In my last article, 18 Essential WordPress Plugins, I discussed 18 plugins that I consider essential for use on any personal blog. I personally use all of those plugins right here on this site.
That should say something about how useful I truly find those particular plugins.
Since then, I realized that I have neglected a few plugins, so I’d like to talk about them here:
Category: Appearance / Presentation
- 1. PHP Widgetify – “Execute phpcode fast and easy with this simple code-widget.” This plugin works similarly to the built in WordPress “widgets,” but the main difference is that you can execute PHP code from within it.
- 2. What Would Seth Godin Do – “Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.” This is a nice little plugin that checks if your site’s visitor has previously been to your site. You then are able to display an appropriate note. On this site, I urge people to Subscribe to my RSS feed, and to Follow Me on Twitter using this plugin.
- 3. Similar Posts – “Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags.” This is a handy plugin that displays links to other articles or posts on your site which have similar keywords and characteristics.
- 4. Random Pages widget – “This is a widget that displays a list of random pages/posts on your widgetized sidebar.” This is fairly self-explanatory, I hope.
- 5. Subscribe To Comments – “Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.” Enough said for this plugin too.
Category: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- 6. Clean Archives Reloaded – “A slick, Javascript-enhanced post archive list generator for WordPress 2.5+.” Rather than have a ton of links for your archives on your sidebar, you can create a single Archives page that uses a collapsible and expandable view of all posts in your archives.
- 7. Optimal Title – “Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before.” Having the title displayed before your site name is better for SEO, and usually helps your Google PageRank.
Category: Social Media / Social Networking
- 8. FollowMe – “WP FollowMe is a WordPress plugin that allow you to add a Twitter Follow me badge on your WordPress blog.” A nice little flash object that you can customize the look, feel, and location of.
- 9. TwitterCounter – “Integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog to display the number of followers you have on Twitter.” Pretty straight forward, right?
I hope you enjoyed this follow-up list of WordPress plugins. These plugins work really well for me, so I hope you give some of them a try on your sites.
Which plugins do you consider essential? Please leave a comment below, I’m really interested to get your feedback.
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