15 WordPress plugins to improve your blog

Posted by Vlad F. on January 12, 2012 · 2 Comments 

Today I will present you a list of 15 Best WordPress plugins you should start using on your blog if you want to add some new cool features which not only look good, but also improve the functionality and the speed of your blog or website and also the usability and the user experience.

The popularity of WordPress gains a lot from the available plugins that can add any kind of extra functionality you need at a click of your mouse (or maybe 2 clicks and some searching ).

 

1. W3 Total Cache. A classic among the WordPress plugins, W3 Total Cache is recommended by various hosting companies around the world and it deserves the recognition. This little plugin caches every little part of your website  and significantly increases the loading time, saving up to 80% of the bandwidth your website would normally require to load.
2. Yoast WordPress SEO. Nothing beats organic traffic coming from search engines. But to get there, you need to optimize each and every post and page of your blog/website to be search-engine friendly. I’m talking about meta tags, page and post titles, keyword placement and density, sitemapsand other such aspects. Installing Yoast’s SEO plug-in make editing these settings a lot easier, because you will see all of these editable fields right below the article you are writing. This plug-in allows you to do the following things:
   • Set a unique title and meta description for the pages
   • Add breadcrumbs support
   • Configure pages to be indexed
   • Create an XML sitemap of your blog/website (very important!)
   • Edit the robots.txt and .htaccess files
3. Broken Link Checker. If you have links pointing to non-existing pages, your page will be rated accordingly by the search-engines and that will results in a bad score for your website. This plugin scans the content on your website for broken links and warns you if you need to change anything.
4. Faster Image Insert. You most probably wanted to insert multiple images into one single post and you had a rough time with the default WP Editor. This plugin allows you to select multiple images from the library and insert them all at once inside the post you are writing.
5. Google Analyticator.  This plugin is essential for any website owner/blogger who wants to keep track of his or her visitors and to see the keywords or search queries the website was found for. It connects with Google Analytics, giving you a strong overview on how well your website is ranked.
6. Sharedaddy. One of the best social sharing plugins out there, available in 9 languages so far! You can configure the plugin to show social network icons, text or both at the end of the articles. You can also define custom services from if you need something else together with the included ones:
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Facebook
• StumbleUpon
• PressThis
• Digg
• Print
• Email
7. Usernoise. This is a very useful tool giving your readers the chance to send you feedback very easy from wherever they are on the website. It integrates in your website as the vertical bar you can see at the right side near the sidebar and it can be configured to match your personal preferences: you can change the colors, text and even the default message they receive after they send you feedback.




8. 5sec Maintenance Mode. This plugin lets you choose from 6 beautiful templates to show to your visitors while your website is down or under maintenance. It also has a countdown timer and it is fully customizable as well as SEO friendly. The only downside is that it’s not free , it sells for a regular licence of $12 at codecanyon.net but you wouldn’t want to lose angry visitors because of maintenance work, right ?
9. Akismet. When your blog/website will reach a few hundreds/thousands visitors you will see that spammers will also start accessing your site and spam it with comments. Checking every comment for spam would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, so you might want to get Akismet ready from the start. Once you set up Akismet you can forget about it and leave it running without worrying to much about spammers.
10. Theme tester. This little plugin lets you test any theme you like on your website while your visitors see the default one. The won’t even know you are working on the design or planning some major changes, until you finish the theme and activate it.
11. WP-DB-Manager. A crucial plugin for every WordPress installation. It allows you to optimize, backup, restore, delete or drop tables from your database. As a full featured maintenance tool it also features automatic scheduling of maintenance operations on the database behind your website.
12. Thank Me Later. This is a plugin which will automatically send a follow-up email to every user who comments on your website/blog. You can use it to say “Thank you” to your visitors and on a long term this little tool can be very helpful in building your online community. Being very configurable you can create multiple e-mail messages and schedule when those e-mails should be sent out.
13. WPTouch. We live in the mobility age and the people who developed this plugin understood this very well. This plugin transforms the interface of your website into an application-like theme, optimized for touchscreen navigation. You can customize many bits of its appearance and it offers a mobile experience to your readers without having to modify a single bit of code.
14. Cool Author Box. If you have guest posters on your blog/website then you should definitely give credit where credit is due. This plugin allows you to make a description of every user who posts on your blog/website which will appear at the end of the articles they write together with their full name and a link to their websites.
15. Viper’s Video Quicktags. With the simple click of a button, you won’t need to type HTML codes for embedding videos in your articles. This plugin integrates some very useful buttons into the WordPress Editor which you can use to insert videos and set the size for the video inside your articles.

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