Successful blogs and CMS sites require several components. Two of the most important components are: 1) fresh, targeted, keyword rich content, and 2) back office tools that maintain and manage the technical aspects of the site.
While there are actually a lot more than 10 great functionality plugins for WordPress, if you start out your blog with these ten in particular, I think you’ll be on your way to having a great content management website.
In my mind, these are the basics of functionality plugins. These plugins are like autopilot when it comes to maintaining how your site technically works, keeping the software updated and keeping your site in front of search engines. I’ve also listed a few that help you to control some aspects of how your site works, what it looks like and how pages and posts are accessed.
Here are My Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Boost Blog and CMS website Functionality
- Google XML Sitemaps
Auto-generates an XML sitemap to help search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to index your blog. Sitemaps make it easier for crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs, and it notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post. The plugin allows you to configure how often it will build and submit a new map, how often it should check for new content, and you can also set the priority of your pages/posts. - WordPress Database Backup
Creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. You can configured how often to backup your database and if the backup should be stored in your admin files on your server, or emailed to you, or both. This is a great tool because you have a level of comfort that if something happens to your server, you’ll have a recent backup to get your blog back up and running. - WordPress Automatic Upgrade
Automatically upgrades your WordPress software version to the latest files provided by WordPress.org. It conforms to the 5 steps provided in the WordPress upgrade instructions. Using this plugin is much, much easier and faster than upgrading your software manually. You just click a series of links and bam! you’re done and fully upgraded. This plugin also automatically backups your current file and database and provides you with a link to download them. - Akismet
You probably already have this plugin as it comes standard with most WordPress installations. Catches spam comments on your blog – without Akismet or something like it, your blog will become innundated with spam! Akismet catches and saves span in the database for 15 days in case you want to check it out manually. After that time period is up, the spam is automatically deleted. If spam gets through, and you mark it as spam Akismet will add it to their database, so it really gets more effective as you use it. - WP-reCaptcha
A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. This is another great tool for combating comment spam. Each post on your blog that allows comments will get a CAPTCHA box with a word or words printed in a distorted manner, anyone wishing to leave a comment will have to type those words in a box in order for their comment to be sent. - All in One SEO Pack
A great SEO plugin for beginners and serious SEO practioners as well. Use it “out of the box” or get in there and configure it however you want. This is really the optimal SEO plugin, it brings back to WordPress what static sites have – namely optimized: description, keywords, blog title, post titles and more. - Wassup
Track visitors to your blog in real time. You can see at a glance who is on your site and how they got there, right from you WP dashboard. There is also a more detailed view where you can see almost everything users are doing on your blog. You’ll get a cronology of your blog’s visits with details for each single user session – including what country they’re from, what web browser they are using, their IP information and more. - Exclude Pages from Navigation
This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages or navigation menus. This is handy for pages you may want on your site, but not on your nav bar. For instance, when you create a contact page, you will normally create a “thank you” or “comment received” page – you probably won’t want that page to be available unless someone uses your contact page. You can also hide pages this way (but only from your site visitors not from search engines), and direct certain users to them with a link. - Category Order
Allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop. Also reorders sub-categories in the same way. Just a tool to let you control the priority of categories as they appear on your site. - My Page Order
You set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages. Like the category order plugin, My Page Order lets you control the priority of pages as they appear on your site.
All of these plugins can be found at WordPress.org and installed directly through your blog at the plugins tab. Simply use the search feature on the plugins page in your blog back office to find the names of these plugins, click install and activate.
I highly recommend you read the documentation of these and any plugins you are considering using, including FAQ, installation and update detail before installing and using them.
Additionally, most if not all of these plugins are provide free by outside developers. Most accept donations through Paypal. If you like the plugin and use it, please donate something to the developer.
In a future post, I’ll list 10 more WordPress plugins that enhance your reader’s experience and help them share your content more easily.
