Three years ago I wrote up a list of my favorite plug-ins, and decided that it was well past time to give the list a fresh look. While many of them have stayed the same, I’ve got a few additions and a few deletions.
The ones that stayed the same
These plug-ins have certainly been updated in the past few years, but remain part of every blog I manage:
Akismet – Amazingly awesome spam fighting plugin.
FeedBurner Feedsmith – I still run all of my blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and this is a great plug-in to quietly redirect visitors over there.
Google XML Sitemaps – A simple way to generate an XML sitemap and automatically notify search engines of your new posts.
Highlight Author Comments – Make your replies stand out when you reply to comments on a post of yours.
Subscribe to Comments – Allow users to get email notifications of new posts after they leave one. I love when blogs have this, so I can be notified if someone replies to my comment and then we can continue the conversation.
The ones that I’ve moved away from
Here are the plug-ins that I no longer use regularly, for one reason or another:
All in One SEO Pack -Most of the themes that I use (typically from StudioPress) have great SEO baked right in and this is less important.
Enhanced WP Contact Form – I’ve switched to Wufoo for virtually all of my forms.
Fancy Zoom – I still use it from time to time, but most themes have better image management.
Top Commentators – This isn’t really a bad plug-in, I simply don’t use it any more.
Sociable – I’ve removed this in favor of Twitter and Facebook-specific plug-ins, shown below.
Twitter Tools – I now use dlvr.it to handle this instead, but I use it rather sparingly; be fresh on Twitter, not automated!
WordPress.com Stats – Still a great plugin, and I use it on a few blogs, but I primarily rely on Google Analytics.
The new additions!
I’ve dropped some plug-ins, but also added some new ones over the past few years such as:
Canonical URL’s – A very simple plug-in to add the canonical tag to your pages. Not overly helpful in many cases, but can be excellent for your SEO sometimes. (What is the canonical tag?)
PuSHPress – This enabled PuSubHubbub support for your blog. In short, it makes sure that RSS readers and others will get your posts instantly, rather than the next time they check in a few hours. (more about the PuSHPress plugin)
RSS Footer – This adds a line of text (with a few links) the bottom of each post in your RSS feed. The basic idea is that if someone is scraping your site and posting it as their own, you’ll at least still get some free links back to your site!
Twitter Button for WordPress – A simple way to add a “tweet” button to your posts.
WP FB Like Button – A simple way to add a Facebook “like” button to your posts.
WPtouch – A great plug-in that creates a mobile version of your site and automatically serves it to mobile phones when they connect.
You?
What about you? Any other killer plugins that I’m missing from the list?
+