(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)
WordPress is extraordinarily powerful software “out of the box,” but there are 4 plugins that you absolutely must have for an effective WordPress installation:
- Akismet (From Automattic, the WordPress people)
- Google Analytics for Wordpress (author: Joost de Valk)
- Google XML Sitemaps (author: Arne Brachold)
- wp-db-backup (author: Austin Matzko)
Each one of these vital plugins is reviewed below.
Akismet
Akismet comes pre-installed as an Automattic (the WordPress company) product. All you have to do is activate it, and provide the free key you get from registering yourself on wordpress.com. It’s all free, and very easy. Akismet will save you hours and hours of time from deleting spam comments from your blog. And the spam will come very, very quickly!
Google Analytics for Wordpress
Google Analytics for Wordpress by Joost de Valk allows you to use the Google Analytics tools to measure the traffic on your blog. You will be able to how much traffic is coming in from search engines, from links, from direct URLs, and from other sources. Metrics include how long people stay on your site, how many pages they read, which pages they read, and much more.
There are actually several plugins for WordPress for handling Analytics. I have this one to be accurate, easy to understand, and updated regularly. The author, Joost de Valk, makes his living using WordPress for marketing, and has a vested interest in maintaining this plugin.
Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachold builds a site map of your whole WordPress installation and automatically submits your site, with all the links, pages, everything to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines. This site map is used by the search engine to help them understand the structure of the site, so that they can index the site pages much more effectively.
Again, there are several sitemap plugins. Like the Google Analytics plugin above, this one is easy to understand and updated regularly. Feel free to experiment with similar plugins if you need more (or less) functionality!
wp-db-backup
wp-db-backup by Austin Matzko makes automatically backing up the WordPress database incredibly easy. Install it, go to the administration page, have a back up created to immediate download, for storage on your server, or even have the backup emailed to you. You can even instruct WordPress to run wp-db-backup on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule, and have those backups emailed to you (this is what I do, super convenient!).
These 4 plugins are always the first I install, before I even write the first post or page. Fortunately, it’s easy to install these using the built-in plugin interface. Just go to “Plugins > Add New” and search on the plugin name. I provided the author’s names to ensure you will be able to find the correct plugin when several results are returned from searching.
Would you like more? Send me a letter...
{ 2 comments }
Awesome! Thanks…I didn’t have any of those, besides Akisment of course.
Carlos Velez´s last blog ..Direction, Not Perfection: The Truth In Movement
Whoa… this is an old, old article!
Definitely need to do some updating on this one. Probably not today.
The information is still good, though.
Dr Wordpress!´s last blog ..When B.L.O.G. Turns into J.O.B. – Downshift and accelerate
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 1 trackback }