WordPress Plugins - A List of 5 Recommended Plugins

cathy

While not an exhaustive list, here are 5 plugins I wouldn't be without.

1.   Akismet

Akismet comes with every WordPress install and should be one of the first plugins you activate.  It protects you from spam comments.  Here is what Matt Mullenweg says about it:

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

You will also get an interesting statistic in your dashboard about how many spam comments have been caught for your blog.  Here's mine -  Akismet has protected your site from 36,057 spam comments already. 

Thank you Akismet - 36,057 yucky comments I didn't have to see! 

The rest are in no particular order.

2.  Exclude Pages from Navigation

If your theme does not have this built in, this is a plugin you will use a lot.  It allows you to decide which pages appear in the navigation bar.  It provides a simple checkbox on the editing page - you leave it checked to include pages and uncheck it to exclude pages.  Great easy to use plugin but ONLY if your theme doesn't have that capability built in.

3.  Page Links To 

Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers at WordPress,  wrote this plugin to allow you to link to pages off your blog without the need for an html redirect.  As he says, it's " Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources."  This is a staple in all of my blogs!

4.  Pretty Link 

Pretty LInk lets you set up and track your own links.  It's great for disguising those long, ugly affiliate links or ANY link you want to track.  It works outside of WordPress too.  You can use your 'Pretty Link' anywhere.  Great plugin!

5.  ShareThis 

Share This lets your visitors share a post/page with others. It supports e-mail and posting to social media and social bookmarking sites and it creates a very cool icon (look for it at the bottom of this post) that is quite recognizable and does not clutter up your blog with a bunch of social media icons. 

There are more and I'll write about them in upcoming posts.  But these will definitely get you started!

Cathy Perkins - The WordPress Wizard

 

Comments

By cathy on December 9th, 2009 at 1:11 pm

Yours is a great post about changing order of comments too. Think I'll write about it - giving you credit of course.

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