My Favorite Wordpress Plugins and Yours?

Posted by rstanley
November 6, 2008

 

image Wordpress is the content management system (CMS) of choice for most bloggers and one if the reasons I like Wordpress is the tremendous number of powerful plugins. I have spent hours and hours installing and removing various plugins and trying to determine which one did what and why it would work or wouldn’t. I also figured out the hard way that you can’t install too many plugins and have them active. Installing too many plugins can result in poor performance for your blog and a shabby viewing experience for your visitors as the web page load times increase. How many plugins are too many? I have heard that you don’t want to exceed 10 active plugins because of the potential for failure, slowness and other complications increases once you pass that magic number.

Must-Have Plugins

  1. Sharethis – the best and only plugin required to enable social bookmarking on you wordpress blog.
  2. Google Analyticator – Allows you to easily add tracking code for your Google analytics
  3. Google XML Sitemaps – Makes managing your sitemap and submitting to Google, yahoo and msn a piece of cake
  4. All-in-one SEO Pack – SEO enable your blog and simplify management within wordpress
  5. Feedburner Feedsmith – If you use feedburner to centralize and track your blog and web feeds then you will want this plugin
  6. Commentluv (optional) – If you want to empower your audience and incent them to leave comments.

 

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Your Thoughts

I have used other plugins and these are just the basics but sometimes it depends upon the purpose of the blog. If you have found alternatives or disagree with my selections I would love to hear about it. Do you have any plugins that you think are better? What about the ten plugin limit?

WordPress, blogging, tips and tricks

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Comments
Comment by michael wong on November 9, 2008 @ 6:27 pm

hey bro, thanks for the recent comment about me finding my niche. :)
i got your other email, but this weekend was crazy and i also had to fit in watching James Bond Q of S. WOW!
about highfade, it’s already on my blogroll 1.0, far right side, you can see it by your blog title:daily and weekly…is that what you meant? i wasn’t sure whether you wanted to be on bml blogroll 2.0, if so pls shoot me a mail, and i’ll get it done Asap. cheers

Comment by Alex- The Blog Traffic Guy on November 11, 2008 @ 11:50 pm

My favorites are:

1. All in one pack
2. Dagon design sitemap generator
3. Ping Optimizer
4. Wp-cache
5. Oneclick

I still use sharethis but it doesn’t bring me traffic. So, it is not one of my favorite.

Comment by admin on November 12, 2008 @ 5:53 am

@Alex - Thanks for sharing. What is a good alternative to sharethis?

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