Essential WordPress Plugins: A web designer’s best friend

This page is my own “cheat sheet” of plugins to reference whenever setting up a new WordPress site. I try to keep it up to date as Wordpress evolves. I last updated it on January 9th, 2010.

Basics

Must-haves for any WordPress installation.

  • cforms adds nice, AJAX-based forms to your site. Perfect for contact forms and comment forms! Be sure to check that it is compatible with any other comments plugins you may be using.
  • WP-DBManager lets you back up your database. Also, helps speed up your database with handy “optimize database” command.
  • WP-PageNavi adds nicer navigation for your pages. It makes search engines happier. It makes visitors happier. It makes me happier. There is also a new WP-CommentNavi plugin on that page that does for comments what this one did for pages. Worth investigating if you expect your comments to get out of hand.

Security

Many people install Wordpress without ever taking a moment to secure it against the many looming threats posed to it. Any opensource code can easily be analyzed by malicious coders. But thankfully, with a little forethought from bloggers and generosity from benevolent coders, most threats can be eliminated without a dust-up.

  • Akismet comes standard with every Wordpress install. It prevents spammers from abusing your blog. Make sure it is activated ASAP!
  • AskApache Password Protect protects your blog by locking it down with a handful of extra passwords and .htaccess edits. Great at walling malicious password crackers.
  • WP Security Scan scans your installation and alerts you to any major holes in your security that icky people might try to exploit. It also tells you how to plug said holes!

Happy Visitor

As a blog owner, you should do everything in your power to make sure your visitors feel welcome. Ecerything should be easy to find and easy to understand, making them more likely to return. On the Internet, where interaction is key, visitors are you bread and butter. Do not dismiss them or mistreat them. “The visitor is always right.”

  • Subscribe To Comments lets users receive email notifications when someone replies to a post.
  • Comment Redirect lets you redirect first-time commentors to any page on your site. It’s particularly nice to make a page that says, “Thanks so much for your comment! Please come back to comment some more! And while you’re at it, subscribe to my newsletter and RSS feed for more awesome!”
  • WP Ajax Edit Comments lets visitors edit their comments for a short while after posting them. Visitors typically like to be able to correct their own typos :) Compatible with cforms!
  • Search Suggest suggests terms users might have been searching for when using the search function.
  • Search Excerpt highlights the search terms in the excerpts returned when a user performs a search on your site. An old plugin, but it still seems to work.
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin finds posts your visitor might also be interested in reading. Uses a large amount of server resources, so please use this with WP Super Cache.

Happy Blogger

You know usability and courtesy are important to visitors, but what about you and the people blogging on your site? There’s no reason you can’t do for yourself what you’re doing for others! Seek to improve your WordPress’s backend and take the back pain out of blogging!

  • TinyMCE Advanced is great if you ever find yourself wishing that you had fewer or more options on the formatting options toolbar you use when writing a new post.
  • WordPress Reports lets you check your Google Analytics stats and Feedburner stats directly from your administration area. So nice for traffic report junkies.
  • Maintenance Mode lets you put up a fully customizable “pardon our dust” screen while you work on major upgrades, re-themeing, whatever you might not want users to see, while allowing admins to fully access the front-end of the site.
  • WP Tuner helps you spot broken plugins, sluggish databases, etc. A must for troubleshooting performance.
  • Broken Link Checker checks to make sure your links are all working. Search engines don’t like broken links any more than visitors do, and thankfully this automates what would otherwise be a painstaking task.

Speed

  • W3 Total Cache caches your pages and posts so they display faster for visitors. Advanced settings can let you take advantage of server RAM and minifying settings.

SEO

Most people want their sites to be search engine-optimized, and these WordPress plugins help with that. I would have put them under “basic”, but you never know. Some installations are meant to be private, thus negating the use of SEO plugins. Yoast has an excellent article on optimizing WordPress for search engines.

  • Google XML Sitemaps makes a sitemap for google to crawl. It makes sure google knows every single page on your site exists.
  • SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt text and titles to all your posts’ images.
  • All In One SEO Pack won out over HeadSpace2 for being idiot-proof–you set it up and ignore it. Even if you hand the blog over to a less than web-savvy client, it works fine. HeadSpace2 is more hands-on, better for people who want to micro-manage their SEO. The only feature that HeadSpace2 has that this one doesn’t is the ability to rename the “more” text.
  • MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer keeps your blog from “pinging” search engines to death. Search engine hate being pestered with content they’ve already looked at. Sometimes, they just start ignoring you. And Wordpress will ping them any time you make an edit to a post! It will ping them with redundant content! The post in your author archives is the same at the one in your calendar archives, but WordPress will try to alert search engines to them both! And if you’re a chronic post-editor like myself, you can easily see how many pings one post alone will generate. This optimizer makes sure that one post=one ping. Requires you to sign up for an annoying newsletter, BUT! well worth it not to be ignored by search engines.
  • Robots Meta prevents search engines’ robots from crawling the links in areas where they might be redundant. Search engines often frown upon repeated content. To find out more, see the Yoast article I linked to above.

Social Media

It’s important to socialize! These plugins helped keep your WordPress, erm, plugged in.

  • Sociable adds little social networking icons to the bottom of all your posts. Choose from a plethora of networks to display. There’s even an “email to friend” option, although it’s not very prominent. Add-to-Any is a similar but aesthetically different choice.
  • Twitter for Wordpress lets you post a custom feed from your Twitter (see the right side of this page for an example!).
  • Twitter Tools posts your latest blog post directly to your Twitter! So handy! You can also post tweets from your WordPress backend (although I personally find this feature useless, others may not).
  • WP-EMail lets users email posts to their friends.
  • WP-Facebook Connect uses the Facebook API to allow visitors to do things using their Facebook account rather than forcing them to register with your site all over again.

CMS

If your installation will be used more as a content management system and less like a blog, these come in handy.

  • Page Link Manager lets you decide which of your pages appear in navigation, and which don’t. A real life saver! Never agonize over whether or not you should add a page for fear of ruining your navigation again!
  • Redirection lets you redirect URLs to specific pages. Handy if you overhaul your site’s permalink structure. It also has an added SEO benefit: be sure to set index.html to redirect to index.php. Some search engines still get hung up on this, pfft.
  • Yoast Breadcrumbs improves the usability of your site by putting breadcrumbs on your pages that help users orient themselves and navigate your site.

Gallery

Artists and illustrators have specific needs, usually involving galleries. More to come later.

Webcomic

Like the illustrators mentioned above, cartoonists have very special needs. Luckily, there are some very nice plugins and themes that take the pain and suffering out of posting comics.