Underground Web Designs Blog

There are literally thousands of plugins for the popular blogging system Wordpress. If you need a feature Wordpress doesn’t have, chances are that there is a plugin for it. However, there are some plugins that are so useful that I believe every Wordpress based site should have them installed. In no particular order, here they are:

WP Super Cache

This plugin caches the pages of your blog as HTML files (instead of PHP scripts), saving server processing power. This plugin is a must for any site that expects lots of traffic, and can mean the difference between having a successful product launch or promotion and getting and “Site Unavailable” error. Even if you’re not expecting heaps of traffic quite yet this plugin should be installed and activated. After all, you never know when your site might show up on the front page of Digg or be Stumbled. Prevention is always the best cure.

Ultimate Google Analytics

The Ultimate Google Analytics plugin is one of the best plugins for adding Google Analytics Stat Tracking to a Wordpress blog. Not only does it add the required Javascript to every page of your blog without you having to touch any code, but it also lets you track outgoing links, download links, and mailto (email) links. The interface is easy to understand and the plugin requires absolutely no upkeep. Just set it, forget it, and watch your blog stats automagically show up in Google Analytics.

Akismet

Even the Wordpress.org guys think this is a vital plugin, which is why it’s included with every release of Wordpress! Askimet is without a doubt the best spam checker I’ve ever seen. You will need an account at Wordpress.org to use it, but that is free and easy to get. Once you have your account, log in, visit your account dashboard, and click the “Profile” link to get your API key. Paste that key into Askimet and your blog will never have a Spam comment again. Now if only they had a version that stopped e-mail spam as well…

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps is another simple but powerful plugin. Once it’s added to your blog and activated, head over to the settings page and click the button to build your Sitemap for the first time. By default the Sitemap is located at http://www.yourblog.com/sitemap.xml, and contains a breakdown of all the pages, posts, etc. on your blog in a format search engines can easily understand. The plugin will also take charge of notifying the major search engines whenever you update your blog, helping to get your latest posts indexed all the faster.

Sociable

The sociable plugin helps spread the word about your blog by placing links to popular social networking sites at the bottom of each post. The plugin has options for almost 100 different sites, and has a slick interface that makes it easy to choose which links show up, and which order they are displayed in. The links displayed are small icons, which will stand out but won’t be overly distracting from the content of your site. The Sociable plugin also gives you lots of options about where the icons should be displayed and where they should not (pages, category listings, etc).

These 5 plugins should be at the very least installed on every Wordpress site. Each one is well maintained, easy to use, and incredibly useful. Maybe you won’t use all of them all of the time, but make them part of your default configuration for any new wordpress blog you set up and you can’t go wrong.

This is my list, I’m sure there are other “Must Have” plugins out there. If you have a plugin that you just can’t live without, post it in the comments, I would love to hear about it and possibly add it to my own Wordpress toolkit.

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For the curious, here is a list of plugins I’m currently using on this blog (besides all the ones listed above):

• Actionstream: Shows updates from activities across the web.
• Adsense Manager: Control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, configurable colours.
• Contacts List: Output microformatted blogroll links on a static page.
• Diso Profile: Detect and import hCard data on new user, extended data for user profiles, easy hCard generation 
• Feedburner Feedsmith: Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Micro Anywhere: Adds microformat buttons to the wordpress post and pages editor, letting you embed microformated data into your blog.
• Open ID: Allows the use of OpenID for account registration, authentication, and commenting. Also includes an OpenID provider which can turn WordPress author URLs into OpenIDs.
• Pictoformats: Supports @replies, #hashtags.
• wp-XRDS-Simple: Add XRDS information to your blog.
• zLinks: Provides a clickable icon for every post, comment and embedded link that leads to additional semantic Web and related data resources; also provides annotation capabilities.