My Top 10 Best Wordpress Plugins
written by John Chow
I get many people emailing me about all the various plugins I run on my blog. The emails come so often that I have decided to compile a list of the 10 Wordpress plugins I am running. I also provide links to where you can download the plugins. Enjoy!
Sidebar Widget
The Sidebar Widget is one of the most useful plugins made for Wordpress. The Widget allows you to customize the look of your sidebar without having to edit the PHP files. With Sidebar Widget, you just drag and drop items you want included in the sidebar and the Widget does the rest. The only downside is the Sidebar Widget only works with Widget compliable Wordpress templates. If the template you are using is not Widget friendly, you cannot use it.
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AdSense Deluxe
The AdSense-Deluxe Wordpress Plugin allows you to add Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your Wordpress posts. The plugin is extremely easy to install and use. Just download, unzip and upload to your plugins folder. The plugin will place an AdsenseDeluxe screen to your Wordpress options panel. From there you can create multiple AdSense ad units and decide what parts of the site should have or not have ads, and what ad size to run. You can even add it within your Wordpress templates. An AdSense SandBox preview tool is also included.
The cool thing about AdSense Deluxe is it keeps tracks of the number of Google ads displayed and limits that number to three (the maximum number of ads Google allows on a page). That is why you may see a 300×250 box ad in a blog post but that ad disappears when the post is viewed from the front page.
Digg This
Digg This is a plugin that detects incoming links from Digg.com and automatically display a link back to the Digg post, for people to Digg your story. When a Digg is first recognized, an email lets you know that someone has Dugg your story. The detection of the Digg comes from the referring Digg URL. In case there are more than one Digg posts to your page, only the first one is considered.
There are many options to choose from in order to display the Digg link. The most popular is the Digg button that displays the number of Diggs a story received. You can see this Plugin in action at this post. Alternatively, you can Digg this story and see the button show up here. 
The Plugin is very easy to install and use – just upload the file to your Plugins folder and activate it in your Wordpress Plugins control panel. Then add < ?php digg_this_button(); ?> to the part of the blog template where you want the button to appear.
Feedburner Feed Replacement
I recently updated my blog RSS feed to FeedBurner because it gives a ton of information about my RSS subscribers. Not only can FeedBurner tell you how many people read your feeds, but it also tell you what RSS readers they use, what posts they read, where they come from, etc.
The easiest way to install FeedBurner on a Wordpress blog is to use the FeedBurner Plugin. This Plugin direct 100% of your feed traffic through FeedBurner, ensuring accurate readership stats. To install, all you need to do is upload the file to your Plugins folder, then activate it in your Wordpress control panel. Then just enter the FeedBurner URL for your RSS feed and you are all set. The cool thing about this Plugin is that it automatically converts any existing subscribers from the old feed to the FeedBurner one.
Related Posts
This Plugin, available from Mr. Wasabi, will find other blog posts that are related to the current post. This is a good way to generate extra page views and keep readers on your blog. The Plugin allows you to set how many related posts to display and gives you options for displaying them. There are also options to exclude excerpt and password protected pages. The performance of the Related Post Plugin is pretty good. For example, in my Dinner At Tropika post, it found these related posts:
• Dinner With The Parents
• $20 To Stamp Your Papers
• Dinner With Mom & Dad
• The Observatory Had No View
• Dinner With VIA & S3
Recent Comments
This plugin comes with Wordpress and retrieves a list of the most recent comments. You can see it in action on the right menu. Like the Related Posts plugin, Recent Comments can help increase blog page views. It also encourages people to comment more, which is always a nice thing.
Optimal Title
Optimal Title mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the separator to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first. In other words, instead of John Chow dot Com >> The Title Of The Blog Post, it will show The Title Of The Blog Post < < John Chow dot Com.
Why would you want to do this? Because having your page information appear before your blog name in the title provides more meaningful search engine results. It is very helpful when the title of your page is very long since most search engine place a limit on the number of charters to display. Having the title go first allows the search engine user to get a better idea on what the page is about. I modified the codes so that the home page displays both my name and the blog description. Before it just displayed my name.
Google Sitemap Generator
This plugin generates a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap for your Wordpress blog. A sitemap helps Google to index all the pages on your blog. Whenever you update, or add new content to your blog, the plugin will generate a new sitemap for Google to use. In addition to saving you time, this plugin will help get your site indexed by Google much faster.
Akismet Comment Spam Killer
This Plugin comes preinstalled with Wordpress and I highly recommend it. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog, it is submitted to the Akismet web service that runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. There is no blacklist because part of the idea of Akismet is that you are always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers.
To turn on Akismet just go into the Plugins section of your Wordpress control panel and activate it. The software does require an API key however. You can get a free key by signing up for a Wordpress account.
Wordpress Database Backup
This plugin comes installed with Wordpress and provides an easy way to backup your Wordpress database. You may download the backup file, or have it emailed to the address of your choice. I know how bad I am about keeping my stuff backed up so plugins like these are a Godsend. The plugin is very easy to use – just activate and then select “Backup” under “Manage” in your Wordpress control panel.
Related Link: Two New WordPress Plug-ins: IMM-Glossary & IMM-Keywords The plug-ins let you build a personal blog glossary and links to all of your terms, and lets you specify keywords for each post and inserts as meta.
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(23 votes, average: 3.65 out of 5)
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Looks like you forgot to close one of your tag , rest of your blog are in bold :p
Wordpress is screwing up. I did close the tag but Wordpress is not including it! This is messed up!
Finally fixed! Man, that was a major headache!
Nice list here John.
I find that the Heat Map plug-in is one of those plug-ins that you can live without but definitely adds to our Sharepoint BUZZ site.
“Displaying a heat map (aka weighted list) of your categories and your monthly archives. Activity in any given category or month can be indicated by varying font sizes, color intensities or both.”
Heat Map Plugin http://www.engadgeted.net/projects/wordpress-heat-map-plugin/
Sharepoint BUZZ
Visit http://www.sharepointbuzz.com
I need to check out if that sitemap generator works.. like now
Nice list, I’ve got a few plugins on my main wordpress site at the moment.
On another note, I think you site might have a few too many ads for a personal blog.. just my thoughts.
Cya
Nowdays i really dont like your blog , bcoz now you are writing only for DIGG, it’s bad.
Mac - I didn’t do this article for a Digg, and I wasn’t the one who submitted it. As I stated at the beginning, I get emailed about these plugins daily. Now, they don’t have to email me.
The ordered list plugin has a security issue that has been identified which would allow someone to redirect your feed to anywhere they want. Bad news. Opt instead for the AntiLeech plugin which redirects your feed to feedburner and protects your blog from scrapers. Nice list nonetheless!
congrats you hit the digg frontpage once again. =)
Nice list, I’m seriously considering switching to WP from Drupal. Need to have a play around with it first and this list has given me a few things to think about.
“Wordpress is screwing up. I did close the tag but Wordpress is not including it! This is messed up!”
Chances are it was like <strong/> and you tried to close it with </strong>, which does nothing.
how about useronline and number of views plugin? i think they are also great
you missed a lot ….
I’m sure I missed a ton of plugins, but this is a list of plugins that I am currently using. I would love to find more. If you come across a great plugin, please let me know.
Nice list, Optimal Title is a new one to me.
Personally I would include Role Manager in this as well (http://redalt.com/Resources/Plugins/Role+Manager) as it a) lets you hugely simpify the admin menu and b) stops users messing with things they shouldn’t
Wow these lists keep being made and people actually dig them when they are forgetting one key plugin.
“Viper’s Video Quicktags”
Google this plugin if you want a way to add YouTube, Google Video and other videos to your site it is very easy to use.
I run it on my website
http://www.fatadam.com
That’s all I have to say.
The “mullet layout” plugin also deserves a mention. It shows more posts on your wordpress frontpage — in a very usable way.
The recent posts has an excerpt, and older posts are only showed with a title. That increases findability and makes frontpage better layed out.
We use it at justaddwater.dk and are very satisfied with the layout. Currently our frontpage show 5 recent articles with excerpt, and 35 following with title only (the “Mullet”: longer in the neck).
Actually, we’re thinking about making the mullet even longer — maybe 50-60 posts or so.
Thomas Watson has made a good witeup on usability perspectives for “the Mullet” over at justaddwater.dk, and you can download it from brainspill: Wordpress mullet plugin
Very useful list. I’m downloading two of these plugins immediately.
Thanks!
Thanks for the list. I already have some of them but gonna try the ones I don’t have.
Cheers!
Well here’s a blogpost made for digg if I ever saw one–another “top x whatevers” list where 3 out of your 10 come included with Wordpress. Why even bother?
Thanks for this list! I am going to look into using the related posts one ASAP.
i also use and recommend all of these…
Sweeeet–Many thanks John! Nice site btw.
Los 10 mejores plug-ins para WordPress (según el autor)
Un listado de 10 plug-ins muy interesantes para aquellos que tengan usen WordPress.
10 Cool Wordpress Plugins
John Chow made a list of 10 cool Wordpress plugins, in my opinion not the 10 best plugins.
But they are worth a try.
Bookmark to:
…
600+ diggs, not bad man
I just went and installed the related posts thing. Wasn’t impressed at first because it wasn’t working properly, but it seems to be doing alright now. Tell me, do you add the keywords into your posts so the plugin picks them up or not?
wp database backup provided a leak for hacker to hack into your wp.. so if you’re not using it, deactivate it for safety issue
@John Chow:
I suggest you take a glimpse at my WWW Redirection Plugin. The entire mission of the plugin is to resolve the conflict of google contributing two seperate page ranks to our blogs. First, you receive a pagerank for http://www.jonhchow.com which currently is 4 and you receive a page rank for johnchow.com without the www subdomain which is currently at a 2.
If I link to your website utilizing the non www version than I am contributing a backlink to your non-www pagerank, so I’m increasing your 2 when you should want me working on the 4.. true?
WWW Redirect solves this issue by adding or removing the www from your address URI prior to the user actually receiving any data from the server.
It happens behind the scenes per se, anyways check it out and let me know what you think. I definitely believe it is essential for any blog!
wordpress-plugin: Google Sitemap Generator
Google Sitemaps is a relatively unkown feature allowing webmasters to control exactly how the search engine crawls their site. by setting up an XML-file in the root-directory of the website, siteowners tell Google’s bots which pages to avoid/inde…
Thanks for the list John, I found at least a few of them to be immediately useful. Kudos!
Thanks John Cow, I made your posting as part of my new posting about 10 best plugin for wordpress. I’ll be install all plugin you’ve recommended.
Thanks John! I uploaded quite a few of them. One I was looking for was a “recent posts” like you have in your sidebar.
Hmm quickies #43: Other business duties call
Just a quick note to fill readers in on what’s been happening lately. We are in the process of setting up a new office/desk/closet for our online company KMR Enterprises. I’ll be taking pictures and maybe even a short video of the transform…
Nice piece of information. But there are others too, such as Shoutbox and WP-online. I do agree that Google Sitemap plugin is a must-have. I have used some of those plugins at my WordPress sites.
why so many haters?
hi, John Chow. just a simple question.
how you manage to put on 3 google Ads on your front page.
If I insert the code into every posting. then I got this problem , i gonna show more than 3 Ads on the frontpage.
but you only showed 3. how you do that?
thank you for helping me out.
Neues Wordpress-PlugIn: Optimal Title
Die Standardeinstellung für den Seitentitel eines Wordpress-Blogs ist, dass erst der Blogname und dann der Titel des Beitrags oder der Seite angezeigt werden. Das ganze sieht dann so aus:
DerZeiger.de - Neues Wordpress-PlugIn: Optimal Title
In der Sta…
Thanks for the tips!
I already use many of the plugins you mentioned..a few I have never seen. I am going to check them out ASAP!
also, I would recommend the google sitemap plugin to anybody running a wordpress blog. I have been using it for about 6 months and it has really improved my search engine traffic.
this is a great list. I’ll be using just about all of these
also, a plugin I found that is pretty cool is the msn search stat plugin:
http://gdymov.com/inbound-links-backlinks-wordpress-plugin/
It shows the number of search results that appear on MSN relating to your blog/site.
I might consider it #11 in the list
Thanks for the list- you mentioned that recent comments comes with wordpress. I recently installed, but can’t find this plugin.
Any advice? Thanks,
sanford
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John, thank you for the list. I’m new to blogging and WP, so it was very useful to have a place to start.
Excellent list John. Greatly appreciated.
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Thanks for the list. Gonna use some.
Thank you. I will have to include this list on my new tool: http://wordpressr.com. It is a meta search for wordpress themes, plugins, and tutorials.
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[...] So that is the list compiled from my own surfing. I decided that if I was to find a more comprehensive list I might need to look to the blogging community, writ large. Via Bloggingpro I came across this article from John C Chow. After reading his list, I decided to add two to my list, and have installed them since beginning the draft of this post. They are: [...]