As some know, I use WordPress for the back-end of my site and for most of the sites that I build these days. WordPress is great by itself but the power lies in plugins, so I put together a list of plugins that I use and suggest to others they would want to consider.
SEO Plugins
- HeadSpace 2 SEO – I used to sing the praises to All-In-One SEO but Headspace wins hands down with great features and is very compatible with most themes. It also, can control follow/indexing of articles and reports analytics to a number of providers including Google. The best feature is the Meta-Data Editor which allows mass editing of meta data.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Auto creates sites maps for submission to Google, Yahoo and Bing
- SEO Friendly Images – For properly setting alt tags on images
Administrative
- Maintenance Mode – locks down the site
- Blog Metrics – Tracks activity on your site
- WP-SpamFree – prevents spam of any sort on the site.
- WP-Super Cache – speeds up the rendering of the site.
- WP-DB Manager – enables backup access to MySQL db & Create DB Backups
- Broken Link Checker – Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
- Redirection – 404 Redirects for broken Links
Commerce
- Advertising Manager – Control and arrange your Advertising and Referral blocks on your WordPress blog.
integration
- Twitter Tools – A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter.
- Feedburner Feedsmith – this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber
- Contact Form 7 – Simple Form Utility with some nice advanced features.
- Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
- SimplePress – Well integrate WordPress Forum Plugin
- PodPress – Podcasting Plugin which sets up feeds to all the major podcasting feeds such as iTunes.
- Event Calander – Online calendar for when you need it integrated into you WordPress site.
- VideoPress – If you need video on your site this is the only way to go.
