Wordpress Plugins

Description: Some amazing wordpress plugins that have helped me make my site what it is now.

Wordpress is an amazing (I can't stress AMAZING enough) tool/CMS that has a variety of components and abilities. However, while everyone has the main abilities already installed on (things like posting, pages, themes), there is a wide range of plugins to customize your wordpress to your liking and the needs of your site.

For instance, if you were a strictly business site, you might want to install the SEO Plugin to make your site more search engine friendly. However, if you were just a personal blog site, you wouldn't care about search engines a twit. That being said, plugins take up a lot of space and reduce the speed of your site, but sometimes the positives outweigh the negatives.

Here are some Plugins that I use on my site that make my life a whole lot easier!

Akismet ; an utterly wonderful (and smart) plugin that catches all of my little spammers out there (people advertising for me to buy ... well... *coughsexproductscough*) This plugin effectively catches them and puts them in queue so you can still manually see if Akismet made a mistake or not, so even if it catches something that is an actual comment, you can still bring it back. This is a must have for all wordpress sites!

Broken Link Checker ; Another must have for site owners everywhere. This plugin basically goes through EVERY single link there is on your site and checks to see if it's broken. If it is, it gives you a handy dandy table to where you can select to whether you would like to unlink it or even discard it, all without having to actually edit the page. A lifesaver!

Dagoon Site Map ; Generates a lovely little sitemap so that your visitors will never ever get lost. Wonderful? I think so! Even has a variety of options so you can control what your sitemap displays and how it displays it.

Secure Contact ; A lot of people don't realize it, but there are wordpress plugins that will create a secure PHP web form for you with the click of a button. I know that personally, I don't like those yucky forms made by bravenet or something, it seems tacky and ew. But with secure contact, you can easily create a customized form and have viewers send the email with just a click, and they will then land on your thank you page. Painless and easy as hell.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade ; I love this plugin, I don't know what I would do without it. This plugin basically just upgrades your entire version of wordpress in the safest way possible. Me, I always used to get nervous when it came to upgrade time because I was always afraid that I would mess something up and in the process, crash my site. When I discovered this plugin, there was no more need to worry. It'll back up your site and upgrade it all in a couple of clicks. ALSO, if you don't want it to take up space, just disable it and enable it when the next WP version comes out!

WP-Cache ; I never used to understand what cache is but now I know and I'm going to explain it to you. What cache basically means is that it will take a virtual interactive snapshot of that page and save it onto your visitors computer. What's the point of that? It'll reduce loading time by A LOT because if the visitor already has the page on their computer, they don't need to reload every single time.

WP-Print ; This is a pretty cool plugin even if it's not the highest of priority. This plugin will generate a printable version of every page and post on your site. This way, if someone wanted to try a tutorial but forgot your site or something, as long as they has printed out a copy, they would be good. Includes a lot of yummy options to play around with.

I love those plugins, they've reduced my stress and workload by 0.6874937536 % Hopefully, they'll help you too!

Tags: plugins, site, wordpress

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Articles, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.