Nifty WordPress Plugins
As you may have guessed, this site is powered by WordPress. Many sites are. I’m a Web Developer, but I don’t want to have to code more than necessary. So WordPress (or the alternatives) is a great platform to get content on the web in a quick and efficient manner without reinventing the wheel. I do write code when needed. So I wanted to share what plugins I used and why.
404 Redirection – No link available. This makes all 404 errors to your main blog URL. This is to improve SEO in case someone is coming into your site from an old link.
Akismet – Spam blocker. Get this. My site isn’t hugely popular. Only about 300 page views a month and yet it has already blocked 1300 spam messages so far this year.
All In One SEO Pack – This is a great tool to improving your sites SEO. It will generate XML Sitemaps and automatically submit the new sitemaps to the search engines. It allows you to specify a title, description and keywords that will show in the search engine. You also have options that can set a certain page or post to be hidden from a search engine crawler. I highly recommend this one to improve your search ranking.
Broken Link Checker – This gives you a nice interface page in your Dashboard that will show all broken links and allows you to quickly identify them and why they are broken. This is important to improving SEO.
Facebook – This Facebook plugin is in fact by Facebook. It allows you to integrate your site into a Facebook application. Users can like and share your posts into their Facebook feed. Very easy to set up.
Last Modified – I do not know if this one improves SEO or not, but what it allows you to do is put the last modified date of a page or post in the body somewhere. I added the code to my templates file so it shows up automatically on every post and page.
Related Posts – This plugin lets you easily add in related links from other blog authors in the network. The web is just a bunch of interconnected links, the more you link to others and others link to you, the more traffic you will get. This helps you provide similar content from other authors. It is especially useful if you are linking to blogs that have pingbacks.
SEO Smart Links – This will allow you to write a post, then it will detect all the possible in text links you have. You can convert various keywords into links. You get control over what words are links or not.
Twitter Facebook Social Share – This adds a like bar to your pages and posts for all the major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, StumbleOn). I use this for all but Facebook in which case I use the Facebook plugin.
WP Simple Adsense Insertion – This simplifies inserting Adsense code. You just take the Adsense code and put it in these settings, then you can either use the shortcode in posts or pages, but I prefer to add the shortcode to the template. I know, none of us like ads. And getting rich quick isn’t our goal. We just want to cover the costs of running the site and call it good.
WP Super Cache – WordPress is good, but kind of slow. This is partially because it is dynamic database driven content. A way to speed this up is by creating cache files which are static rendered files of your dynamic content. This will help improve performance immensely. Not only that, but it will know when new content has been created or updated and will recreate the cache. Very useful.