12 Essential WordPress Plugins - My Athletic Life

12 Essential WordPress Plugins

2011

In building the My Athletic Life website on WordPress, I have spent many hours researching and evaluating various plugins. From site maintenance, to enhanced functionality, to improving the end user experience, each of the plugins I have listed below are ones that I find of critical importance. All 12 titles are clickable and hyperlinked to the appropriate place in the WordPress plugin directory. If you would like to search for additional plugins, you can do so by clicking here. If you do not feel like you have the skills necessary to evaluate and install these plugins yourself, you should still use this list in discussing your needs with whoever maintains your website. A word of advice: Make sure that you are aware of updates to both WordPress as well as the plugins you have installed. You will know you need to take action when you see something like this on your WordPress Dashboard:

Do not ignore these reminders. Keeping your site updated will make it a lot tougher for a hacker to find his way in and ruin your hard work.

#1 - Akismet SPAM! We all hate it. But what can you do about comment spam on your website? The answer is Akismet. Akismet compares each comment on your blog or website against a database on the Akismet site and automatically eliminates anything that looks like spam. For personal blogs the service is free. For business or commercial websites, the current cost is $5 a month. Another option would be to use the Disqus “hosted” comment system. It is also available as a WordPress plugin and does a good job of filtering basic spam. And it is free; however on my site I use the combination of Akismet and Disqus together.

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#2 - AskApache 404 Google What happens if someone tries to access a page that doesn’t exist on your site? Do they get a confusing “404 error” message? With the AskApache 404 Google plugin, you can easily redirect 404 errors to anywhere on the site you wish. Not only is this helpful for real humans trying to find information on your website, it also helps your rankings with search engines.

#3 - Facebook Like Box

While I don’t believe you should clutter up your sidebar, having a Facebook “like” box is an absolute no brainer. Showing your fan count demonstrates to a visitor that you have credibility, and an even bigger benefit is that the faces shown will be friends of the person visiting your site. And, by having the like button on your site, a visitor can become a Facebook fan without ever leaving. The link above will help you generate the code for your sidebar; however I recommend you follow the instructions in this post for setting it up: How to Add a Facebook Like Box.



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#4 - Google Analytics for WordPress

If you are interested in learning more about visitors to your website, Google Analytics (GA) is a musthave. In addition to the plugin, you will also need to set up a GA account (which is free) in order to track visitors. One interesting thing I learned by looking at my stats was that 33% of my visitors were coming to the site via a mobile device. That led me to install another plugin which provides a better experience for mobile users.

#5 - Google XML Sitemaps Having a sitemap will make it much more likely for your information to be discovered and indexed by the major search engines. From the plugin page: “This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it's much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.”

#6 - SEO Ultimate Since it is important for your site to rank high in the search results for at least a few major keywords, you should make sure you have the basics done right when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO Ultimate will guide you through the steps to improve your rankings in search results, increasing the likihood that a searcher will find you.

#7 - Sharedaddy From the plugin directory:



2011

“Share your posts with Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other services. You can configure services to appear as icons, text, or both. Some services have additional options to display smart buttons, such as Twitter, which will update the number of times the post has been shared.”

#8 - Social Media Widget If you are active through multiple social media channels, you need to make sure that it is easy for your clients to find you. This widget will let you collect each of your IDs in a handy sidebar widget.

#9 - Ultimate Security Checker Installing and running this plugin will definitely give you an idea of what you can do to make it more difficult for a hacker to gain control of your site. From the plugin directory: “This plugin identifies security problems with your WordPress installation. It scans your blog for hundreds of known threats and gives you a security grade based on how well you have protected yourself. You can fix the problems yourself, or you can use our help to do it for you automatically.”

#10 - W3 Total Cache You may not be running in the fastest hosted environment, but you can do something that will dramatically improve site performance. “W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.” This one is also a no-brainer decision to install.

#11 - WPtouch As I mentioned earlier, when I looked at my Google Analytics information, I found that nearly 1/3 of my visitors were using a mobile device. By simply installing this plugin, the average time that a mobile visitor spent on my site doubled. Here is what the plugin does: “WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung Touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.” © 2011 – My Athletic Life, Inc. Page 4


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#12 - WordPress Backup to Dropbox Lastly, make sure you have a solid backup solution for your website. This plugin is fantastic as it puts my files onto a FREE Dropbox account. You can sign up for a FREE account on Dropbox as well by clicking here (disclosure – I get extra free storage from Dropbox if you sign up using this link). What the plugin does with a Dropbox account: “A plugin for WordPress that automatically uploads your blog files and an SQL database to Dropbox. Just choose a day, time and how often for your backup to be performed and kick back and wait for your website’s files and an SQL dump of its database to be dropped in your Dropbox!”



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If you find errors in this document, or have suggestions for additions, please contact me at [email protected]. Thanks for reading!
