One of the limitations of WordPress is that you can visit WordPress powered blogs, but you don’t really get a chance to look under the hood and find out what plugins the website is using. For those who might be curious or use WordPress themselves, I thought it would be helpful to list the plugins that we use at the Hive Health Media website along with why we use them.
Many people recommend limiting the number of plugins that you use for your website. Too many plugins will slow down your site particularly if you’re on shared web hosting. We use far more than the arbitrary limit of 10 set by many WordPress developers, but they all serve a needed purpose.
To start with, let’s take a look at the Search Engine Optimization plugins used by our site…
Search Engine Optimization Plugins for WordPress
SEO Ultimate
At this point in time, All In One SEO Packs is probably still the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. After that, there are several blogs that use HeadSpace2 as well. Switching from All In One (AIO) SEO Packs to SEO Ultimate is a seamless transition as you can import all of your data from AIO when you do the installation. We’ve already covered a number of the features of SEO Ultimate which can view by following the link: SEO Ultimate Plugin Review. In short, it replaces the need for SEO smart links and SEO slugs by including this funcitonality in a single plugin.
SEO Friendly Images
It’s a simple plugin that automatically adds ALT and title attributes to all of your images. You can do this without a plugin, but after you install this one, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. For more info about the value of this plugin, there’s a very useful post by Vladamir Prevolac: SEO friendly images.
Google XML Sitemaps
You can use this plugin to create and modify an XML Sitemap that you can then submit to search engines such as Google and Yahoo to help indexing of your pages.
Google Analyticator
This plugin makes it easy to add the code for Google Analtyics which is a free program that provides information about your website’s traffic stats.
RSS Footer
This plugin basically makes it easy to add keyword optimized hypertext links at the end of your posts that show up in your RSS Feed. It has potential SEO benefits for link building particularly when scraper sites republish your articles without your approval. For a more detail description on how to set this up: Effective ways to create backlinks for your blog.
SPAM
Askimet
Askimet is included with most WordPress installations. It’s pretty much a no-brainer in terms of plugins, so we won’t go into any great detail.
Bad Behavior
We haven’t been tremendously impressed with Bad Behavior, but it appears to have lowered our server load somewhat. In the future, we might switch over to Conditional Captcha instead.
Social media / interaction
Digg Digg
Digg Digg is the plugin that we’re currently using that contains the floating Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz support. Some of the feedback that we’ve received is that some don’t like the way it appears/disappears at times when you scroll down a blog post. Overall, it’s a fairly easy plugin to install and works quite well for social media.
IGIT Related Posts
IGIT Related Posts is the plugin that adds related posts by thumbnails at the end of our blog posts. It’s really easy to setup and has worked flawlessly so far. The basic idea with this plugin is to improve your website’s navigation to increase page views by visitors. We’ve covered more details about this plugin here: IGIT Related Post Plugin review.
Yet Another Related Post Plugin YARPP
I’m personally not a huge fan of the YARPP plugin and would prefer to use the Contextual Related Post plugin instead. However, we switched over when we changed themes since our current theme supports this plugin instead. It adds related posts without thumbnails at the end of posts.
WordPress Popular Posts
Again, a fairly simple plugin to install and setup. It basically allows you to create a widget with popular posts on your blog.
Contact form 7
There are several contact forms plugins available for WordPress. Contact form 7 is one of the most popular since it’s easy to configure and fairly versatile.
Commentluv
Commentluv is a very useful plugin for encouraging readers to comment on your blog posts. One thing that I’ve noticed is that it’s probably more useful for some blog niches rather than others. If you blog about blogging or making money online, you’ll probably find it tremendously effective for encouraging quality blog comments.
On the other hand, it’s not widely used by health and fitness bloggers, so it could take more time until this niche catches on to its usefulness.
Subscribe to comments
A fairly basic plugin that provides the option for people to subscribe to comments when the comment on a blog post. It’s used by most bloggers these days.
Other plugins
After the deadline
After the deadline is a useful plugin for editing blog posts that adds a better spellchecker than what comes standard with WordPress, it also provides a grammar checker which is useful since we accept guest blog posts. You can download after the deadline (it’s currently free) by following this link: After the deadline
Advertising Manager
It’s a useful plugin if you use Google Adsense or several other advertising networks. You can insert ads in widget locations or in the posts themselves.
Members by Justin Tadlock
Since this is a multi-author blog, this plugin is great for setting user permissions. We have many authors who contribute on this blog, most of which I’ve never met. With this plugin you can limit author roles to submitting posts for review. On a standard WordPress installation, authors have the ability to edit/delete posts and many other options. Without this plugin, if you invite the wrong author to your blog, you could run into problems either by accident or intention. You can find the Members plugin by Justin Tadlock for download at the WordPress repository: Members plugin download. It also has several other features that I haven’t yet explored.
WP-DB Manager
Pretty much an essential plugin to manage your WordPress database.
WP PageNavi
It allows paged navigation as is used by most WordPress blogs today.
WP Supercache
Caching plugins can help to speed up your blog dramatically. This is of obvious importance to improve the browsing experience of your blog readers. In the recent past, we used W3 Total Cache which worked equally well in my opinion. Unfortunately, W3 Total Cache didn’t play nicely with Dreamhost, so I had to switch.
About Jarret Morrow M.D.
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