Mandatory WordPress Plugins
Mar 23, 2010 Best Practices
I’ve been running wordpress sites for quite some time now and I have been doing it professionally for almost as long. There are some plugins that I always install on client and personal sites. Here are a few of them.
All in One SEO Pack – Gives you an easy way to target the SEO of your posts and the entire site. Very comprehensive.
Askimet – duh its comes built in and was written by the guy who wrote wordpress. I am constantly surprised by its accuracy. I enabled it on kidcudi.com and saw the amout of spam comments drop from thousands a day to darn close to none.
Faster Image Insert – One complaint I hear from my clients is that waiting for the modal popup window of the media upload and insert is a pain in the neck. Get it faster with this. Turns it into a metabox like old school wordpress. Only really useful if you are posting a bunch of media.
Flexupload multithread uploader – LOVE this one. Just install it! Turn your uploading into pure joy.
Google Analyticator – I use google analytics on all my sites. Its free, its pretty, its awesome. This plugin has a dashboard widget with a graph of traffic over the last month and a list of your top pages and refers. Its nice because it does not break your workflow to check analytics quickly.
Login LockDown – This one should be incorporated into wordpress core. Restricts brute force attempts at login. Priceless.
WP-PageNavi – Enables a numerical list of pages at the bottom of catagory lists or search results so you can navigate several pages back without having to hit next or prev a bunch of times. Quick and easy.
W3 Total Cache – Lots of people like wp-super-cache, and it may be a bit faster, but I dont like being restricted to running apache or having to hack .htaccess to run on lighttpd. My systems that I have full control of run nginx, so the caching redirection is run through php so I dont have to mess around with it.
PageMASH or CMS – pick one for whichever makes more sense for your install. Both of these offer nice ways of reordering your page list menus. CMS if you are making your site a CMS, pageMASH if not. I’m running WordPress 3 alpha and these will be obsolete when it comes out. But until then its the least hackish way to order your page lists.