A few days ago, I shared seven of my favorite WordPress Plugins and promised I would be sharing more… so, true to word, here are seven more of my fave WordPress Plugins:
Page Links To
An excellent way to set up pages on your website and redirect to ‘other’ locations. I’ve found this plugin extremely helpful when setting up content sliders and only want to show ‘teaser’ content in the slider window…
Page Links To is easy to use and VERY effective.
Simply Exclude
If you’ve taken the time to ‘hide’ your content from the Search Engines, then it’s likely you’ll want to ‘hide’ the content from the site search functionality…. after all, you probably don’t want your bonus page to show up in a search!
Simply Exclude is just the plugin for this. When installed, an author can select to have their content appear in the site search or not, simply by setting the Simply Exclude setting in the edit post / page window.
Akismet
This plugin comes standard with WordPress (in most cases) and I never really understood its power until I started getting spam comments.
By enabling Akismet and getting the API from WordPress.com, spam comments are reduced (a lot!).
Akismet has a fairly awesome algorithm that appears to learn as it goes. It will review submitted comments and either mark them as Spam or allow them to show on the site. If the comment is marked as spam, it is put in a spam queue and deleted after 30 days.
It certainly makes managing comments much easier. The spam queue can be reviewed the site owner and, if a legitimate comment is caught (it happens occasionally) it can be reclassified, and Akismet will revise it’s algorithm. It’s all pretty neat really.
It’s not 100% foolproof – but it’s a major step forward.
WP-E-Commerce
Want to set up a shopping cart on your wordpress website, quickly and easily? Then take a look at WP-E-Commerce…. The base plugin is free and you can most certainly setup a shopping cart that uses Paypal and offers digital and physical products for sale.
With the Gold Cart add-on, you can unlock more features and more payment gateways.
I like WP-E-Commerce because not only is it easy to setup quickly, but with a bit of attention the shopping cart theme can be customized and the layout tweaked to look exactly as you want it too.
I’ve used WP-E-Commerce to setup and customize several websites over the last few months and have yet to be disappointed.
Google XML Sitemaps
If you’re serious about Search Engine Optimization for your wordpress website, then it is absolutely paramount to create a ‘machine readable’ sitemap….
Google (and other search engines) use XML formatted files for sitemaps – don’t worry if that makes you glaze over… all you need to know is that you need to create a sitemap in the right format to make it easy for the search engines to ‘index’ your website.
Google XML sitemaps plugin will automatically create a sitemap, and update it whenever you add new content – highly recommended.
Google Analyticator
As many who read my blog will know that I think Tracking and Measuring is one of the most important tasks a business owner should undertake.
Google Analyticator will automatically connect your website to your Google Analytics account and measure what’s happening, traffic wise, on your site.
WordPress Google Analytics Reports
Once you start tracking your results with Google Analytics, you’ll need to review the statistics and see what’s happening. You can, and should, log in to your Google Analytics dashboard to access all the reports available to you.
However, I personally like to see a snapshot of my sites performance when I log into my site – as do most site owners. WordPress Google Analytics Reports adds a dashboard widget to wp-admin that will show site owners a rolling 30 day snapshot of their analytics – very, very helpful.
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