More Must-Have WordPress Plugins

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I wrote a post a few months ago detailing some of the best WordPress plugins you can install on a new blog. While those are still my favorites, I wanted to point out a few others that can make your blogging life easier.

Keep in mind that there’s a tradeoff when you use plugins - they allow you to do certain things that might be too complicated to do yourself, but they can also bog down your site and cause it to load slowly. Always make sure that you can’t accomplish what you need in another way and that you truly need a plugin before you activate it. (And if you’re in doubt, ask someone!)

More Must-Have WordPress Plugins

Pretty Link - If you use affiliate links, you’ll love Pretty Link. When readers hover over a link and see something crazy like domain.com/ZgjikFrkjlf2345, they may be scared to click. But with Pretty Link, you can change those to whatever you choose. For example, my affiliate link for HostGator (see what I did there?) leads to blog.nutsandmedia.com/hostgator, which then redirects to the scary-looking affiliate link. It’s not about deceiving anyone - it just keeps things looking neat and organized. Pretty Link also allows you to edit the original affiliate link - that way if you’ve used a Pretty Link in multiple posts or pages and get a new affiliate code, you can change the link once instead of hunting it down all over your site.

Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin - For blogs with standard WordPress comments, GASP is the way to go to reduce spam. It adds a tiny checkbox under your comment box (you’ve probably seen it) that asks commenters to verify that they aren’t a spammer. (You can also change the text to say anything you want, like “Check here if you love cake.”) Most spammers use a script that fills in the comment fields automatically, but it doesn’t check any boxes because they don’t want to subscribe to replies. So their spammy comments won’t go through and you won’t have to deal with them. Good stuff!

Widget Logic - If you accept advertising on your site, you may be asked to place a sidebar ad on your homepage only (or on a certain page or post). This plugin adds a little box to each of your sidebar widgets - you can leave it blank to display that widget across your entire site, or you can use WordPress conditional tags to specify exactly where the widget will show up. Once you get the hang of the conditional tags and how they work, this plugin is super easy to use.

WP Optimize - Did you know that WordPress saves a version of every single revision you make to your blog posts and pages? Yeah, I didn’t either. The WP Optimize plugin identifies things like post revisions and spam comments that are taking up space in your database, as well as optimizing your database tables, with one click. This can reduce the size of your backups significantly, as well as helping your site perform better.

RPS Sitemap Generator - Submitting your site to Google Webmaster Tools helps Google’s bots crawl your site and list your content in search results. If you also submit a sitemap, it helps the process tremendously. RPS Sitemap Generator is super lightweight and creates a sitemap with one click. You do have to update it periodically to reflect posts since the last sitemap was created (again, with just one click from inside your dashboard) so it can remind Google to crawl your site again. I like this plugin because it doesn’t require me to do anything beyond submitting the sitemap to Google the first time - after that, I can just click the update button once a week or so and I know all my content will be indexed.

Ultimate Category Excluder - Let’s say you have a certain set of posts that you don’t want to send out to your subscribers via RSS. Or maybe you don’t want it to show on the main page or in your archives. This plugin allows you to choose which categories are hidden from those areas. For example, on one of my blogs, I chose not to include time-sensitive updates (like giveaways) in the archives. I created a specific category that all those posts go into, and checked the box to exclude them. That way someone won’t find a 2 year-old giveaway and get all mad because they can’t enter.

Per Page Sidebars - On the Nuts and Bolts Client Portal, each of my clients has a unique sidebar with links to their specific portal pages. This was accomplished with the Per Page Sidebars plugin. It just adds an checkbox to “replace sidebar” in the post/page editor - once you save the post, you can go to Appearance > Widgets and there will be a sidebar with the name of that post or page. You can add whatever widgets you want and they’ll only show on that particular sidebar. This is a really cool plugin with lots of options.

This pretty much wraps up all my favorite plugins - which ones did I leave off the list? Anything that makes your blogging life much easier?