WordPress Plugins that I use

Recently, I posted a poll asking which blogging tool do you use?

The results (to date), are 73% using WordPress, 25% using Blogger, and 2% using other tools.

As promised in that blog post, here are a list of all the WordPress plugins I use on www.kevinmullinsphotography.co.uk�

• Akismet - the standard spam filtering tool.  A must have.
• All in One SEO Pack – this is the de-facto SEO optimisation tool for WordPress.  If you are serious about WordPress and your Search Engine Rankings then you should install this tool.  It has a wealth of features that makes life that much easier.
• Contact Form 7 – a great little plugin that allows you to build custom contact forms.  If you are simply leaving your email address on the website then you should seriously consider replacing it with a form.  For one, your email address (if plain HTML), will be harvested by spambots, but also, a contact form, in my opinion is much more professional and gives you the opportunity to obtain information from the client that they may not necessarily include in a standard email.
• Efficient Related Posts – there are lots of plugins like this, but this is the simplist one that works for me.  It creates a list of related posts at the bottom of you post – great for SEO.
• FD Feedburner Plugin – if you are interested in allowing people to subscribe to your blog (and you should be, really), then get yourself a Feedburner account, and then this plugin.  All feeds will then be managed by Feedburner.
• Featured Content Gallery – a very nifty little tool that I use for my revolving images on the home page.  It’s quite heavy in terms of performance, but used correctly it’s a lovely little tool.  It means I don’t use any Flash animation on my site and allows me to target the images on the homepage that I want very easily.  Needs a little bit of configuring and playing with but well worth putting the effort in.
• Google Analytics for WordPress - I use Google analytics extensively for monitoring my website traffic.  This plugin simply allows you to put your google key in and it does the rest.
• Google XML Sitemaps - Google (and most of the other search engines), gobble up XML sitemaps like my daughter gobbles up Chocolate Buttons.  This tool will keep control of your XML Sitemap and keep it up to date.  Use it in accordance with Google Webmaster tools and the sitemap will become your friend.
• My Page Order – a recent plugin for me.  I was fiddling with the very fiddly page order system in WordPress (for non plog pages) until I stumbled upon this plug in.  It’s great – I just drag and drop pages now.
• NextGEN Gallery - this is my gallery tool of choice.  As with all of these plugins there are numerous other options, but this tool gives me everything I need including mini-galleries and full control over image order etc.
• Samsarin PHP Widget - this tool allows you to run native PHP code in the WordPress Widgets – great if you have that little PHP script that needs to be run in your side bar.  I don’t actually use this at present, but it’s on my list of widgets that are activated.
• SEO Friendly Images – this little tools will clean up your images from an SEO point of view.  For more information on that, read this post about your images and SEO
• SEO Slugs – Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.
• WordPress Database Backup – Backs up and emails me a daily copy of my WordPress database.  Not relevant for SEO, but relevant for peace of mind.
• WP-Mail-SMTP – I use a self hosted server running Microsoft Windows (OK, I know, that’s half of you who will never speak to me again), and this wonderful little tool allows WordPress to send email the Microsoft way, rather than the PHP way (I can be more technical if you really want).
• WP Super Cache – Ive mentioned caching before so you can read a bit more about it in that post – needless to say, as Google begins adding website performance to it’s impossibly large equation, caching (correctly) is a must.

So, that’s a list of the plugins I currently use on my Kevin Mullins Wedding Photography website, which is entirely built using WordPress.  As is always the case with these types of posts, there will be other plugins that offer the same, if not better functionality.  If there is, please comment and let everyone else know (and me).  Also, if you have any plugins that you can recomend, please mention in the comments too.

-km (Listening to:  The Photocreative 365 Podcast)

You may also be interested in:

• SEO Training for Photographers
• Which blogging software do you use?
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• Backlinks
• What’s on your homepage?