WordPress Plugins a Site Wouldn’t Function Without

Wordpress LogoPerhaps “wouldn’t function” is an overstatement — it’d surely function, just not quite as well. These are the WordPress plugins that I install before doing anything else on a new blog (all are highly recommended!):

404 Notifier
This is a nifty little plugin that allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed listing all of the 404 hits your site receives. It’s useful if you’re doing any changes in permalinks, deleting posts, or similar. I wouldn’t recommend this for high-traffic sites, unless you purposefully want to see what the “hacking” SQL-Inject scout bots look for.

Akismet
I can’t even begin to describe my undying love for this tool. I love it almost as much as I love Gmail’s anti-spam feature. It blocks spam comments on your blog, and it is almost always correct in what it blocks.

FeedBurner Feed Replacement
If you aren’t already “burning your feed”, you should. Feeds are becoming increasingly popular, and this service manipulates your feed to your choosing, e.g. by inserting a “Digg this” link below posts, tracking your feed subscribers/stats, and more. This plugin simply redirects all hits to /feed/ (and /comments/feed/ if you choose so) to your burnt feed on FeedBurner. For an example, see the Burned Sheeped Feed!

Google Analyticator
Google Analytics is wonderful. Again, I highly urge you to sign up for this service if you’re not already using it. This plugin automatically inserts the correct Analytics code into your pages - what makes it better than simply pasting the code in your template footer is it also generates Analytics code for outbound links, allowing you to keep track of what links are generating the most heat.

Google Sitemap Generator
I’ve previously tried to manually build sitemaps with the Google Sitemap Generator tool, by parsing Apache accesslogs. This turned out to be quite unsatisfying as it would index funky pages such as unfinished posts that I was working on in the admin panel. This sweet little plugin generates a Sitemap of all posts, pages and categorizes on your WordPress blog, prioritizes them based on comment count (if you choose to), automatically updates the sitemap and notifies Google every time you make a change, and more. If you’re using tags, it can also index that: Google Sitemap Generator UTW Tag Addon. For an example of a sitemap, see the Sheeped Sitemap (XML).

Related Entries
This plugin allows you to show a list of posts that are related to a specific post. For an example, check out the “Related Posts” part of the sidebar to the right.

Snap Preview Anywhere
Snap lets you show your users an automatic screenshot of a page before they click a link. For an example, hover over this link with your mouse: Hover me!. Snap is pretty cool, but serves no real, useful purpose — not on this site, anyway.

Sociable
Sociable automatically appends links to common social bookmarking sites for your users’ convenience. The links are set up so users will automatically get to an already existing story or submit a new one, preventing duplicate stories. For an example, see the bottom of this post, before the comments section. Sociable supports many more services than the ones I’m showing.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows your users to subscribe to the comments of a certain post when they are making a comment. This is particularly useful if users are seeking support for something you’ve written about. Whenever a new comment is made, they will receive an e-mail, letting them know there might be an answer to their question.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
Mmmmm. This plugin converts your blog from taxonomy to folksonomy in the sense that it lets you tag your posts rather than categorize them (or both). Personally, I keep categories as broad as possible, then add tags to posts to specify what I’m writing about. For an example, see the top of this post, which shows this was posted in Internet and Software. Now, take a look at the bottom of the post, which shows that this is tagged with the tag WordPress. UTW also lets you make a tag cloud, an awesome thing. You can see the tag cloud for Sheeped on the Archives page.

Videos with Wordpress
This is by far the easiest-to-use plugin of this type I’ve found so far. It lets you embed Google, YouTube, etc. Videos in your posts with very short tags, e.g. google 4183875433858020781 (surrounded by brackets). For an example, see the post on Parallel Universes I made a while back.

WordPress Reports
This plugin shows you (both) your Google Analytics and FeedBurner stats from within the WP admin panel. Very cool.

WP-Cache
This is THE single most useful WordPress plugin in my opinion. Everyone should use this. It automatically caches your pages and serves them from static files rather than making up to 30 SQL queries per page. I’ve been using it for ages with a cache time-out setting of 2592000 seconds (24 hours if I remember correctly) without any visual abnormalities. The cache is automatically cleared whenever a new post or comment is made. I’m telling you, this plugin could be what makes the difference between life and death if you get dugg/slashdotted/etc - and it’s basically transparent.

Note: If you make any changes to your blog’s template or core files, you will need to clear the cache manually.

WP ContactForm
Shows a simple contact form, allowing your visitors to reach you easily. For an example, see the Contact page.

WP-DBManager
WP-DBManager allows you to backup, restore, delete (if you really want to) and best of all, defragment your MySQL-database from within the WordPress administration panel.

WP-Lightbox2
Also one of my favorites. This plugin opens images in a very pretty AJAX window, allowing users to see images (even a series of images) on the page rather than having to navigate back and forth. For a demonstration, click this link to an image.

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In case I fall in love with any more plugins, I will update this post.

Feel free to share your thoughts/problems of/with any of these add-ons by commenting!

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