8 Wordpress Plugins to Make Your Life Easier
Here are eight Wordpress plugins we use on our blogs to either make things easier on our readers or on the management of our blogs. These plugins are downloaded from the links provided, unzipped, and and then uploaded into your plugins folder in your Wordpress intall. The plugins folder will be in the wp-content folder.
To activate a plugin go to your Wordpress admin panel, click on plugins. Go to the plugin you want to install and click on activate.
Akismet comes with your Wordpress install. Use it. It helps to fight spam in comments and spam trackbacks. The options for akismet are found under Plugins, Akismet Configuration.
How about making it easy for your readers to contact you? Dagon Design has a secure contact form you can add to your blog. After you activate this plugin, the options for it are found under the Options tab. DDFM-Main. You can have more than one contact form on your blog. For instance, here on DandelionBlog we have a contact form for contacting Suzanne, and one for contacting me.
Full Feeds is a plugin that will send your whole post to the RSS reader even if you use the “more tag”. Wordpress defaults to only sending the portion of your post before the more tag to the RSS feed. This plugin forces Wordpress to send the entire post. Partial feeds to RSS readers is one way to tick people off. A lot of viewers won’t bother to click on over to read the rest of the post. So to make it easier on your viewers, install this plugin if you use the more tag in your posts.
Similar Posts lets you automatically add links to posts that are related to the current posts. You can set how many posts to show. The options are found under Options, Similar Posts. This plugin gives you lots of options, from the # of related links to show, to excluding certain categories, or matching only to the category of the current post.
Similar Posts for Feeds does the same thing as the above plugin, but adds the related posts links to your RSS feed.
iimage-browser makes it easier to upload photos to your blog and create thumbnails if you want to use them. It makes it easy to browse photos you’ve already uploaded too. You can easily add tags to your photos since you’re all optimizing your photos for Google image, right? With one click you can add the code for the image to your blog post. We’re all about making it easier to blog.
Backup, backup, backup wp-db-backup makes it easy to back up your blog database. So activate it and use it! You never know when disaster might strike.
We use a few other plugins on our blogs, but they deserve full blog posts to explain how to use them. I’ll do them in a future post. We hope these eight Wordpress plugins presented here will help you, or your readers enjoy your blog even more. Do you have any great plugins you use on your blog?
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Oh, hey, I’ve never heard of most of these. I’m gonna go check them out!
Thanks a bunch! These look incredibly useful. I’m just setting up my Wordpress blog now. Sheesh! Talk about a learning curve! These really help.
Thank you for the contact form info. I have been digging for that one!
You’re welcome! I love finding new and useful Wordpress Plugins!
[…] actually talked about a handful of plugins I recommend to new Wordpress bloggers in this post. I use some other ones for SEO, and a few to help me with other things, but this list will give you […]
Dear Kacey; I’ve been unable to email you lately because of my server. I read the article about Wordpress about plugins being downloaded from links provided, “unzipped” …..you lost me there! If you remember I had emailed you about being 50ish and want to start a blog but am scared because I don’t know alot of techie lingo. Now after reading just that post of yours I’m afraid that I won’t beable to do this. Should I try to hire a Highschool kid to tutor me in some of the basics? I know nothing about html or codes,or alot of things that you talk about. Once I got a blog up and running I KNOW I CAN do it but it’s tech. stuff thats got me sweating. HELP PLEASE………
Jenny, I’m trying to make my instructions as detailed as possible so anyone can set up Wordpress on their own. If you don’t feel confident enough to do it yourself, then maybe get someone who knows computers to help you. You’re right, high schoolers are always a good choice.
Then you can concentrate on the actual blogging.