Top WordPress Plugins

My Best WordPress Plugins List

Here you will find plugins that I personally use and a couple that come highly recommended by top online marketers. You may not need them all, but they work together beautifully. Stop by and check every once in a while because I will add new ones after I’ve tested performance.

Akismet – If you set your blog up to allow comments- you are going to get spammed. There are people out there who use programs to find blogs and dump hundreds if not thousands of links in your comment boxes to create inbound links to their sites. Akismet comes with the basic WordPress installation. To activate it all you need is an API key so follow the directions with the plugin to get yours. Use that key on all of your blog sites. Then you can go into your dashboard and lose all that spam with two clicks. If you decide to not allow comments- delete it. You don’t want your database filled with things you are not using. You want a fast loading blog.

Auto Excerpt Everywhere – If you are using the HeatMap Theme you may not need this- but this plugin automatically displays excerpts instead of full post contents in your blog. Custom excerpts and generated excerpts supported.

Clicky by Yoast – Website analytics help you manage your blog. I like this one better than Google Analytics. Don’t use both- pick one.

CMS Tree Page View I love this simple plugin. When I write posts I generally start with the basics of a topic. My next post is more advanced on that topic, but WordPress wants to display my posts in the order I publish them- so the more advanced are what you see first- not good. Reordering meant manually changing the dates. Not with this plugin. It sets up pages as a “tree” and allows me to drag and drop to re-order them. Go into “settings” and set it up for Posts and you can drag and drop for posts too. It’s free, simple, and killer!

Delete Duplicate Posts – Sometimes you have so much going on it’s hard to remember that you already posted a particular article. Duplications will cost you in rankings so this plugin runs in the background making sure you avoid that mistake.

Efficient Related Posts – A related posts plugin that works quickly even with thousands of posts and tags. Can be added automatically to the end of posts.

Enhanced Search Box – This WordPress plugin simply adds some nice un-obtrusive Javascript functionality to the basic search box. This works out-of-the-box on a WordPress search box once activated and gives you the ability to control the default search text from the admin panel.

Exclude Pages – This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages so if you want to have a page that can only be found by having the actual link, this will do it. I offer people who register on this site a ton of information on a page just like that. If you want to see the page you have to register and the link is then sent via my autoresponder email system. You won’t see the page title anywhere on the site.

FeedBurner FeedSmith Extend – This is a plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner. You have got to make use of the RSS feed capability of your blog. Make it easy for people to find your site and keep coming back.

Flash Video Player – The flash video plugin for WordPress allows the addition of video (and other media) to a WordPress website using standards-compliant markup and the leading open source software (Jeroen Wijering’s FLV Player and Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject Javascript Library).

FLV Embed – This plugin allows you to put compliant Flash video (FLV) into your posts and supports video sitemap generation.

MaxBlog Press Affiliate Ninja – This is a killer must-have plugin if you want to monetize your site. It lets you copy those long affiliate codes and make them look like they are links to another section of your site. There’s a box that allows you to “open in another window” so your visitor stays on your site. And in the tools above all your new posts and pages there will be a drop down list of each affiliate link you create in the system. You can highlight any words and make them into anchor text without going into the html. This plugin also allows you to have that done automatically. Rapidly increase your affiliate earnings with this monster plugin. It’s very affordable- even with the license to allow use on multiple blogs- the way I purchased it. Get this first and then get the Max Banner Ads Plugin below.

Max Banner Ads – Banners have proven to get a high click through rate. Most affiliate programs offer banners. All you need to do is copy the code for the banner and split it to be input into this plugin. It’s really simple. There are two parts to the code: the source of the image, which you find by looking for src=”(and then copy what is between the quotation marks), and your affiliate link. If you use their Ninja Affiliate above you can put in the Ninja Link as your affiliate link. They work great together.

MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder – You can build and add optin registration forms to your WordPress blog without dealing with code. If you have an Aweber account you won’t need this because you have great templates there to use in creating forms.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will automatically generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index the pages and posts on your blog.

No Duplicate Content in Comments – Check comments for duplicate content using Google AJAX Search API as they are published. The reason: It prevents people from writing out a

comment and pasting it all over the internet on blog after blog just to get backlinks to their sites. You don’t want duplicate content of any kind showing up on your blog.

Official Statcounter Plugin For WordPress – The Official StatCounter WordPress Plugin brings you all the powerful StatCounter features to your WordPress blog. If your blog is a busy place, this is a great credibility builder.

OnlyWire for WordPress – This one is critical for SEO and promotion. OnlyWire syndicates your blog posts to over 30 social networking sites simultaneously when you publish. It takes time to manually register at all the sites they submit to- but you cannot miss this opportunity. Make sure to check the “auto post all posts” and do not check “auto post all revisions”.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – This plugin moves all the dashboard management to the top of the dashboard as drop down options. You can try it and if you don’t like the feel of it- deactivate the plugin and you’ll go back to having the controls on the left.

Pop Up Domination – Popup Domination is one of the Best WordPress Plugins in existence today for capturing leads. It’s loaded with different themes and theme options to match the look and feel of your WordPress site. I’m telling you that there is absolutely no other popup WordPress Plugin available that compares to the style and effectiveness of Popup Domination. Out of all of the Best WordPress Plugins that do pop up, Pop Up Domination is #1

Redirect Old Slugs – Redirect Old Slugs allows you to change your post slugs (the unique URL established for your posts) without breaking your permalinks. People requesting the old link will be redirected to the new link. This all happens automatically so if you decide to change link titles for better SEO you are not going to lose any inbound links that you may have worked hard to get.

Revision Control – When you write a Post or Page WordPress and you save a draft or publish WordPress saves both the old version and the new. Before I activated this plugin on this site I was putting my Super Tools Page together. I looked at the bottom of my dashboard while working on that page only to find over 50 revisions were saved. I certainly don’t want to clog my data base and slow down my site with revisions I will never need. I manually deleted over 50. With the Revision Control WordPress Plugin you can limit the number of post revisions that remain in storage and never think about it again. I set mine to save only 3.

SEO Friendly Images – SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

SEO No Duplicate – This plugin helps you manage your search engine duplicate content, by setting your post page’s canonical to the permalink.

SEO Smart Links – Having incoming links from high ranked sites is a key to high ranking for you. Internal links from one article in your site back to another in your site is positive too- not

nearly as relevant as external links- but helpful. The search engines see your internal links as a way to enhance your visitors’ experience on your site. It does. And the longer people stay on your site is important too, so giving them an easy way to find more relevant content is just plain smart. This plugin will interlink keywords to your other articles for you.

Sticky Manager – I use my Heatmap Theme’s Featured Page component to keep my “Welcome” page as my landing page. This plugin lets you Stick a post in first position if that’s what you are after. Allows simple management of sticky posts from a centralized admin panel.

Thank Me Later – This plugin is great. It sends an email to all first-time visitors. You can compose your email for another call to action- or anything you’d like.

TweetMeme Button – This plugin adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

Tweet Old Post – If you’ve been building a Twitter following this WordPress plugin is the perfect way to sprinkle your posts into your tweets. It has options to add hashtags, leading text and more.

Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger – The Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger replaces the standard WordPress build-in ping functionality and makes many improvements to it including making sure your revisions don’t all ping and ping and ping making you look like you are spamming the pinging universe. I have to also tell you that when I first decided to use this I downloaded the zip file and could not upload it and have it activated. I discovered that the zip contained another file and the plugin was inside that. It’s called a nested file. I used Filezilla to solve that by uploading using the FTP (file transfer protocol). It’s free and easy to work. Just drag and drop. If you are going to put a new plugin into multiple blog sites this FTP Client is a huge time saver too.

User Role Editor – User Role Editor WordPress plugin makes the role capabilities changing easy. You can change any standard WordPress user role (except administrator).

Video Widget – Add more than 25 types of video in your sidebar. Only video Id is required so it’s simple and fast.

WordPress Editorial Calendar – This plugin provides a crisp, clean editorial calendar of your posts both past and present. You can drag and drop articles from one date to another, edit them and much more. This is an amazing organizational tool.

WordPress SEO by Yoast : WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most complete free WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between. After a couple years of using All In One SEO Pack I can tell you this is far superior. Don’t try to use both.

WP-DBManager – Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop or empty tables and run selected queries. Supports

automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database. One of it’s most impressive feature is it’s ability to email the entire WordPress database so you can save a backup. By the way, keep your backups in your gmail account on their server. There’s no point in backing up your data base on you own computer and then losing that backup if your hard drive dies.

WP-PageNavi – Those “Older Posts” and “Newer Posts” links are boring. With WP-PaveNavi you can get page buttons so users can go directly to whichever page they want. Plus they look a lot better than plain little links.

WP Super Cache – This WordPress plugin is a must-have free plugin for two reasons. First, it makes your pages load much faster. Second, since it stores static versions of your site, it requires much less CPU processing than using WordPress all by itself and enhances your visitors’ experience.

WP Widget Cache – Cache the output of your blog widgets. Usually it will significantly reduce the SQL queries to your database and speed up your site.