s one of the few plugins on my A+ list.

  2. Bunny’s Technorati Tags

    It provides you with a template function to easily display Technorati tags for your posts. Technorati automatically parses your WordPress categories, and inserts your post in searches that match your category name, as well as providing you with a maximum of 20 tags which you can add in your account settings, for each claimed blog. With this plugin, you can assign additional tags for each post, so you’ll end up in more searches. A lot of people don’t really comprehend the importance of Technorati tags and how much traffic and visibility it can offer to their blog.

  3. Reddit This Button

    This plugin automatically adds a Reddit button to your post, so users can vote your website on Reddit. It also adds a button to the quicktags toolbar in the post writing screen. Clicking the button will prompt you to insert the style of the button you wish to add. The button has 3 styles. Having this button in your post will definitely help you gain more initial reddits, because your visitors will know that your article has been submitted. This way, you will not leave your submission’s faith only to Reddit’s users.

  4. Digg This Button

    Digg this is a plugin that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your WordPress post and automatically display a button (with the number of diggs) and a link back to the Digg post, for people to digg your story. When a Digg submission of your post is first recognized, an email is sent to the blog’s admin. Having this button in your post will definitely help you gain more initial diggs, because your visitors will know that your article has been dug. This way, you will not leave your submission’s faith only to Digg’s users.

  5. No Self Pings

    I really don’t like that WordPress sends pings to my own internal posts too. It clutters up my comments and would rather love to see only trackbacks from external bloggers that write about my posts. This is a plugin to disable internal post pinging.

  6. FeedBurner Plugin

    This plugin forwards all your feed traffic to your FeedBurner feed. It will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally your main comments feed as well. It works magic for me.

  7. Google Sitemaps

    This plugin generates a Google Sitemaps (xml + gzip) compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog that automatically updates every time you change/edit/create/publish a new post.

  8. WordPress Cache 2.0

    An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. This plugin saved my server from at least 2 Digg effects.

  9. Post Views

    This plugin will display the number of views that each article had. I just love it. It’s an extra functionality that you can add to your blog.

  10. Bookmark Me

    The bookmark me plugin for WordPress lets you easily add links to social bookmarking sites, into your posts. Again, one of the few plugins on my A+ list. From all my research and analytics about social websites and submitting posts to them, the most important of them that should be in your every post are : del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Netscape, StumbleUpon and Newsvine.

  11. Bonus: Math Comment Spam Protection

    This plugin asks the visitor (questions are configurable in the administration) making the commenter answer a simple math equation or a question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. This is the MOST efficient comment spam protection I can think of (more effective than Akismet), and it stops 100% of spam comments, unless they spammer is human.

Published by

Cristian Mezei

I am myself.

40 thoughts on “My favourite 10 WordPress plugins”

  1. Mine are posted on my romanian blog. The post SEO Plugins WordPress has some plugins (seo related) that I use on my blogs.

    Spam protection: Sum of 1 + 5 ?

    What if I do not do math? I can not post then?
    Lol..just a joke..

    Error: You have entered the wrong sum in the spam protection field.
    Press the back button and try again.

    Say no more.

  2. Wow, I’m surprised Cristian… This is a really good blog. I especially like your #1 recommendation, I’ll rally for it at SBB.

    The Math one is kinda nice – it helps to keep my mind in the here and now.

    Robert.

  4. Nice list. I am about to add a number of the plugins on your list to my blog (in particular the no self ping, the reddit plugin, post views and the math plugin). In the meantime, I have a question. Do you think that there is a difference between Bunny’s Technorati Tags and the Simple Tags plug-in that I mention on my WordPress plugin list? Is there any difference in functionality (to the best of your knowledge)? What about these tags comared to the Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in? I personally like Simple Tags because it is, well, simple. However, now that I use the new Windows Live Writer I’m not sure that I need any of these plug-ins (except, perhaps, for Ultimate Tag Warrior).

    Either way, thanks for the useful plug-ins.

    All the best,

    Moshe

  8. What about image image verification, Cristi? Does it suck too? :/ I use it on my site and everything seems pretty cool until now (even for “contact” / “email this post” it still works).

  13. Spam Karma is the way. It caught 100% of spam from 20 sites I maintain right now (it also includes all spam caught by Akismet ;)

    And yeah … my opinion is that WP Cache is a bitch, I don’t really like this plugin (especially when I have to update a site).

  15. This plugin will display the number of views that each article had. I just love it. It’s an extra functionality that you can add to your blog.

  22. I added the Math Comment Spam Protection, fantastic!

    Thanks Cristian, no more time wasting and big databases with Spam Karma 2. I also added Bookmark me, thanks.

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