My Favorite WordPress Plugins

I’ve been using WordPress for several years now — I’m a big fan.  It makes it really easy to run a blog (or website) and it keeps getting better.  One of the advantages of WordPress is the ability to add your own plugins to improve the functionality of your site.  Here are some of my favorite WordPress plugins… (for now).

Disqus Comment System

Disqus replaces the WordPress comment system with it’s own, which allows readers to see their comments across all the sites that use Disqus, and it has good spam collection.

FD Feedburner Plugin

FD Feedburner is a WordPress plugin which redirects all the blog’s feeds to Feedburner to utilize Feedburner’s stats and additional feed functionality.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generates a XML site map to help search engines properly index your site.

Lijit Search

Lijit Search lets readers search the content on your site — can also support ads for your site (search and content-related).

LinkWithin

LinkWithin WordPress plugin displays other recommended stories on each article to help increase the amount of time people spend on your site.

PostRank

PostRank provides some social network tracking as well as top posts.  I use it to track the PostRank of each post which is also a metric used by the AdAge 150.

Scribe

Scribe is a paid WordPress plugin (affiliate link) which quickly and easily provides recommendations to increase the search engine optimization for each post.  Requires a theme which supports it (I use the Thesis paid theme — affiliate link).

ShareThis

ShareThis provides links so your readers can share your content on various social networks.  Lets you control which social networks show up (and what order).  Provides stats for how many times that button is used.

TweetMeme Retweet

TweetMeme Retweet adds a button for each post so your readers can tweet a link to the article.  Counts the number of times the article has been tweeted (doesn’t always catch alternative ways to tweet the article).

Wibiya Toolbar

Wibiya Toolbar adds a bar at the bottom of your site which has links for sharing your content on social media, as well as a message (among other features).

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress Database Backup automates the backing up your blog’s database — can have it email a compressed copy or save to your server or computer.  Your theme along with your database are the key parts of your blog.  Having a backup of your database means you can recreate your blog if you have to.

WP Greet Box

WP Greet Box customize a message to your blog visitors depending on where they came from.  For example, ask visitors from Digg to Digg your post.

WP Minify

WP Minify WordPress plugin helps your blog run faster by combining and compressing javascript and CSS files to improve page load time.  I’ve seen a huge improvement since using this plugin.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache adds caching to your blog (which you can control) to make the pages load faster.  Site speed is now a consideration for Google’s PageRank.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins?

(photo by Sarah Worsham)