9 Awesome WordPress Plug-Ins

I love WordPress. I used to blog on Blogger and after making the switch, I don’t know how I ever blogged before without plug-ins. They make my life so much easier and the developers behind them are clearly geniuses.

All kidding aside, here are a few of my favorite plug-ins for WordPress:

Spam Plug-Ins

• Akismet – By far my favorite plug-in of them all. This plug-in catches spam comments before they ever reach your moderation queue and puts them into a special spam folder. So far on my own personal blog {Just My Blog} Akismet has caught 599 spam comments with 97.6% accuracy. That means there were almost 600 comments that I didn’t have to worry about. They were quarantined and held for me to either delete forever or set as “not spam.” I almost never have to set the comments Akismet catches as “not spam.”
• WP-Ban – Because I have a mean streak and hate spammers, this plug-in allows me to block certain IPs from accessing my site at all. If someone from a banned IP attempts to access my site, they get a custom “Get lost” screen that tells them exactly how I feel about their spam. This plug-in is very easy to maintain and since all comments automatically come with an IP address, easy to find the spammers.

SEO Plug-Ins

• All in One SEO Pack – While I may not be very good about always filling out the Meta information that makes All in One SEO Pack as good as it is, it is still a pretty awesome plug-in. It lets you add search engine friendly titles, keywords and descriptions without having to sacrifice your super-creative and fun titles along the way by simply replacing the “meta” title that the search engines see. You don’t really need to understand why it works…just know that iw does work and get it.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Basically, every search engine uses a bot to scan webpages and find out what type of content is available so it can return appropriate search results. What this plug-in does it create a basic map for these bots to show them around your blog. Here is my sitemap that this plug-in created for search engine bots. See? It’s simple to read and much easier for the bots to crawl.

Social Media Plug-Ins

• Subscription Options – This is simply one of my favorites because of its ease of use and simplicity. You can see the options on the right sidebar over there….You see? It’s four simple buttons that link directly to my RSS feed, E-mail subscription, Twitter and Facebook. You simply have to give the plug-in the URLs it should point to and pick what color and size you want your buttons to be. I stuck with the default colors because I thought they looked nice, but they have a very simple color palette to choose from. I especially liked that I can adjust the button size easily in case of a re-design {which never happens…clearly}.
• WP Tweet Button – Exactly what it sounds like. This plug-in inserts the Official Tweet Button into each post. You can designate the placement and orientation of the button, as well as specify a custom tweet and recommended follow with each tweet. It also shows how many times the post has been tweeted {or not, if you choose}.

Comment Plug-Ins

• CommentLuv – This plug-in allows you to show some love back to your commenters by automatically including a link back to their last post on their own website. I really love this plug-in, not only on my site, but on everyone else’s because it helps to drive a little traffic right back to my site. It’s just a little something you can do for your commenters to show them you appreciate them.
• TwitterLink Comments – Made by the same guy that created CommentLuv, Twitterlink adds a layer to your comment love and allows users to enter their Twitter username and it will show with each comment they make on your site. Just another layer of the reciprocity associated with being a good comment/host relationship.
• Comment Reply Notification – This plug-in is simply my way of easily bypassing an issue that I’m sure is simple to fix but I am too lazy to find out. This plug-in allows you {the blog host} to reply to commenters through your own blog {not in email} and have that reply sent to the commenter. I find this super useful since 9 times out of 10 I get an error when trying to reply directly to a comment. Like I said, it’s simply a lack of willingness to actually find the issue and fix it. Instead, I employ this plug-in so that everyone can see my reply {in case they have the same question} and the original commenter is notified.

Okay, so I’ve shared several of my favorite plug-ins. I hope this was helpful to you and that you found some good plug-ins along the way.

 Do you have any plug-ins that you absolutely cannot live without that I have overlooked here? Share them in the comments below!