WordPress is a great platform for so many different reasons, including its power as a framework and flexibility with different themes and plugins that can take one website structure, be utilized by millions of different people, and each experience is both unique and great. You already know that we love Standard Theme by the 8bit team, but we have never formally come out with what plugins we use for this site.
Before we get into the plugins, let me reiterate for those that do not know my stance. Plugins are great, but can cause a lot of problems if not used sparingly. Each plugin you use requires database calls, hooks into the WordPress theme, and sometimes unnecessary clutter, so be picky about what you use. Too many plugins can cause your site to run slowly or even crash it and deliver it dead on arrival. I personally subscribe to a minimalist approach with plugins, only using the ones I absolutely need and I would urge you to have that same precaution.
- Broken Link Checker
When you have over 800 posts, you begin to lose track of what you have written and links that go to your site. This is one of those plugins that is strongly advised for any blog that has been around for more than six months. People are always changing URLs, their URL structure, or simply deleting pages or whole websites. This fun little app continuously goes through your links to see what is and is not working and allows you to make changes on the fly. - Digg Digg
Digg Digg is one of those apps that you can easily go overboard, but has the well intentioned sharing aspect of your site. Take the understanding of sharing for social media and emailing with the floating format that Digg Digg offers can provide for a social media sharing option no matter if you are at the top of the post or down in the comments. This being said, Digg Digg was the best option for us, but go explore what you want. - Disqus Comment System
The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. Do note that this has complications with several other plugins (none of them list below) and others simply had a bad experience, but for our needs, this commenting system is popular, powerful, able, and worth it. - Exclude Pages from Navigation
This plugin will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.This is one of those little plugins that the reader may never know I have, but is great for special offer pages that we limit to only certain people groups. Imagine needing a page on your website to drive new viewers to or a contest giveaway but that should not be in the main navigation, this is the app you would want. - SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and more. Instead of going through your plog posts, this uses keywords (in our case, all of the categories we have) and when that word comes up in a post (up to five words an article), it will link to that section on your website. - NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
This plugin automatically publishes posts from your blog to multiple accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles and/or pages. When a new post is scheduled, it also has a tweet that will go out live when the post goes live too. I tried to do this manually, it never worked out well and this solution was great. - Shareaholic*
Shareaholic adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. It has many of the same features that Digg Digg offers, but the main focus we use it for is the Recommendations section. Between the article and commenting section, you will notice a recommendation to other similar posts that encourage further navigation on your site. (and reduce the bounce rate hopefully!) - Tweet old post
This plugin helps you to keeps your old posts alive by tweeting about them and driving more traffic to them from twitter. It also helps you to promote your content. You can set time and no of tweets to post to drive more traffic. But be careful that you do not come off as spammy. - BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy backs up your entire WordPress installation: widgets, themes, plugins, files and SQL database – the entire thing! Just like your laptop or desktop computer, you should be doing regular backups of your website. - WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.
What plugins would you put on this list too?
Tim Young says
Hey Jeremy, thanks for sharing. I use some of the plugins you mentioned. I would also add Backup Buddy. Its a premium plugin but probably the best backup/restore plugin out there, I use it to move my site from dev -> tst -> prod in minutes. Give it a look.
seventy8Productions says
Backup Buddy is #9 on the list.