WordPress is an amazing website building platform that is relatively easy to learn, in a matter of days even the most timid internet user can have a professional looking blog and website up and running. With WordPress there is no need for HTML or JavaScript coding skills. Everything is created with an easy to use ‘plug and play’ style system. I guess that’s why they call plugins ‘plugins’.
Once you have installed WordPress on your server a default theme will appear, this is usually the ‘Twenty Eleven’ theme, if you don’t like this theme all you need to do is change it. We will talk about how to change the subject in another post. For now, the default theme is good enough to start your newbie blog.
WordPress functionality may seem a bit basic at first and it is, but even the basic theme can look great if you use it right, once you start adding the plugins the magic can really begin. Plugins can turn your blog from just one or two video posts into a full video styled website or it can become a photo gallery. You can add podcasts, sales pages, and eCommerce stores. The possibilities are endless. Still, you’d better not get too excited or exhaust your brain with “too much to learn syndrome.”
I’ll take it easy and start small. I am going to give you a list of plugins that I think all new blog owners should know about and install before we get into the really good plugins. Some are essential and some are, well, you guessed it, not. These are in no particular order
1.Akismet– Great plugin that stops spam comments and automatically deletes them, saving you the time and hassle of having to review comments left by people promoting porn or Viagra! Akismet is usually preloaded in WordPress and should be found in the plugins section. This will need a key to enable it and you will need to register with Akismet to get a key. It used to be available on WordPress.org, but sadly they have stopped making it. [Essential]
2. Contact Form 7 – Great plugin, it adds a contact form (if you hadn’t already guessed it) to your site. Simply add your email address you want emails sent to and any other information you need, then copy and paste the simple code it provides onto a page. Give the page a name like hmmm ‘Contact me’ hit publish and you’re good to go. [Essential]
3. Ezine Articles – This is a cool plugin, when you write a blog post, before you add links or images, you can hit a couple of buttons and submit your new article directly to EzineArticles for distribution. Now, article marketing used to be important, but since Google has taken a bit of a dislike to article sites, I’m not sure how powerful article marketing is; however, it can still be good for you if other websites and newsletters take your article with a link to your site and use it.
4. Google Privacy Policy – This is a must if you want to monetize your site with Google AdSense. They will not add any advertisements to a site that does not comply with their terms and a site must have a Privacy Policy. This does it all, similar to Contact Form 7, you copy a bit of code and post it to a page and hit publish. Work done. [Essential]
5. Google XML Sitemaps – The best way to describe this is using the description of the plugin itself. ‘This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap that will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.
6. CKEditor for WordPress– This is great for copying and pasting from Word etc, keeping the text and font formatting. Better than the standard default text editor in WordPress. It gives you more options and control when writing your blog posts or importing images. Actually, this isn’t an essential plugin, it’s more of a preference.
7. cbnet ping optimizer – This stops excessive ‘pinging’ of your website to search engines. WordPress by default will ‘ping’ your blog posts to help them get indexed by search engines. If you’re like me, you’ll create blog posts by adding parts, posting, viewing, editing, updating, etc. etc. This can go on over and over again. Every time you press ‘Refresh’, WordPress will send a new ‘ping’. You may think this is good, it is not. Too much “pinging” can actually work against you. Google may think you are spamming and trying to get indexed too fast for mischievous reasons. So, in fact, you could be punished for excessive ping. Installation of this plugin is a must. [Essential]
8. Share and follow – This is a social sharing plugin that adds all those lovely social media buttons and bookmarks to the top/bottom of posts, allowing people who like your posts to share and bookmark them (obviously) There’s also a ‘Follow Us’ bar where you can add your Twitter and Facebook links so your site visitors can easily join and follow you on popular social networks.
9. Yoast SEO – Search engine optimization is a must for websites to help them rank higher on search engines, this great plugin checks your posts before publishing to see if they are written at their best with your chosen keyword for that rank better in places like Google. Alternatively, you can use the All in One SEO Pack plugin. I prefer the Yoast personally. [Essential]
10. Digg Digg – Another social media plugin that allows your site visitors to ReTweet or share your posts. Digg Digg has a funky big floating bar that sits next to your posts. I run this along with share and follow.
11. Statpress Reloaded – This is a great little plugin to show you how many visitors you’ve had to your site, where they came from, what page they looked at, what search terms they used, etc. Once you’ve activated it, it’s up and running unlike the Google Analyticator plugin, which requires you to set up a Google Analytics account and obtain an identification password before you can use the plugin. Statpress Reloaded is a simple and fast job. [Essential]
12.WPtouch – Awesome plugin that automatically converts your site into a smartphone compatible version. Most smartphones these days can view normal websites just fine and the new version of WordPress seems to adapt automatically when viewed on phones, however, that being said. WP Touch makes your site look much better and organizes your posts into an easier to read list. Install, try it, if you don’t like it, disable it and delete it. It is not a problem
13. Related Post Thumbnails – This cool plugin allows related posts to be seen in the sidebar and at the bottom of your posts with the featured image, giving your reader something else to look at, possibly grabbing their attention and making them click your other posts by keeping them where you want them, on your site!
14. WP Photo Album – Another excellent plugin that gives a greater visual dimension to your blog. This plugin allows you to upload many photos, create albums and galleries. You copy a code onto a page, give it a title, and hit publish to create image galleries within your site. It has several widgets that can be placed in the sidebar to create a picture of the day/time, a slideshow of images and a section of the top ten images that give your site an amazing visual experience.
15. WordPress Feed – This is for lazy people who don’t like to create their own content. Plug this baby in and it will pull content via RSS from websites of your choice and place them on your blog as posts. As long as they have an RSS feed, of course. Great for the news type of blogs. Use this in conjunction with your own content and you have a winning combination. Regular content posting is good in the eyes of search engines, they normally don’t like duplicate content, but if you use it wisely it can be good. The only downside is that you need to choose the websites you pull your feed from wisely, otherwise your site could become cluttered.
So there you have it 15 essential and non-essential WordPress plugins for the novice blogger. Plugins can be disabled at any time, so try them out and if you don’t like them, stop using them. It will not affect your site. I advise you to keep the essentials as they are important.