Blog

With over 7,200 plugins freely available for WordPress there is quite a bit out there which can help enhance and improve your website. It is easy to simply add multiple plugins and accumulate a large amount over time. Adding multiple plugins should be done with some caution as I’m sure many users have discovered why. Plugins have and will conflict with other plugins, especially those which rely on the use of jQuery, MooTools etc. WordPress is already a lightweight, lean, mean blogging machine. No sense overdoing it with plugins and slowing it down.

We use a total of 11 plugins on this site and we could probably do away with 1-2 of them.

For those interested, here is our list and I suppose you can consider it our recommendations:

• All In One SEO Pack: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines.
• AntiVirus: AntiVirus for WordPress is a smart and effective solution to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.
• Popularity Contest: Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
• Download Monitor: Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links.
• WordPress Exploit Scanner: This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious.
• WordPress Popular Posts: WordPress Popular Posts is a sidebar widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog with your own formatting.
• WP-PostViews: Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.
• WP-SpamFree: An extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam.
• WP Security Scan: Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

There you have it. 11 simple and effective plugins to keep us, our site and our visitors happy!