WordPress plugins are a great way of extending the capabilities of your WordPress installation. We created a list of 5 must have plugins that every site should have. Keep in mind that using too many plugins isn’t a great idea so when you’re setting up your site use them sparingly and only use the plugins that will actually use. I’ve had clients who had installed close to 50 plugins but only used about 10 to 15 of them.
1. All In One SEO – Unless you’re using the mighty Thesis theme which has built-in SEO you need an SEO plugin and none is better than the All In One SEO available at WordPress.org as a free download.
The All In One SEO WordPress plugin is easy install set up and use. You can install it from add plugin page in your admin pages or you can upload using FTP, either method will work fine.
The screenshot shows the settings page of the plugin, however now when you write a post you’ll find All In One SEO WordPress plugins settings on the post or page editor screen below the editor (Where you write your posts) so make sure that you fill out all of the SEO options for each post or page you create or edit otherwise you won’t get the all the SEO benefits from this plugin. I’m not going to go into all the settings in detail (We’ll do that in a separate post) but make sure you understand what you’re doing before making any changes to the default settings of the plugin.
If you’re a power user and understand what SEO is all about and want more control and options then give Greg’s High Performance SEO Plugin a try. There are over 100 settings that you can mange to fine tune your SEO efforts.
2. WP Security Scan – Every WordPress blogger needs to know if their blog is secure. The WP Security Scan WordPress plugin does exactly what it sounds like it does. It will scan your entire WordPress installation and tell you whether or not you need to make any changes to your site’s permissions settings. Besides telling you whether or not your permissions are all correct it also gives you some other suggestions for improving your security.
One suggestion I have for you is to make sure that you have the very latest version of WordPress installed and that your plugins are all up to date. Please remember that WordPress and plugins are updated all the time and not all updates are because of new features. A lot of updates are done for security reasons, hackers look for vulnerabilities all the time so they can hack your site. These people get some perverse pleasure in ruining your day so don’t make it easy for them, keep everything updated.
3. Viper’s Video Quicktags – If you publish videos on your blog, and you should, Viper’s Video Quicktags WordPress plugin is the easiest plugin for publishing your videos.
You can add videos from any of the the following sites:
- YouTube (including playlists)
- Google Video
- DailyMotion
- Vimeo
- Veoh
- Viddler
- Metacafe
- Blip.tv
- Flickr videos
- Spike.com/IFILM
- MySpaceTV
You can publish the following formats:
- Flash Video Files (FLV)
- QuickTime (MOV, etc.)
- Generic video files (AVI, MPEG, WMV, etc.)
Hands down it’s the easiest WordPress plugin for adding video available. If you know of better please comment below but only say better if you’ve tried Viper’s:)
4. Sexy Bookmarks(Direct Download Link) – A great WordPress plugin that gives your visitors an easy way to share your content to a whole lot of sites and in different ways. When activated the plugin adds the icons below the post, or wherever you choose, but it doesn’t show all the plugins all at once. What it does is use a nice “drop” down effect to open all available icons(See below this post).
5.Backup Buddy – This is the only WordPress plugin on the list that is not free but is probably the most important off the lot. Plugin Buddy is an excellent plugin for backing up your blog on a regular basis. You can schedule automatic backups so you can set and forget. The great thing about this plugin is that you can use it to migrate your site from one web host to another or even to a different domain without jumping through hoops. The really cool thing is that you can backup your entire domain, not just WordPress. So if you have sub directories with other scripts installed it will back those up too. For migrating to a new host or to do a complete restore all you have to do is download a script they call import buddy. The whole process will take you less than five minutes. The plugin only costs $39.99 for a personal use license and it’s worth every penny.
