I’ve had a number of people ask which WordPress plug-ins I use on my blogs. Not every blog uses the exact same set of plug-ins, but they’re all pretty similar. If I find a plug-in that I like, I tend to use it on most of my sites. Here is what I have running on this one:
Akismet — It comes with WordPress. Use it. Love it.
All in One SEO Pack — It has some nice features to help with the SEO of the blog.
Enhanced WP-ContactForm — An easy way to build the form on the contact page.
Fancy Zoom — Adds a nice effect to embedded images. Click the WordPress logo at the top of this post to see what I mean.
FeedBurner FeedSmith — I use FeedBurner to handle all of my RSS feeds, and this plug-in redirects your normal feed over to your FeedBurner feed so that there is no confusion.
Google XML Sitemaps — Creates a sitemap of your posts and pages, which can then be uploaded to the various webmaster tools.
Highlight Author Comments — If I leave a comment to one of my own posts, it shows up in yellow to help it stand out from the others and show that it’s more of an official reply.
Show Top Commentators — The users with the most comments show up in the sidebar, along with a link to their site. This can be a good way to attract more comments.
Sociable — Adds popular social bookmarking links to the end of each post.
Subscribe to Comments — This adds “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” below the comments on each post. I hate when a site doesn’t have that, and it usually reduces the chances of me leaving a comment there.
Twitter Tools — A variety of tools to link the blog to my twitter account (follow me and I’ll follow you).
WordPress.com Stats — I use Google Analytics as well, but this plug-in gives me a different look at the stats and they’re presented very well.
That’s about it. I’m always on the lookout for other useful plug-ins, so what do you use?
Fancy Zoom is awesome. I didn’t know about that one. Thanks for the tip.
You might also enjoy robots meta, wordpress backup and in case you start getting thousands of comments here, wp super cache.
One of my sites could probably stand to use the cache plug-in, so I’ll check it out.
There are a few different cache plug-ins out there. Is super cache your favorite?
A cool one I found the other day is Crawl Rate Tracker. Shows you which pages on your site are getting hit by the bots the most. Pretty slick if I say myself.
Brian – I hadn’t heard of that. Cool idea, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Nice list — I like Fancy Zoom too.
You might want to play it close to the vest when it comes to publicizing plugins for specific blogs. I had a bad experience with hacking of my site and learned that some WP plugins can be vulnerable. Best not to make it to easy for the bad guys 🙂
Thanks for the Twitter follow.
That’s an excellent point. I know there are two sides to a site like this:
1 – Giving away as much information as possible (how to monetize, how much money I earn, sites I own, plug-ins I use, etc) to make it more useful for other webmasters.
2 – Not giving too much away as to cause problems (friends knowing exactly how much I make, plug-in vulnerabilities, etc).
It’ll be an interesting balance to slowly figure out.
Great list. I also like WP Super Cache, Related Posts (YARPP), and Ravatars.
I like KQF but I think WP updates are messing with his code
Well,you’ve been a great source to the SEO community and i can tell you that most of your posts and tools have actually improved my work.
Cheers mate!