Acan Media

When I left off on my first post about building a website with Wordpress, I had just installed and slightly configured the software. The next consideration is what features you will need which are extended using plug-ins. Wordpress ships with two plug-ins, the must-have SPAM filtering solution Akismet and the frivolous Hello Dolly (which posts random lyrics from that song to your administrative interface).

There are thousands of others to choose from at the directory kept by the Wordpress developers but which are right for your site depends on what your needs are. Another thing to keep in mind is these plug-ins tend to effect your site’s loading times and overall performance. The more plug-ins activated, the slower your site gets and some plug-ins are not as efficient as others. Finally, some plug-ins cause issues with Wordpress and/or other activated plug-ins. So keeping the minimum number of plug-ins to meet your requirements is the name of the game.

In my experience building and managing dozens of Wordpress installations the following plug-ins are my “must-haves”:

Akismet - Essential SPAM protection from Automatic the developers of Wordpress. Get your API key for free at Wordpress.com (pass on getting the blog; all you need is an ID there).

All in One SEO Pack - The name really says it all. An plug-in which give you complete control of your search engine optimization settings.

cformsII - Every website or blog should have a contact page and this plug-in gives you complete control over fields, layout and much more.

FeedBurner FeedSmith - The first of two metrics-related plug-ins, this works with your free Feedburner account to make sure new subscribers are counted by the service.

Google XML Sitemaps - The easiest way I know of to generate and maintain Google Sitemaps. Set it and forget it but make sure you also link to your Google Website Tools.

Simple Tags - The built-in Wordpress tagging system is pretty basic so this plug-in adds the missing features to make tagging, well, simple.

Sociable - I’ve tried a bunch of other social media bookmarking plug-ins and this is my current favorite. Make sure you configure and delete the large text that this plug-in generates above the images of all the social sites. I also add and subtract from the default selection of social sites the plug-in provides.

Twitter Tools - Full integration with Twitter. It automatically posts a tweet with each blog post and can be used in the other direction, as well.

Ultimate Google Analytics - The second of the two metrics plug-ins, this simply adds your Google Analytics code to each blog page.

WordPress Database Backup - We all mean to backup our MySQL database regularly but often don’t get around to it. This plug-in lets Wordpress do this task for you on the frequency you choose (you can add more options with the WP-Crontrol plug-in if the default intervals are not exactly what you had in mind).

WP Super Cache - This plug-in significantly improves your site loading times and reduces the amount of calls to your MySQL database by creating a cache of popular pages.

In my next post in this series I’ll highlight my favorite task-oriented plug-ins to add additional functionality to your site.