WordPress plugins are in many regards just like Firefox add-ons. You got a few popular ones that most webmasters have installed and then a lot of differences when it comes to the rest. If you have ever looked at one of those “top x” posts about WordPress plugins chance is that you already know the most popular plugins for the blogging platform. Another similarity is that some webmasters like to run a lot of plugins while others tend to concentrate on the core to optimize the performance of their blogs.
We here at Ghacks are currently running nine WordPress plugins. That’s not a lot when compared to most other websites. Our sister site Windows 7 News for instance is using 17 plugins which is almost twice the number installed on Ghacks.
You will find some plugins that most WordPress webmasters have installed and some that only a few are using. Here we go
Akismet
WordPress blogs need an antispam plugin to protect the blog from spam comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. Akismet is shipped with every WordPress installation and it feels only natural to use this plugin. We are not very fond of it on the other hand but the lack of a solid alternative is what makes us use it.
All In One SEO
One of the SEO plugins that are available for WordPress. Another highly popular plugin that optimizes some aspects of the blog to increase its search engine visibility. There are other plugins like SEO ultimate out there that we are testing on some of our other websites but we stick to All In One SEO here at Ghacks.[link]
Contact Form ][
One of the many contact form plugins that are available. It was very easy to setup (by simply integrating the command on a page or post) and has been reliable all those years.[link]
Google XML Sitemaps
It is not only compatible with Google but also with Yahoo and Bing. It creates a sitemap regularly and pings the search engines to notify them about the updates sitemap.[link]
Internal Link Building
This is the first plugin in this list that not many WordPress webmasters are using. It makes use of a similar concept that can be seen at Wikipedia: Internal Linking. It allows the webmaster to define keywords and urls they point to. Blog posts are then automatically scanned for those keywords and if they exist they are made to link to the url defined in the plugin’s options. The main purpose of this is to improve the internal linking to push relevant keywords but it can also be used for other purposes like advertising.[link]
Subscribe To Comments
Provides the option to subscribe to the comments of a post so that a notification is received whenever a new comment is posted. It is an alternative to comment RSS feeds that are automatically enabled on the blog.[link]
W3 Total Cache
A few caching plugins fight for dominance. We have been using WP Super Cache for quite some time until we discovered W3 Total Cache. Back then we had to use other plugins like one for compressing CSS files to optimize the loading times of the blog. W3 Total Cache combines not only caching but also minifying of scripts (JavaScript and CSS) eliminating the need for the CSS Compress plugin. It also supports CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) and is more complete than the other caching plugins. Takes a bit longer to configure but is well worth the troubles.[link]
WP-PageNavi
This is the only plugin next to Akismet that we have been using since the creation of this blog. It allows the webmaster to display numbers at the end of each index page instead of the Next Last navigational elements. [link]
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
This one supports caching and displays related posts beneath each article and also in the RSS feed if desired. We had some troubles with it because of the large number of tags but once we disabled tags from being included in the calculation it worked fine. [link]
The huge amount of traffic that we get every day has forced us to optimize the blog and get rid of some plugins that we would be using otherwise. We have for instance removed social bookmarking icon plugins which reduced the page loading time and did not prove to be as effective as we hoped they would be (meaning that not many visitors clicked on them).
Are you running similar plugins on your website? Let us hear about them in the comments.
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i`m thinking about remove social bookmark icons, too, because like you wrote it, nobody`s clicking and using it.
i prefer wp super cache over w3 total cache but thats just because i have no need for CDN (at the moment) and i hope mod_deflate helps me out in case of css and js. we`ll see.
thank you for that nice posting about which plugins one of my fav websites is using. have a nice day
chris
But mod deflate is not minifying the scripts, only compressing them.
I won’t even go into Akismet, you know how “fond” I am of that one. :)
I set up W3 cache just yesterday myself after move to new hosting. Took a look at your config. Seems you aren’t done yet, because theme CSS is still served using compress and not W3. Also I am unsure about reason but I get completely uncached page in Opera 10.50 with message “user agent is rejected” in status at the end of page.
gHacks always was light blog… compensating with heavy JS of ads. :)
Rarst I had to disable the caching for Opera users since some were seeing the compressed file instead of the website. Could not figure out a way to solve the issue other than to disable Opera from caching. I disabled CSS Compress a while ago but forgot that I hard coded the path to the CSS in the header to reduce the database lookups. Seems I missed that one, corrected.
And the ads, well, I have to live :) I would really be more than happy to get rid of all of them if someone wanted to sponsor my blogging here instead but I guess that this wont happen ;)
Still not done with CSS. :) You must explicitly add your style in W3 minify settings so it handles concatenation and minification.
Could you reproduce Opera issue? I hadn’t ever experienced that on any of the blogs using W3 and I know several I regularly visit do (including my own now :) I saw your topic in WordPress forum, had you tried setting compression to gzip only?
As for ads you know I totally don’t mind them. :) But you use multiply networks and a LOT of scripts. It takes few times longer to load ads than page itself.
Rarst when I do that i get a broken website :)
about opera, yes I tried it and everything else i was able to think of but to no avail
I had some issues myself with CSS. It seems that minified code is not immediately generated and it ignores logged in admin… It took some add/remove CSS and page refreshes not logged in to get it working.
Interesting situation with Opera… Found another topic on forums
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/360032?replies=11
so it’s not unique to your server. But it clearly isn’t widespread or there would be more reports.
Maybe you should get in touch with plugin developers and sort it out properly.
Fixed it. Was a permission issue.
A suggestion:
Big fan of AllWebMenus WordPress Menu Addin. It is a tool for making cross browser menus for WP sites
Info found at:
http://www.likno.com/addins/wordpress-menu.html