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.

One of the main strengths of WordPress is its huge developer community, something that is unmatched by most of its competitors. With this great third party support comes thousands of plugins and themes. So without further ado, I’ll name out a couple WordPress plugins that every user of the blogging platform should use.

All in one SEO

WordPress has the reputation of being the best SEO optimized blogging/CMS platform out of the box. But even with that it still could use a little work. That’s where “All in one SEO” comes in. Basically it allows you to control the SEO aspect of every post, page or tag on your blog as well as override the default WordPress features.

Customizing the plugin is easy and the readme file helps with any problems you might have. There is a reason why it has well over 2 million downloads. So if you haven’t checked it out, I suggest you do so. If you are looking for something a little more advanced you can check out the Headspace2 plugin which is also popular (at the time of this writing it had over 200,000 downloads).

Broken Link Checker

I didn’t know how much I needed this plugin until I got it and since there I have installed it on all my blogs. As the name suggests, this plugin checks your blog at intervals (user defined) for links that might be broken. I cannot stress how important this plugin is for those who run political, tech or news blogs as it is extremely vital at notifying you if your links are active or leading to 404 error pages.

WP-DB-Backup

If it were not for hackers and hard drive failures, this plugin would be obsolete. But thanks to these and many other problems, database failures are prevalent. At least there are options to help keep your database safe.

WP-DB-Backup is one of those plugins which offers users the ability to backup their WordPress databases instantly or have monthly, weekly, daily or hourly backups. The backups can either be sent to a specified email address or can be downloaded instantly. While this plugin is mainly built for those who carry large amounts of traffic on their websites, I would recommend it for everyone including personal bloggers.

Beware that this only backs up the database and not information stored on the server such as download files, pictures and such. That will require another program.

Redirection

When I first started using WordPress I decided to go with the default permalink structure as I was not versed in customizing .htaccess files. That changed a few months later and by that time my blog had boasted well over 150 posts. I needed to do some major on site SEO but was stuck with the fact that if I changed the permalink structure to something more search engine (SE) friendly, visitors who came to my site from backlines would be left with a 404 page error.

Well after a little Google expedition I came across the Redirection plugin which did exactly what it sounds like, redirects old links to the new location. I was extremely happy and I didn’t lose SERPS because of my updated permalink structure.

Even if you are not in the same position I suggest you get this plugin because it is well worth it and it requires very little configuration.

NextGEN Gallery

It’s not everyday that a plugin crosses the 1 million download mark. But Alex Rabe has struck gold with his plugin. For those who are familiar with the WordPress, it is clear that while 2.7 did fix a lot of issues, the built in media library fails to say the least. It’s OK for basic media but managing gallery’s, albums and such is impossible.

That’s where NextGEN Gallery comes in by providing the best photo gallery plugin for the platform. While it still lacks in certain areas, it is light years ahead of the built-in functions of WordPress. Plus with the numerous plugins that expand its features it is quite a beast. If you would like an excellent example of the plugin in action, check out TechCrunch.com.

cformsII

It used to be the top downloaded plugin on wordpress.org until someone brought to the attention of the WordPress community that its license agreement did not match the requirements of wordpress.org. Since then it has been removed, but even with that it still continues to be an excellent plugin.

Basically cformsII allows you to create contact forms, contest forms and anything else your heart desires. Although it is not the easiest plugin to use, it’s powerful and extremely customizable as the CSS file can be edited to meet any requirement.

The only drawback to this plugin is since it’s no longer available on wordpress.org, those wishing to use it have to install and update it manually. That said I still would recommend using it but if you cannot be bothered with the hassle for the extra features, you can always check out Contact Form 7 which carries many of the features but still lacks in the customizability department.

I’m sure there are many others out there but these are the ones that I have found out to be the most useful and would recommend for every WordPress blog. But if you think I left one out, hit me up in the comments below.

Other concerns were that Akismet was not really a free anti spam plugin as webmasters who made more than $500 per month had to order a commercial version for $55 a year. The last concern was probably the most important one as data is send to Akismet servers including the commenter’s IP, user agent or referrer.

One of the main advantages of Antispam Bee is that it does not have to communicate with external servers for the anti spam protection. It is an all in one solution that detects spam not only in comments but also in trackbacks and pings.

The anti spam plugin runs out of the box after activation in the WordPress interface unlike Akismet which requires the WordPress api key. A few options of the free anti spam plugin can be configured in the WordPress settings. Antispam Bee will delete spam messages automatically when they are detected. This can be changed to mark them as spam and keep them for a limited time in the WordPress spam folder. Great for the first time of usage to monitor the performance of the anti spam software.

The main benefits of using Antispam Bee are twofold. It does increase the privacy of the users who comment on the blog as it does not submit data to third party servers which in turn reduces system resource usage which could be noticeable for blogs that receive many spam comments per day (Ghacks receives about a thousand a day).

We have been testing Antispam Bee for the last days and like the performance and spam detection rate a lot. Only one legit comment was flagged as spam by the anti spam plugin. Even better was the fact that comments from users who were usually flagged as spammers (jojo for example) were not moved to the spam folder at all.

Antispam Bee can be downloaded from the website of the developer. The WordPress plugin itself is multi-lingual (at least German and English).

I hope this article mentions some plugins that are not that known and might be interesting for some webmasters who use WordPress as their blogging plattform of choice.

I’m also interested in plugins that you might be using and that I did not mention in this article. It is always nice to read about new plugins and try out a few that sound interesting.

• Adsense Paster – This plugin gives me a great flexibility and works with all kinds of advertising codes – not only those from Adsense. I use it for two purposes. First, it has a function to rotate ads which is great if you want to try out new ads but don’t want to remove all old ads in the meantime. I usually start new ads in a ratio of 1:8 and increase their ratio if they perform well. The second benefit is that I can include all kinds of codes without having to fiddle around with the php code of the various WordPress php files.
• Code Auto Escape – escapes code automatically which is nice if you post code snippets from time to time.
• Comment Link Target Blanker (CLTB) – adds target=”_blank” to all urls in the comments which has the result that those links are opened in new windows.
• CSS Compress – this one compresses the CSS file before it is send to the user reducing the size of the website effectively.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith – detects all RSS feed readers and redirects the feeds to Feedburner to receive better more reliable stats.
• Feed Count – displays the Feed Reader Count of Feedburner without having to use the Feedburner chicklet. Is highly customizable using CSS.
• Full Text Feed – WordPress has the habit to deliver partial feeds even if Full Feeds are selected if the blog uses the Read More function.
• Google XML Sitemaps – create and send Sitemaps to various Search Engines.
• Head META Description – adds Head Meta descriptions to your posts.
• LinkLove – rewards regular commenters by removing the don’t follow link from their website url.
• Link Truncator – truncates long links making sure they don’t break the design.
• MyAvatars – source of all those nice avatar pictures that you see in the comments.
• Optimal Title – uses the title of the article as the page title which is very important for SEO.
• Popularity Contest – keeps track of the most popular posts on your blog. Can display them in the sidebar.
• Simple Tags – great tagger with an immense functionality. Adds tags as meta keywords for instance as well.
• Spam Karma 2 – the best spam plugin for WordPress in my opinion.
• Subscribe To Comments – offer users a way to be notified when a new comment gets posted on an interesting article.
• WLWManifest Disabler – Remove the WLWManifest link declaration in WordPress header
• WordPress Mobile Edition – creates a mobile version of a WordPress blog and automatically redirects mobile users to that version.
• WP-ContactForm – a simple contact form.
• wp firefox referral – add Firefox Referrals from Adsense to your blog.
• WP PageNavi – instead of displaying previous and next page WordPress displays page numbers at the bottom which are easier to navigate.
• WP AJAX Edit Comments – gives users the possibility to edit comments that they have made for a period defined in the admin panel. Mine is set to 15 minutes.
• WPvideo – I use this mainly for some old posts of mine that are using this plugin. I tend to embed videos directly.

A large plugin repository exists on the net and I have downloaded most of my plugins from the wp-plugins.net website. I have added and removed many plugins since then and found a number of plugins I can’t live without anymore. I have decided to use an alphabetic list for ease of accessing the information.

This plugin makes it possible to share Adsense revenue among the siteowner and the author of the article. Only useful if you have more than one author for a site. It fully complies with the Adsense Tos.

The normal behavior for links in comments is that the destination opens in the same tab / window as the comment. This is pretty uncomfortable for the user and the webmaster and I decided to change this by using the plugin.

Makes it easy to add links to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. I have only added some using this plugin but you could theoretically add dozens.

Add a individual meta description to every post you make. Not that important anymore but google uses this information in the search results.

Basically the same as the meta description plugin, only for keywords.

This tool creates a sitemap of your blog and pings google to let them know that you created one. Good for indexing purposes.

Long links in the comments can break the design and I had to use this plugin to make this impossible. This plugin cuts the name of the link after a certain amount of chars. The link itself remains intact of course.#

Very important for SEO. Optimal Title changes the way WordPress displays the title of the website / post.

Creates a popularity index of all posts. Uses amount of comments, trackbacks, pingbacks and more to create the ranking. You may add a top ten to the sidebar or below every post for instance to give visitors a reason to stay on the site and read more articles.

A very useful plugin that displays a certain number of related posts at the end of an article. Adds more information to a subject. Only useful if you have at least 50+ posts.

Fights Trackback Spam by scanning the website that sends a trackback for a link to the post. If none exists, which is normally the case when someone is spamming trackbacks, the trackback goes right into the spam folder.

I never liked using Akismet because you had to apply for a key. Spam Karma does a very good job at eliminating most spam. The only thing that I have to do is to take a rough look at the spam that was caught and delete it if it is indeed spam. The number of false positives is really low as well.

You will receive a notification if a new comment as been added to a certain article.

Tags are important. May be used to add tags to your post which are scanned by Technorati and then included in their search engine. Can also replace the Meta Keyword plugin.

Currently not activated but pretty useful if your sites makes it to the frontpage of sites like slashdot or digg who send hundreds of users per minute to your blog. Caching eases the load on the database and the site acts much faster.

Well, a contact plugin. If you click contact you see what it does.

The counter that is displayed at the end of the right sidebar.

Adds auto-translate links to your blog to offer visitors that do not speak English that well a way to understand what the article is about.

Displays page numbers instead of next page, previous page messages at the end of a page.