24 useful wordpress plugins which I use on my blog

WordPress undoubtedly is the best blogging platform for almost all types of blogs, the best features of WordPress is its wide collection of themes and plugins, which makes each and every blog unique and different from the other. I have struggled for months to get the best WordPress plugins and today I have a clean and well organized dashboard and I have made my site pretty fast, clean and efficient for cheap, low cost hosting that is.

Today I’ll be disclosing and describing all the WordPress plugins I currently use, I am arranging them according to their significance for making it easier for you to find. I’ve also rated and linked to them.

Search engine optimization

All in one seo plugin

This is one of the major reasons why my posts get indexed into Google within just hours. I’ve been using this from the time I shifted this blog to wordpress and I have got a lot of love from search engines due to this. This plugin allows you to choose the format of your title and the posts and pages which will be indexed and it has section beneath your text editor in WordPress, so as your writing a new post you can easily update the search engine information for the same.

Google XML sitemap

One thing in common in most search engines is that all of them love xml sitemaps, as it gives a clear structure of a site to their bots and it wouldn’t lead to any spam or black hat stuff in their search results, so if your using black hat SEO never attempt, if you don’t you can earn Google’s trust by doing so. This plugin is not just for Google, but for all the major search engines, so now you can tap into an extensive search audience.

After the sitemap is generated, it is stored as a file in your server and all you have to do is link to that particular file from your webmaster dashboards from different search engines. The file keeps updating each week or day as you want and so will your sites performance.

Automatic SEO links

I have always stuck to interlinking of old and new posts as an effective strategy to increase pageviews, stickiness, revenues as well as SEO. Most of the time most bloggers including me never find patience to go through old posts and interlink them with each other, so as they that in the information age everything you hate must be automated. This plugin does the same, which is interlinking of old posts with the new ones  and new posts with the old ones.

I have used this tool from the past two weeks and its saved me a lot of time and till now it hasn’t made much changes in my stats, but my blog has low traffic, so if you have a high traffic blog I’m sure you’ll find success with it. All you have to do is give keywords for a particular post and this plugin searches for the keywords in your old posts and links to it if it finds a match.

Comment optimization

Akismet

If your traffic just passes beyond one hundred visitors per day your sure to loads of spam comments, most have nothing but a link, such things make your blogging career miserable. Akismet is a built-in WordPress plugin which means you get it as soon as you install WordPress, but for activating you must find your free API-key, but don’t worry the plugin show baby steps for getting that.

As soon as you activate your plugin it automatically starts blocking spam comments and it also gives you stats on how much comments have been blocked, for Dumb Little BLogger it stands at 1760. In case the plugin is not able to judge on a comment it keeps it in its spam queue waiting for you to analyze and moderate the comment.

Subscribe to comments

This plugin places a check box next to the comment form and if a user checks it he would get mail updates if anyone adds a comment after he does. This has more than one use, it can get a reader to make repeat visits, it can help start a discussion on your post and will let users get a feel of what others think about their comments. I’d say this is very useful for any site with a comment form, this really helps in showing the popularity of your blog too.

CommentLuv

I bet most of you are familiar with this plugin, most blogs today have it and I started to use it just a month ago. What this plugin actually does is while a reader is writing a comment, it visits his site and aggregates his latest post and posts it right below his comment, giving a lot of exposure to the commenter and increasing your comment volumes.

I started to use this plugin two months ago and I still use it, so did I see a huge spike in comments? Frankly speaking I didn’t see any extra rise in volumes, I think thats because my blog still has low traffic and no one would care if they did or did not get a link to their site has they would never get much exposure.

Dofollow

Most commenter’s would love to get a few search engine benefits for taking time to leave a comment on your blog, especially if your in the make money online or blogging tips niche. If you make your comments dofollow your sure to see increase in spam comments, but on the other hand many visitors will post resourceful comments to get a link back, which will prove your authority on your niche.

After you activate this plugins its recommended that you put a banner or something attractive stating that your comments are Dofollow mainly to inform your readers about it. If you take my advice, you must write a post on this topic to increase exposure.

Comment redirect

If you had commented on my blog a few days ago I’m sure you would have noticed that after posting the comment you would be taken to a new page where I thank our commenter’s and also suggest them to be part of our community and connect with in different social networks and also to subscribe to my feed. If you are willing to witness what this theme does, please do comment below.

Clean, organize and speed up your blog

WP super cache

This plugin is a very technical plugin which deals with optimizing your code, what it does is it increases your load time and helps your server support your blog when there is heavy traffic spikes. I exactly have no idea on this works, but I’ve heard that it converts your dynamic blog into static html. which may make a difference.

I personally don’t feel any change in my blogs speed, but when I analyzed it there was quiet a change which I’m really appreciative about. Just imagine your site makes it to Digg’s frontpage your enjoyment would come to a standstill if your blog couldn’t manage that, so by using this plugin you can make a big difference.

CSS Compress

If you do a detailed check up of your blog’s CSS files I’m sure you’ll find piles of unwanted CSS codes and such unwanted things up an extra burden over your blog making it slower. I activated this plugin 3 months ago and thats pretty much the time we set foot on WordPress, but I can’t rate its success as I don’t exactly how to analyze it. If you are a web designer or programmer you may get to know how well its doing its job.

PHP Speedy WP

This is the most complicated WordPress plugin I’ve ever used, it does a lot of work (Although I didn’t understand anything and it made some drastic changes in my load time. You have to install it like any other plugin, but its just that you wont understand what you must select and un-select, so I selected all of the options and so far not encountered any problems.

This has proven to be much more effective than the above two, but this isn’t very popular.

Broken links checker

If you have tons of posts and if you make some small changes to your old posts it may lead to plenty of broken links and as much as I know search engines don’t like broken links and it would also result in degraded user experience. This plugin scans your posts and shows it to you so that you can easily remove them.

Till now I didn’t have much use of this plugin as my blog is a pretty new blog, although I have plenty of posts already made. I rarely make changes to old articles, but yes I did use this tool to some extent when I was navigating from Blogger to WordPress.

Security and backup

WP security scan

This is a very popular plugin and I guess most of the blogs use this. This plugin happens to be a tool for you to judge the weak parts of your site which are prone to hack attacks and other dangers. All the changes it recommends are easy and its mandatory that you follow it.

Well basically this does nothing to boost security itself but it showed the need for measures and other plugins to safeguard my blog, I recommend that you run it once to get a good idea.

Login Lockdown

This plugin follows a simple system, but such systems are used to safeguard one of the world’s biggest security threats. What this plugin does is that it records the IP address and in case a hacker tries to login but fails 3 times within a particular time range, then login from that range will be banned for upto an hour. This is a very good measure to prevent those who are likely to hack manually.

You install the plugin normally and you must visit the plugin options after activating it and their you can change the number of attempts allowed and also the time range, you are free to customize it as you like, but its recommended that you keep up with the default.

Askapache password protect

WordPress always had a bad reputation with its weakness against Bot attacks, but they managed to improve in WordPress 2.7, but still you can never be dependent on the default protection as I haven’t heard of any testing or experiments made to test it. This plugin is what it takes to protect yourself from most of the bots out there. I’m really not a technical guy so I can’t give you such an explanation, but all I can say is this plugin protects your password and delicate directories such as wp-content, wp-includes, etc by forming multiple layers of security from bots.

This does not mean that it will mess around with your files and directories, it uses a fast built-in system to combat spam and hack attacks. You may find using your dashboard a bit slow if you don’t have a good host after activating this plugin, but it is recommend that you go for this.

WP Backups

I have spent hours to write each and every post and months to bring in each any every reader and in case my server goes corrupt or faces any other unexpected dangers I cannot afford to loose all that I’ve done. For any blogger, however your blog is, whatever you’ve done with it, I’d say its mandatory to you have a back-up, because none of us would have the strength to bare the loss of our years of work.

WPbackup is one of the plugins which give such services, and I make sure I take a backup each time I write a post. Its a bit time consuming and complicated to setup the plugin for the first time after installation, but they instructions which can easily be followed. It may cost you after you reach a certain limit, but until then you don’t have to worry about anything.

Its good and recommended that you update it each and every week and for those blogs who produce massive content I’d recommend that you do it in constant time intervals.

Social media optimization

Damn Sexy bookmarks

I have seen many bookmark buttons, but none of them have the eye catchy design or interface to encourage readers to bookmark and share your posts. When I first saw it on some blogs I was deeply impressed by it and I searched a lot and finally placed it on Dumb Little Blogger. Currently I’ve removed it, but was worth having it.

The plugin contains more flash than most social buttons, but it has no effect on your speed. After installing and activating the plugin you can customize it in the options. Choose your needs and also choose the social networks you want to display. It has options of over 25 different networks, but allows you to display only a few.

Lifestream

For those of you who are looking to build a strong social media profile with the help of onsite exposure, this plugin happens to be the best for the job. What this plugin does is it aggregates your activities in your social networks and publishes them as a widget on your site. You have to install it like any other WordPress plugin then activate and configure it with the list of social networks you use matching with what they provide.

This plugin will definitely help you build a strong profile as when your users witness your activities their sure to respond to it, but one thing which is of concern is privacy. When you use such plugins its more like your giving up on privacy.

TweetThis

Another Twitter plugin which is as efficient as Tweetmeme itself. This is much more efficient because it occupies a larger space and its eye-catchy which is important to remind your readers to share it with their followers. Another advantage it has over other Twitter plugins is that it is very fast simple as the text with the shortened url is already placed and the only thing a reader has to do is press on the tweet button.

I had put it up for almost a week on my site, it worked pretty well, but it took away the entire place below my article which I didn’t like and moreover it was generating as many tweets as tweetmeme and it occupied lesser space.

Follow me

This also helps in building strong profiles, but this does not take away much bandwidth or space. All this does is hangs on the sides of your sites whichever side you choose that is and it will have a text saying ‘follow me’ and when a reader clicks on it, the plugin will expand and shows some links to your social profiles.

It gives you plenty of options and choices to select your profiles and the type of banner you want to float. I have used this too, but I removed when I changed my theme. This will work better than the others because its floating on the sides which is very eye catchy and many of your readers would click and see what thats about.

Improve user experience

Yet another related posts plugin

I have just started to use this plugin and it took almost four days for it to accurately show the number of related posts I had opted to. This is one of the only related posts plugin with shows laser targeted links. This plays a key role in building page views and improving your user experience. Its recommended that you post atleast over 80 articles related to your niche before using this or else you may not see the accuracy and it may even display links.

WordPress popular posts

This is a plugin which is very useful to a new user, as it would lead to a good impression if he takes a look at the most popular posts first. This plugin judges the popular articles on the means of comment volumes of each, so its recommended that your blog must grow to a certain level and get a few comments on each article.

This plugin works best if it is placed in the sidebar because thats where most people would have eyes on. This is a simple plugin which you install like any other, you place it where ever you want in the form of a widget and as got a few options to judge your needs. If you search online you’ll find plenty of articles to customize this plugin to show thumbnails, backgrounds and link styles.

Insights

This is a powerful and dynamic AJAX tool which loads information for your searches within seconds that too inside your dashboard text editor. This is a easy way to write sticky blog posts as it allows you to easily embed youtube videos, flickr photos, insert a Google map, search Wikipedia and also search for your own blog posts to interlink easily.

Something I really love about this plugin is that it is placed just below the WordPress editor, so it makes it hell easy to add elements to your post.

Search meter

One of the most common ways to find out your reader’s needs is the search form, as most people would search for their content of choice over their. Its a common thing that almost 75% of the searches doesn’t result in a successful result. This is not the problem with your search form, but with your blog itself which has failed to provide readers the value for their time and effort.

This isn’t something to get discouraged about, but a method to write what your readers really want and not something you want to put into them.

On to our readers

These are the most useful plugins WordPress can offer. I have used most of them but not all, so its up to you to try and experiment with it. It has long and tiring to write such a big post for this sake please do help promote it using the social buttons on the top and also follow me on twitter and subscribe to my feed.

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