A quick question for WordPress users:
WordPress Plugins – which ones do you use?
18 months ago in a post titled (I’ll show you mine if you show me yours) I shared the WP Plugins I used and asked readers to tell us which WordPress plugins they used. The response was great and I then compiled a list of WordPress Plugins for ProBloggers which summarized everyone’s favorite WP Plugins.
That was a year and a half ago so today I thought it might be time to do the exercise again.
I’ll kick us off with a few of my personal favorite WordPress Plugins and then will open it up for you to submit yours:
- Ad Rotator – this is what rotates the 468 x 60 ads that you see at the top of ProBlogger.
- AdSense Deluxe – for inserting AdSense (and other types of ads) into posts
- Akismet – comment spam filtering (which has stopped just under 2 million comment spams on ProBlogger since I installed it).
- Democracy – Poll plugin (the one I currently use here at ProBlogger in the sidebar)
- Landing Sites – I have used this off and on with my blogs – it greats readers arriving from search engines with suggestions for further reading
- Popularity Contest - a modified version of this runs the ‘Best of ProBlogger’ section on the front page of ProBlogger
- Random Redirect – a cool little plugin that I use on DPS offer readers a random post from my archives (people do actually use it)
- Related Posts - not the sexiest plugin but pure gold at driving people deeper into your blog (also good for SEO)
- Share This – a plugin that lets your readers share your post via email or social bookmarking
- Subscribe to Comments – used by quite a few ProBlogger readers to track comments left on posts
One WordPress Plugin that I’m keen to experiment with in the coming months:
- What Would Seth Godin Do – a plugin that encourages new visitors to a blog to sign up as an rss subscriber
So now it is over to you. Which WordPress Plugins do you classify as your favorites?
Please limit your answer to 10 if you can (if you have more – get it down to your 10 ‘must have plugins’). I’ll compile a summary of all the plugins submitted in a week or two. Stay tuned to ProBlogger’s RSS feed to be notified of that post.
About Darren Rowse
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
Thanks for the info.
I use SEO title tag, alongside editing the permalinks to %postname%. Great SEO advantages.
Great list.
Here is my list of my favorite plugins, but some of them interfere with each other, so I have a page on my blog that is powered by WP-PluginsUsed – a great plugin to list all the plugins that are enabled, and disabled!
Thanks for the list
David Airey mentioned a bit further up in the comments that the Seth Godin plugin will often give you the welcome text even after the first time you visit. This isn’t a bug with the plugin, but an option that you can configure.
By default the welcome message will show up 3 times, but you can go into the plugin options and change this to any number that you want. (Well, any positive integer anyway. :-) )
I use seo pack, related posts, xml sitemap, do follow, popular etc…
Related posts, audio player, post ratings, post views and seo all in one plugin <- very very useful!
I also use Windows Live Writer to write all my posts, incredibly useful if you’re like me and hate logging in the wp-admin interface all the time.
1.All in one SEO pack
2.Permalink redirect
3.Akismet
4.Enforce www preference
5.Google sitemap
These are the essentials.
It has to be the ‘All In One SEO Plugin.’
I’m just starting blogging and about three days ago I started to changed on of my sites http://www.vegetarian-worldwide.com from a standard site to a blog and I’m adding one or two pages that I have each day. Today I added a recipe ‘American Blueberry Toast,’ and just 18 minutes later it ranked No.1 in Google!
I’ve tried a number of the other pages I have and they are also ranking on the first and second page.
Recommendation: get All In One SEO plugin today (well not if you’re running a vegetarian site :) )
Kevin
Over my head….do you have a resource to learn the ABCs of blogging. I guess WordPress is a good choice, but why? I wonder.
Anywasys, great post,….I have bookmarked it.
Nick