WordPress Plugins That I Selected
February 15th, 2017 by Lucie Bellemare
After creating a Privacy Statement and a Disclaimer for my blog, the second step in my blog optimization process consisted in cleaning my set of plugins. I went through all the plugins that were installed on my blog and reviewed them. I deleted several plugins that were outdated or that I was not using, or that I didn’t want anymore, and I installed new plugins that offered features that I wanted for my blog.
Here is the list of WordPress plugins that are installed on my blog. Clicking on a plugin name will open the plugin page in a new window.
This plugins shows social site buttons below your posts so that your visitors can share your posts in the social tool of their choice. There are several button models to choose from, and you can put them at the top of your posts, at the bottom, or both.
This plugin takes care of the spam comments that are sent by robots or automated tools. It puts them in the Spam folder in your blog admin panel, where you can bulk discard them for good. It really saves time, instead of having to check and delete them manually.
As the name implies, this great plugin checks the links in your blog posts and comments and alerts you whenever it finds broken links. You can then unlink them, change the link or tell the plugin that it can leave the link as it is, in which case it will strike it through in the text to show it is a broken link. Very useful!
This plugin helps you show some love to people who comment on your blog. It places a link to their latest blog post at the end of their comment.
This plugin will help you create a contact form on your blog so your visitors can contact you if they have any questions. It is better than putting your email address on your blog and helps prevent email harvesting.
This plugins goes hand in hand with the Contact Form 7 plugin. It saves a copy of all the email messages that are sent through the contact form for future reference.
As its name implies, this plugin generates a Sitemap for my blog. It shows the category titles and all the posts below each category. I can also choose to indicate how many comments each post has received.
This plugin executes the php code in your posts, pages and widgets, if any.
This plugin creates an XML sitemap for your blog. Contrary to the HTML sitemap created by Dagon Design above, which is easy to read for human eyes, the main goal of the XML sitemap is to help search engines better index your blog.
This plugin allows you to put a Pinterest button on your images so that your readers can easily save them on Pinterest.
This easy to use plugin allows you to simply click on a button to backup your blog data. You can have it sent to the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) or sent to you directly by email.
This nice plugin makes all the links in comments open in a new window so that your visitors can come back and continue reading your blog.
This plugin shows a list of other related posts that you have written on your blog. If your visitors see another post that interests them, they will stay on your blog longer and read more of your content. You can see it in action right below the Social Share buttons at the end of this post.
There are still a couple plugins for which I have not yet decided if I will keep them, dump them or replace them, but this list contains the main plugins that I am using on my blog. If you know of any interesting plugins that are doing great things for your blog, feel free to share them in a comment below!
Tags: 
Lucie,
Thanks for the great post.
Your email of post updates is working fine 🙂
Akismet is a must for any wordpress site.
Ken Damon
Ken Damon´s last blog post ..Protected: My Plan To Pay For EA Status
Hi Ken,
You are right, Akismet is a great plugin! It is a tremendous help for any blogger nowadays.
Thanks for your comment!
Lucie,
So with that said do you take investing in Askimet very seriously? I have before in the past but not much money.
You can use Akismet for free if you want. Personally, I haven’t yet invested in this plugin, although it is very useful.
What potential issues (if any) do you risk taking by NOT cleaning up and deleting unwanted plugins? One plugin I have grown to really like is Photo Gallery by Supsystic. It’s ideal if you like to publish a lot of photographs on your website. If your website is text-laden I urge others to transition to a more visual appearance.
I also like the Exclude Pages from Navigation plugin. On the surface it may not seem like the most popular or obvious need for a WordPress site, but it’s surprisingly useful. If you’ve been maintaining websites for quite a while chances are you’ve wanted to “hide” a page in your website’s menu.
Check it out…it’s pretty cool.
Hi Kevin,
Those are good ideas of plugins to install on a blog, thanks for sharing!
I think one issue that could arise if you do not delete unused plugins or if you use too many is that your site could be slower to load. The main reason why I removed mine was that I wanted to get rid of the clutter and see easily which plugins were active on my blog. 🙂
I reduced my plugins recently to just 2. Akismet and JetPack
Like you say Akismet is a real help with spam comments. JetPack does the social share and comments as well as giving stats on your blog – I know which posts are getting attention and which are not.
Commentluv looks interesting, may look at including that next update
DeHawkinz´s last blog post ..How anonymous is anonymous?
Hi Richard,
Wow, thanks for the JetPack suggestion! This plugin looks very comprehensive and easy to use. I’ll be sure to give it a try!
The most important plugin is a security plugin, Wordfense is one of the best and having a secure blog is the first thing you want.
the free version of wordfense works great.