Plugins

Customize with Plugins

Listed below are some wonderful plugins I recommend to help you with managing your blog(s).
Although you may not see a need for these right away, I still recommend keeping this list as you will most likely find a need for most of these as your blogging progresses.
Akismet and Photo Dropper are my absolute favorites.

• Akismet – It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep.
• Photo Dropper – Lets you add Creative commons licensed Photos to Your Posts from Flickr. Be sure to use the photo credit.
• BlogUpp Plugin – Free blog promotion network.
• Rating-Widget Plugin – Create and manage Rating-Widget ratings in WordPress. As long as it doesn’t adversely affect your blogs load speed, this one is fun to use.
• Trackable Social Share Icons- Enables blog readers to easily share posts via social media networks, including Facebook and Twitter. All share clicks are automatically tracked in your Google Analytics.
• Broken Links Remover – Eliminate Broken links
• pType Converter – Easily convert a post to a page and vice versa through an easy to use interface.
• cbnet Ping Optimizer – Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer and ultimately being banned from Google and other search engines.
• No Self Pings – Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.
• Link Juice Keeper – Keep the link juice by redirecting all non-existing URLs which normally return a 404 error to the front blog page using 301 redirect.
• VoltRank Affiliate Plugin – This is a free link exchange network that operates randomly, acquiring links that are placed inconspicuously on your site and backlinks to your site on other sites averaging the same PageRank or more.
• Feedburner Email Widget – Allows you to add a Feedburner Email Subscription widget to one of your sidebars.
• Google Analytics Tracking Code Embedder- Embed your Google Analytics Tracking Code to your theme files without hard-coding them into your template or theme files.
• BWP Google XML Sitemaps – A more lightweight Google XML Sitemap WordPress plugin that generates a sitemap index rather than a single sitemap. Despite its simplicity, it is still very powerful and has plenty of options to choose from.
• Headspace2 – Allows complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, etc.
• Just a Quote Widget – Display any quote from any source in your sidebar with some basic ‘quote-like’ formatting.
• WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from.

A Word of Caution – Use only plugins that are absolutely necessary to achieve what you want with your site. Page load speed is a vital factor in the performance of any site, and installing too many plugins can adversely affect it.