WordPress Non-essential Plugins
I won’t be going into details on installing and configuring these plugins. I will
just tell you what they do, and if you want to add them to your site, you can use
the help documents that come with them should you need assistance setting them
up.
Remember this though; the more plugins you install on your site, the slower it
will potentially load. Therefore keep plugins to a minimum, and only use ones
that you actually need.
1. WP Policies
This plugin will create a default set of 'legal' documents for your site. Things
like disclaimers, terms of service, privacy page, etc. I am no lawyer, so cannot
comment on how good these documents are, but they are the types of documents
you need to have on your site, so I think they're better than having none.
Search for "wp policies"
2. Google XML Sitemaps for Video
If you have a lot of videos on your site, even YouTube videos, then this plugin
will create a separate sitemap for them that you can submit to Google Webmaster
Tools; hopefully getting better indexing rates for them. As a bonus, Google likes
to rank video highly in its search engine results pages (SERPs), especially
YouTube, so if you have YouTube videos embed into your pages, you can get
them indexed with this plugin.
Search for "video sitemap"
3. YARPP
This one stands for 'Yet Another Related Posts Plugin'. It basically creates a list
of related posts, dynamically, for each post on your site. These posts can be
automatically inserted after a post’s content, or you can insert related posts as a
widget, meaning you can place them into any widgetized area of your template,
for example, a sidebar.
Search for "yet another related post"
4. Contact form 7
This plugin makes it easy to setup a contact form on your site. A contact form is
an essential part of any website. Whether or not you expect your visitors to
contact you, the search engines expect good sites to have this option.
Search for "contact form 7"
5. WP-DBManager
This plugin is one I install on all of my sites. It looks after your WordPress
database, optimizing it regularly, and sends you periodic backups via email
(crucial in case you ever have a server crash, or your site gets hacked).
Search for "WP DB Manager"
6. Automatic Updater
Keeping your WordPress install (and plugins), up to date is a good idea to
prevent security holes in your site. This plugin will do just that, checking for
updates periodically and then automatically updating WordPress and/or your
plugins. I personally use this, but only have it set to update WordPress, not the
plugins. Plugins can take a while to catch up once a new version of WordPress
is released, so I prefer to manually update those once the authors tell us they are
compatible. Later in the book, I’ll show you how to manually update WordPress
and the plugins.
Search for "automatic updater"
7. Broken Link Checker
If your site has a lot out outbound links to other websites (by the way, linking to
authority sites within your niche is a good idea), then this plugin can check your
outbound links and tell you if any are broken. Google don’t like broken links on
a site, and may punish you if you have a lot of them. Therefore, this plugin can
help ensure this does not become a problem.
Search for "broken link checker"
8. Social Essentials
Social Essentials adds social media sharing to your site. That is, buttons for your
visitors to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Pinterest, and
Stumbleupon. It is a great idea to add this feature to your site, as Google are
taking notice of social signals and using them in their ranking algorithm.
Encourage your visitors to share your content!
To be honest, there are a lot of plugins with similar functionality, so if you
already know of one that you like, use it instead of social essentials.
Search for "social essentials"
9. Growmap or Akismet
These are two anti-comment spam plugins, i.e., they block spam in comments
automatically. Install either of these and you’ll get far fewer spam comments.
Of the two, Akismet (which comes pre-installed with WordPress), is the better
option in my opinion, however, it is also commercial. Growmap is a free
alternative.
Search for "Growmap"
10. Pretty Link
Pretty Link Lite is a free plugin (there is a commercial version too, but the free
version is all most people need). What this plugin does, is allow you to setup
redirects on your site. Therefore, if you want to use an affiliate link on your
page(s), you could set up a link like mydomain.com/affproduct, and this would
redirect to the affiliate site. Why bother? If you don’t know why you would
want to do this, then you most probably don’t need this plugin. One other nice
feature of it though, is that it tracks clicks on all of the pretty links you set up,
which can be very useful.
Search for "pretty link lite"
11. Social Stickers
Social Stickers is a neat way of adding social follow buttons to your site. Do
you want your visitors to follow you on Twitter? Facebook? Google +?
Pinterst? Quora? Social Stickers will add these buttons to your site.
Search for "social stickers"
Finally there are a few commercial plugins that might interest you. One in
particular helps with on-site SEO.
12. CI Backlinks
This plugin allows you automate the internal linking of content across your site.
It is a plugin I use on all of my websites, because internal linking done manually
is an almost impossible task. For example, when you add a new post to your
website, you’d need to go and find all other posts that mention that topic so an
internal link can be created. With this plugin, you setup the rules and internal
links are updated automatically as you add new content.
More details from: http://ezseonews.com/wpseo
13. VIA Curation
Getting you visitors to contribute content to your site is a great idea as it gets
people involved with your project. VIA Curation does this by way of
submission forms. From these forms, your visitors can submit articles, images
and videos to your website. Obviously you get to moderate all submissions.
More details from: http://ezseonews.com/wpseo
14. WP Secure
This plugin helps to keep your WordPress install secure against hackers. When
this plugin is installed, even if a hacker gets hold of your username and
password, they'll still not be able to login. How’s that possible? It’s magic! No,
not really, but it is clever!
More details from: http://ezseonews.com/wpseo
15. WP Sticky
The next plugin is WP Sticky. It allows us to 'stick' posts at the top of archive
pages:
This comes in handy for non-Genesis themes if you want to create introductions
to category and tag pages (see later in the book for details on this).
OK, that brings an end to my list of essential, and not so essential, plugins.
Make sure you get the essentials installed before moving on. We’ll be starting to
configure them very soon.
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