There are heaps of Wordpress plugins out there all for various purposes. I try and limit the amount of plugins I use to avoid excessive overhead in my databases and increased load times on my blogs. There are a few I have installed on this blog that I couldn’t live without. These Wordpress plugins will make your life easier and streamline your blog for making money online.

1. The first, and most obvious Wordpress plugin, is Akismet. You need this because it filters out comment spam from your blog. It comes ready to use with Wordpress these days because it’s so important. The more popular your blog gets, the more spam comments you have to deal with. All your spam comments will be kept in a separate place by Akismet, but you should bear in mind that sometimes genuine comments are filtered out accidentally.
2. The All in One SEO plugin for Wordpress (site down at time of writing) is another godsend. It optimizes your titles, meta tags and keywords for SEO purposes. It makes everything neat and tidy and search-engine friendly with minimal fine-tuning needed.
3. Anti Leech is a fun way to get one over on sploggers who steal content via RSS feeds. The idea behind it is that fake content is generated when sploggers try to steal your genuine stuff. Anti Leech doesn’t always work, but if it turns the tables on sploggers at least some of the time then it can’t be a bad thing.
4. Feedburner Feedsmith redirects the feed from your blog to Feedburner so that you can keep tracks of how many subscribers you have and also tweak your feed to make it as easy for people to access as possible.
5. Google Sitemaps generates an XML sitemap of your blog that will help you with indexing pages in Google. A sitemap points Google in the right direction to aid the bots when they crawl your site. The sitemaps are fully customizable and easy to generate and use.
6. I’m a sucker for blogs with Live Comment Preview. I think it’s a great feature to have because it gives readers a useful tool for reading back their comments. I’ve had readers of other blogs ask me for this feature when it’s not been installed.
7. Another great Wordpress plugin is the Related Posts plugin. It gives you the opportunity to add a list of related articles, based on keywords, to the end of all of your posts. It’s great for keeping readers on your blog because it gives them easy access to more material after they’ve finished reading an article. Keeping people on your blogs is a step in the right direction toward making money online.
8. Although you can do it manually by accessing phpMyAdmin, Wordpress Database Backup is a plugin that allows you to do it automatically, saving you the time and effort it takes to do it the old-fashioned way. You should be backing up your databases at least once a week in case something happens on your server and you lose data.
9. The Wordpress Contact Form plugin makes it easy for readers to email you without having to actually log in to their email accounts. It saves everybody time and avoids the need to give out your email address publicly. The latest version has spam protection as well.
10. If you want to reward your readers then use the Top/Recent Comments plugin. I don’t employ it on this blog because it doesn’t generate enough comments for the stats to benefit me in any way, but I have used it on others. If you’re getting a lot of comments then this plugin is a must.

Those are my essential plugins, but which ones not on the list do you use?

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Tags: Tips and tricks // 3 Comments »