ForTheLose.org - Top 5 Wordpress Plugins That You Need

As someone who has become very fond of the Wordpress interface after creating numerous themes for the CMS, I’ve come across many-a-tips from the professionals. (Yes, Wordpress professionals. Got beef?) They all have their opinions on what plugins they could live and couldn’t live without. I being the bored curious little beaver that I am have tried out most of these plugins to test how efficient they really are. I’ve finally settled down on my own “Best Plugin” list, and here it is.

Akismet

This plugin is probably number one on everyone’s list. I can’t tell you how great this freakin’ little thing works. Askimet, once activated, works in the background quickly scanning all of the comments made to your blog and concluding if they are spam or not. So far with this small blog, its blocked 30+ spam comments with 100% accuracy. I don’t know what I’d do without it. It comes with every download of wordpress, you just have to activate it.

Download: http://akismet.com/

Wordpress Stats

This is a very useful tool for the aspiring web developer. Wordpress Stats lets you track almost every aspect of your site that you could imagine. It shows you real-time unique visits to your site as well as your all-time most popular pages and posts. It also displays yesterday and today’s most popular pages and posts as well as the search terms that are used to find your site, ranked by most commonly used. It shows you where people are being referred to your site from and even what links users are clicking on your blog. With this knowledge and a little tweaking to your blog, you should be able to improve user-friendliness on your site and effectively increase your number of hits.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

OIO Publisher

I made a great blog post about this a few weeks back, but I’ll give a quick summary here too. This plugin is for those of you that monetize your wordpress blogs. By installing this plugin and getting it set up correctly, all you have to do is sit back and watch advertisers buy ad spots on your site directly… you don’t have to do anything. This plugin sets up a little “store” in your site where advertisers use a purchase form to buy ad space on your site. It takes care of billing the customers and offers them subscriptions, so you can keep your advertisers for much longer than normal. It does cost $37, but if you google around, you’ll find a coupon code for it somewhere. I spent only $20 on it, but it paid for itself twice over in less than a week.

Download: http://www.oiopublisher.com/

Most Popular Posts

This is a really overlooked and nifty little plugin. Scenario- you write an epic-as-hell post. The people love it. It’s driving all this attention to your blog. Time goes by. You make more posts. This epic-as-hell post is now sitting on page 6, rotting. No one knows it exists anymore. The post slowly contemplates suicide as it moves to page 7. All your hard work put into this post is now all for not.

Sadly, this story is all too common in the blogging world. Great posts that bloggers make, once they exist the front page, are lost forever. That’s where this plugin comes in. Install it and put the widget in your sidebar and you are good to go. It keeps all of your best posts right there in plain sight for everyone to see. Never again will you lose out on all the hits you should be getting because a few of your great posts aren’t frontpaged anymore.

Download: http://www.macalua.com/2007/02/01/top-posts-by-category-plugin/

All-In-One SEO Pack

This is a pretty useful tool for those of you that want to increase attention to your site. (SEO = Search Engine Optimization.) So many blogs are not getting the publicity they need in google searches because their website isn’t properly set up to be effeciently crawled by google spiders. They lose out on a countless number of hits because they don’t rank well in the eys of search engines, and thus are usually displayed on page 5 or 6, when, if they had proper SEO, they might be on page 1 or 2. This is a very useful tool and is very easy to set up.