Akismet There is a reason that this plugin is now bundled with WordPress and that is because it is absolutely essential. You have to activate it by going to the WordPress web site, signing up and then getting an API key, but there is no excuse for not doing this. Without the Akismet WordPress plugin, spammers will be leaving comments on your blog at will, with ease. You will be plagued by rubbish comments that you have to delete. So make sure you activate this plugin. Broken Link Checker New to my favourite collection, this is a tremendous little plugin that keeps checking your posts for broken links. If any are found, such as a new post has an invalid link added or a web site is deleted, which affects an current post, you are quickly warned. Invalid image links are also notified to you. The benefits are that search engines and visitors are not coming across dead links and if you are linking to your own web sites, then you are warned that the link needs changing. WP Stats I installed this one as part of another plugin. Previously I just relied on Google Analytics, but since using WP Stats I have seen the light and realised that both of these packages work well together. WP Stats provides real time visitor tracking and ignores your own visits to the website, so it is more accurate. It doesn’t provide the high detail that Google Analytics provides, but it does provide all of the indispensable stats you will need - visitor source, popular pages and so on. WP Popular Posts This is the plugin that requires WP Stats and is really good for helping steer people round your site. For new traffic you want to highlight those posts that do well with readers, so the Popular Posts plugin displays these to your readers. This can help convert a one time reader into a regular reader, which really ramps up your site traffic stats! Yet Another Related Posts Plugin There are several related posts plugins, but this is the one I always use. Again, it is a plugin round getting readers to read more and hopefully enjoy your web site so that they decide to sign up for your RSS Feed or newsletter. This one works by placing a list of maybe related posts at the bottom of the post that is being read, occurring the theory that if they have just read that post to completion similar writings may also be interesting. Ultimate Category Excluder A bit of a cheat, this one, but there are times when you decide to write something that is totally off topic and perhaps you don’ need it displaying everywhere. For example, I use UCE to prevent the posts in my uncategorised category from displaying in the RSS feed. I do this so that readers of the RSS feed are only seeing the proper posts, those that are totally on topic. If I go off topic and mouth off aboutsomething, then these are not cluttering the RSS feed. They are my six favourite WordPress plugins that I install to every new weblog I create. If you have any others that you like to use, leave me a comment!
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Several plugins perform functions that useful that they, or equivalent plugins, really should be used on every website. Here is my collection of suggestions!
Written by Keith Lunt of How To Start Blogging. Call in if you need any help or advice with starting a blog.
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