Essential Wordpress Plugins That You Should Consider

Okay, my bad. I thought I can share all the essential plugins with you after my 4 days play around with them but hey NO, I couldn’t. Well, if you’re in search for plugins for your Wordpress blog to make them as user friendly as possible and integrate with the most subtle but profitable monetization method on it, here’s the conclusion I’ve come up with:

“Wordpress is getting better day by day and with its constant version update, there’s no definite plugins that you can settled with at a time. You need to keep an eye on the plugins made available everyday as some plugins that are useful with version 2.1 might not work with version 2.5. Yeah, the developer did not update the plugins thus render it incompatible with the new version. However, more and more plugins are introduce every now and then, so it’s rather impossible to say which is best. Therefore, you need to keep learning and keep yourself up to date with what’s going on around you to stay competitive. One of the way is to bookmark this site and come back often  ”

Sound disappointing? All right, here’re 2 of the plugins that I’ve activated and will keep updating it as more is discovered.

The first and foremost plugin that I activated is Akismet that comes together with your Wordpress 2.5. Just activate it from your Plugin Management panel and key in your API key to use it. This is the first plugin you must activate if your blog has comment enabled. Akismet helps you to get rid of all irrelevant comments and trackback spams. It’s a great time saver than to spend countless hours reviewing every comment yourself.

(Remarks: I spent 2 hours searching for the API key that was said to have emailed to me or that can be acquired from my Wordpress dashboard. Well, if you’re running a self hosted Wordpress blog on your own domain, you wouldn’t find the API key anywhere in your dashboard and email. You have to register yourself at Wordpress.com to get one. Yeah, it’s Wordpress.com and not Wordpress.org at which you downloaded the Wordpress software.)

The next would be Google XML sitemap. I consider this to be very important for SEO reason and a must have as it creates a sitemap for you blog. The plugin also ping to major search engines everytime you make a new post and this encourage the search engine to crawl your blog more often and eventually get more of your blog pages indexed.

(Remarks: You can also set the priority of your blog pages and the frequency at which you want the search engine robot to revisit it on the configuration area once the plugin has been activated)

Note: I’m not sure if you’ll have this problem but it’s worth mentioning here. While I’ve successfully created my first site map for the search engine at http://netbizsimplified.com/sitemap.xml, there was an error viewing the page with Firefox but it’s ok with IE. It said something like “XSLT is not a valid …blah blah blah”. I couldn’t remember what was the whole sentence but the problem was solved by adding an extension at the MIME folder of my cpanel.

Login to your cpanel > Click on the MIME Types icon > In the MIME Types box type “application/xslt+xml” and type “xslt” in the Extension box. If it doesn’t work, type “application/xml” in the MIME Types box and “xml xsl” in the Extension box. That should fix the error in case it does happen.

Cheers!

Waken