WordPress Plugins That I Selected

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 I deleted several plugins that were outdated or that I was not using, or that I didn’t want anymore, and I installed new plugins that offered features that I wanted for my blog.

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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.

  • AddToAny Share Buttons
    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.
  • Akismet
    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.

  • Broken Link Checker
    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!

  • CommentLuv
    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.

  • Contact Form 7
    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.

  • Flamingo
    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.

  • Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
    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.

  • Exec-PHP
    This plugin executes the php code in your posts, pages and widgets, if any.

  • Google XML Sitemaps
    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.

  • AccessPress Pinterest WordPress Plugin
    This plugin allows you to put a Pinterest button on your images so that your readers can easily save them on Pinterest.

  • UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
    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.

  • WP Open Comment Links in New Window
    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.

  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
    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!

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  • 8 Responses to “WordPress Plugins That I Selected”

    1. Ken Damon says:

      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

    2. Kevin Timothy says:

      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. 🙂

    3. DeHawkinz says:

      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?

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