Top 10 Wordpress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Performance And Traffic

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You can find top Wordpress plugins posted by virtually every blogger. Well, its my turn to put forward mine. I will rate the plugins on the basis of its necessity, importance and coolness.

10. Adsense Deluxe: This is number ten because not everyone uses adsense to monetize their blog. This plugin allows automatic insertion of google adsense ads or yahoo publishing network (YPN) ads in between posts or wherever you want it.

Necessity: * Importance: ** Coolness: ***

9. Simple Tags: If you want to tag your posts with important keywords then this plugin is for you. Tagging makes the post more search engine friendly and is proven to increase traffic.

Ultimate Tag Warrior the previous best tag plugin is not compatible with Wordpress 2.3+. For other tagging related plugins go here!

I haven’t used any Tag Plugin in this blog but you can see the keyword tags after each post. I just included a line of php code in the loop of my ‘Main Index Template’. So, if you want to give it a try, just copy and paste the code below in the loop after the post entry.

<?php the_tags(); ?>

Necessity: * Importance: *** Coolness: ***

8. Sociable: This plugin allows your to put small icons of various social bookmarking sites like digg, del.icio.us, etc after each post which helps your readers spread the word about your blog.

Necessity: * Importance: *** Coolness: ****

7. Wp-Super Cache: As the name suggests, this is a caching system which makes your blog load faster and makes it highly responsive. If you used the Sociable plugin and got your blog dugg then this plugin will help your blog survive the ‘Digg effect’. This plugin might not be as important if your blog traffic is low.

Necessity: ** Importance: **** Coolness: *

6. Related Posts: After each post, this plugin shows the title of other posts that are related to the current post. This is highly effective to engage your readers and get more page views. You can see the example of this plugin in this blog. After every post there are links to the older related posts.

Necessity: ** Importance: *** Coolness: ****

5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: This plugin was creatd by Steve Smith and now adopted by FeedBurner themselves. Here are Smith’s words about this plugin:

this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: **

4. Optimal Title: This is a really cool and important plugin. Here is the original description of this plugin:

This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first. Having your page information appear before your blog name in the title is advantageous because it provides more meaningful search engine results and browser bookmark names. The text that appears between your <title> tags is used to generate both of these things, and will often be truncated when viewed. Because of this, it is more effective to have words directly relating to the content of your page appear before common markers. Not only will the titles be more meaningful, but the they will also be more scan able when being viewed in a list.

If that confused you, it simply means it makes the post title appear as the blog title for the respective post page. You can see the example on this blog.

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: ***

3. Google Sitemap Generator: This plugin generated a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog which is supported not only by Google but also by Ask.com and Yahoo. Sitemap is basically the map of your site in the language search engine bots can understand. This is an important plugin for SEO purposes.

Necessity: *** Importance: ***** Coolness: **

2. Wp-Contact Form With Spam Protection: Wp-Contact Form allows your readers to contact you without having to email you. This plugin creates a simple contact form where readers can fill in their information and leave your messages. The Contact Form now comes with spam protection. So, yay!!

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: ****

1. Wordpress Database Backup: Now, this plugin is perhaps the most important plugin after Akismet. It creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. So, if you are not very good at backing up your database yourself, like me, then this plugin is absolutely necessary. You never know what accident might happen.

Necessity: ***** Importance: ***** Coolness: ***

Top Wordpress Plugin: Akismet is a spam protection plugin which comes by default with Wordpress ( You just need to activate it and insert the Wordpress.com API key). I would include this as Number 1 but since it is already present in your plugins directory, I decided to give this a special mentioning. Spam is a big and annoying issue and akismet really helps filter them out.

Necessity: ***** Importace: ***** Coolness: *****

Other Mentionable Plugins: Source:

No Ping Wait - Speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php.

PXS Mail Form - Creates a mail form with multipart verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. It is much more easy to contact with website author.

SpotMilk - SpotMilk is the admin theme for WordPress 2.0. It makes wp-admin panel much nicer.

Super Archive - Implements a dynamic archive, the best archives system i know.

SRG Clean Archives - Super clean archive. Very simple and useful.

WP lightbox 2 - Overlay images on the current page for WordPress. You can turn it on and all images are now working with it.

fQuick - Sidenotes, short notes for WordPress. You can place it for example in sidebar.

CG-FlashyTitles - Implementation of sIFR 2.0 Flash-based - Nice graphical flash titles for WP. Very easy to install.

flickrRSS - Integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. Show flickr photos on your website.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

Gravatars - Add gravatar support to WP. Administrative interface to control default gravatar options.

Get Recent Comments - Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar or where you want.

WP Paginate - Create pagination for pages. It is the best plugin for that makes navigation easy with many static pages.

wp-notable - Add social bookmark links such as digg or del.icio.us to each blog entry

Exec-PHP - Execute PHP code in posts or static pages. When this plugin is on you can add php code to static pages or even posts.

Related Posts:

• What is a Blog and Where to Start?
• Simple Permalink Change To Increase Your Blog Traffic And Ranking
• 5 Steps For Beginners To Set Up A Blog

This entry was posted on February 09th, 2008 and is filed under Wordpress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.