Some Cool WordPress Plugins for Newbies

As I was saying in one of my previous posts, I’ve been putting up quite a few WordPress sites lately.

WordPress was chosen by my clients because it is simply sublime for beginners. They wanted something easy to work with, easy to update. Fair enough. WordPress it is.

Since they lacked the tech skills, they also wanted most of the stuff to be done for them. It does require quite a bit more skill than it does to visit FoxyBingo or Facebook, but it’s not too hard! With a bit of practice and application, anybody can learn it. For a real professional look though, it’s always nice to ask an expert!

Here’s a list of plugins that I found extremely useful, look good, and do the job right in 99 percent of the cases (sometimes the theme you choose can really screw things up  - I should know).

So, here goes.

For performance/speed, the best combo appears to be (so far) W3 Total Cache (disable Minify) and WP Minify. I found this combination extremely useful in speeding up a website with 200+ articles with photos, widgets, etc. All in all a pretty heavy website for some reason. Anyway, the combo is recommended by Google Page Speed on GTMetrix, and you can also find instructions on how to set up W3 Total Cache and WP Minify.

You can check your site’s speed on GTMetrix. W3 Total Cache also has a dashboard widget for Google Page Speed (you need a Page Speed API key to activate it – detailed instructions in the “Performance” tab in your dashboard all the way down). This widget allows you to monitor your speed for Google every time you log into your dashboard.

We all need to backup our websites, don’t we? A pretty easy to use plugin is EZPZ One Click Backup (download from Daring Words, for some reason it’s not up on WordPress.org anymore). You just make the initial setup and then the thing takes over. You can get an email and download your latest backup on your hard drive. You unzip and upload the files through FTP and DONE. This one is good to have especially if your hosting service offers you backup and restore services for individual domains only if you pay. My site is hosted by Bluehost and they only offer me free backup for the entire account (ALL the websited will be restored to the latest daily version). That’s pretty annoying, but this plugin solves the problem.

Another thing that’s good to have is Revision Control. This one limits the number of post revisions . It’s good to limit the numbers of revisions, because WordPress will save quite a lot of them otherwise.

Images are vital to websites. We all now that an article with photos will likely bring more readers than a dry, photo-less one. However, photos tend to slow down websites quite a lot. A very nice tool to compress your photos automatically it WP Smush.it. It will only compress the photos you upload after installation, but you can go in Media >Library and manually smush all the old photos as well.

For SEO, I use Platinum SEO. I find it does a better job than All in One SEO. It basically works the same way, but for some reason I like it better. I guess it depends on how much time you want to spend on putting meta title and descriptions. I prefer spending my time writing, so with Platinum I leave all that drag to the plugin.

Also for SEO purposes, I recommend SEO Friendly Images. This will pull the title of your post and append it as title and alt text to the post image. It can increase your traffic considerably, by bringing you searches on images. Tried and tested, big fan of it, but apparently it doesn’t work with every theme. Buggers! Anyway, try it. It won’t harm you. If it doesn’t work, just deactivate&delete.

Sharing is the God lately, I found. I use AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget (or AddThis featuring Sharing Buttons / Facebook Like / Tweet Button – same thing).  There are some better looking ones out there, but Addthis.com also has a neat way to track your sharing performance . It saves me time looking for other solutions to monitor how many times my posts are shared and where. Comes with a dashboard widget if you create an Addthis account, and they also offer analytics in your account on Addthis.com.

Social Profiles Widget allows you to add a widget with links to your social profile (the “Follow me on” type of thing). It’s nice to use because you just add the full URL to your profile on FB, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. No need for trial and error with partial segments of the URL, profile names, page IDs and such crap.

Tweet Blender gives you a sweet widget to put your Twitter stream on your website in the footer or sidebars. Tweet Old Posts will select random old posts and push them on Twitter in an attempt to increase traffic (don’t set it to send too many in too short time… it might become nasty). I guess its performance depends a lot on what you wrote and how interesting it is for your followers. Obviously, it’s not a great idea for news websites, unless you were lazy at making a Twitter account and now you find yourself in the position to manually tweet hundreds of posts. Even so, for news items Tweet Old Posts is a desperate measure.

YoURLs: WordPress to Twitter is also nice to have. Once your post is published you can enter a custom message and tweet it. Shortens the URL and it’s all done from the post editing kitchen.

A good way to keep readers on your website is to offer them related posts. Some themes do it by themselves. If your theme fails at this, you can get IGIT Related Posts With Thumb Image After Posts (warning: in connection with SEO Friendly Images all the post thumbnails will have the alt/title text of the post the related ones are attached to). Another option is Link Within, which looks very pretty, but you have to request one for every website. A nice loop here is that you can add Link Within from one website to another, bouncing visitors from your personal blog to a business website with the help of this neat toy.

If your theme is a dumbass and doesn’t allow you to upload a favicon, use All in One Favicon.

To create a login page for site contributors and subscribers you can use Theme My Login. It has a bunch of useful options. Of course, it’s more for noobs than for pros. But then again, most of us are noobs. It doesn’t work perfectly with every theme. Try it out then decide if you keep it or discard it.

Spam protection: Nothing beats Akismet as far as I know. If you don’t have an API yet, get one. Akismet is there with every WP installation.

Contact forms are many. I fell for Contact Form 7 + Really Simple Captcha. The combo looks good on almost every theme, the captca is clear and easy to understand, making it easy for your visitors to read the code correctly. You just need to add the Captcha to the contact form template. Send me a message if you can’t figure it out.

A plugin I absolutely fell in love with is Widget Context. This one allows you to select where your widgets will display. It has one problem I haven’t been able to get around, and that is to display widgets in all posts under a category. But still, a great tool. Send me a message if you need help with it.

For affiliate links or just to insert links on a regular basis in your posts, you can use Kaitora Affiliate System. You will need to introduce every anchor word or expression and the links manually. But it fails not It will nicely display your anchors as links. It also masks the links and other useful stuff, such as selecting how often it will perform the link insertion (every time, every 2nd, 3rd, and so on in a post for a keyword). It limits the number of affiliate links to the desired quantity, adds friendly linking, and gives you the option to put in a custom word for redirection (such as daring-words.com/out).

AdSense Now! puts ads inside your posts. Easy to use, not the most customizable, but nonetheless a quick solution. For inserting ads, I also recommend Ad Injection (you can rotate ads at every page load). This one is more complex, but it puts ads in posts as well as in widgets. I found Ad Codes Widget very useful as well. It automatically centers your ads to fit the spot perfectly, which can be a big relief. It is also useful for adding other bits of code that are otherwise stubborn and won’t display in a text/html widget.

Now, a really AWESOME plugin is LockPress from TwoEnough. This baby allows you to lock your posts and they can only be seen if whoever wants to read them pays up It is a great tool for those of you who have news websites and you produce some exceptional feature or analysis that you don’t want to give away for free. It accepts PayPal payments only.

The list could go on, but another time. This is already too much for me

Aaaand, talking about plugins I still miss a few here. Time to practice what I preach or something. LOLz.