Best WordPress Plugins

When setting up your WordPress blog, adding plugins means adding functionality, personality, and ease to your brand. Plugins come in all shapes and sizes; if you’ve got a blog-related need, there’s likely a plugin for it. Better than that, there’s likely a free plugin for you to quickly download and install without about 45 seconds. WordPress is constantly evolving and becoming more efficient, but in the meantime, where there’s a good idea, a plugin isn’t too far behind.

In my years of professional blogging, I’ve had everything from short-lived flings to long, intimate relationships with a variety of WordPress plugins. If I were stranded on a deserted island and could only bring 10 plugins with me, the following would be on my list:

All In One SEO Pack
This is an incredibly valuable plugin that’s still, shockingly, available at no cost. This plugin automatically creates meta-tags on each post page, allowing you also to pre-establish any meta-titles or meta-tags you want included. All In One SEO is one of the best “plug & play” style plugins available – even if you’re new to WordPress and know next to nothing about SEO or WordPress development, all you need to do is install, activate, and write up a storm! There’s also a “pro” version available for $39 (for an unlimited license), which is allegedly the “#1 Most Downloaded WP Plugin.” They update frequently (sometimes too frequently), but it will definitely do its job in getting your website optimized for search engines.

I-Max Width
Blogging is definitely a writing-based sport, but as most bloggers know, without visual aid, a wordy blog post can make a reader’s eyes glaze over with boredom. Particularly for design, fashion, or photography blogs, I-Max width can save you valuable time and frustration by automatically adjusting every image to fit in the content column of any theme. By setting a pixel maximum (i.e. 400px wide), you can ensure that your theme doesn’t get distorted, and neither do your images.

ShareThis
In a world of constantly evolving social media, plugins like ShareThis become increasingly important. What sets ShareThis apart from the rest of the social sharing plugins is its compact, flash-based user interface. You can control the number of social media sites to include, as well as the color scheme, text, and general appearance of the plugin. It’s by far the easiest way to get your post submitted to important outlets like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.

Shortcut Macros
Attention affiliate marketers: if you’re tired of looking up the same links over and over, you need this plugin. Shortcut Macros allows you to use short codes such as “##hostmonster” which, after saving a draft or publishing, converts itself into an image, link, php executable… Whatever you designate. This will save you hours and hours of cumulative linking. It can also be used for post headers (using an image tag) which is handy for creating periodical blog columns, differentiating authors, and more. This may be the single most valuable free plugin for affiliate marketers.

TweetMeme
Chances are good you’re familiar with TweetMeme even if you don’t recognize the name. This plugin has taken the blogosphere by storm over the last few months. adding tiny, light green boxes to the top right of millions of blog posts across the internet. “But if you have the aforementioned ShareThis, why do you need TweetMeme?“, you might ask. Well, while ShareThis includes a comprehensive list of all mediums of social media, TweetMeme is an eye-catching, one-click way for users to share your post, and it also offers link tracking capabilities, so you can see exactly who, where and when your link was posted on Twitter. One important reminder: Remember to configure this plugin as soon as you install it, otherwise all of your retweets will define the source as “@tweetmeme” instead of your personal twitter handle.

WP-Stats
The classic statistics plugin makes yet another “must-have” list. While WP-Stats may not be the most technologically advanced, beautiful, or complex plugin available for statistics tracking, it’s definitely the most user-friendly. They have been making some excellent upgrades over the last few months, including the ability to see how many hits you get on your home page, instead of just specific posts. While Google Analytics or Quantcast may deliver more in-depth, detailed reports – when it comes to statistics available in your WP dashboard, WP-Stats is still tops.

Theme Tester
While you may not be using this plugin more than once or twice per year, it’s extremely important when the time comes to modify your site’s design. I used to put up a “Maintenance Mode” splash page on my blogs when changing the design, but that lost valuable hits and even more valuable affiliate link clicks (which means lost money, and that’s never good). Theme Tester allows you to install new themes and activate them, visible only to the administrators of the blog. Your readers still see the previous design while you customize images, CSS and HTML on your new theme. Then, just activate the theme as usual and all your customizations will be saved, and your new design goes live without worry.

WP-Polls
Getting feedback from your readers is probably the most valuable information you can collect from your blog. If you know what they like, you know what to give them. WP-Polls allows for AJAX-enabled poll insertion into sidebars, pages or individual posts. You can cap the number of responses (I like to cap it at 100 for demographic-related polls, for each percentage-creation used in media kits), as well as filter the responses by guests, registered users, and/or comment authors.

CommentLuv
It’s come to my attention that the majority of comments on blogs are from… well, other bloggers. Often times, they are quick, basic, and spammy – just looking for another place to put their link; but other times, these comments are insightful and delivered by peers who actually deserve a link back, as your readers will likely benefit from their knowledge. CommentLuv offers an easy way to give those readers a little something extra for commenting on your blog (encouraging comments is always a good idea) by pulling their most recent blog post from their RSS feed, and displaying it right below their comment.

Exec-PHP
This is exactly what it looks like: a plugin that allows you to execute PHP/javascripts from within individual posts, sidebar widgets or pages. Sweet, simple, and extremely effective. Use it to display feeds, news reels, or anything else you can dream up.