Top 5 Wordpress Plugins
Posted on October 22nd, 2007 by IBabel under Blogging
The great thing about Wordpress is the ease of use and the array of useful plugins. The following is a list of my top 5 Wordpress plugins (not in order of favoritism) that I think are pretty essential for anybody using Wordpress to blog.
1. Show Top Commentators - This plugin increases blog comments immensely, the reason is because it gives your readers an incentive to comment by provoking competition between themselves. Being top commentator can help them get traffic to their own blogs, if the plugin is displayed in a prominent position. So it’s in their best interest to comment. Once a few join in, it will usually entice other people to do the same.
Download and instructions here
2. Top Posts - I love this plugin. A lot of bloggers are using it now, It’s one of the most useful plugins available because it displays your top posts depending on number of comments or views. You can decide how many to display and categorize them if you like. Displaying your best work helps give people a reason to stick around and delve deeper into your blog. You could obviously just create a sidebar entitled of this nature and manually put into it your favorite posts, disregarding comment or view stats but I prefer to use this plugin as there is obviously a reason why your top commented / visited posts are that.
Download and instructions here
3. Democracy - This is a poll plugin. Polls help provide an interactive aspect to your blog. By placing a poll somewhere on your blog, you give people yet another reason to get involved and study your blog longer than they usually might.
Download and instructions here
4. Subscribe to Comments - Nice little plugin that provides your readers with an option of subscribing to comments on a particular post via email. It’s simply a little opt-in check box that appears underneath every comment box on posts, with a text field for their email. This is great for reminding people of your blog. If somebody happened to not subscribe to your RSS because they forgot or whatever but they did subscribe to a post’s comments and forgot about your blog then they can handily be reminded via email next time someone comments on said post. They then may proceed to subscribe to your feed.
Download and instructions here
5. Buy Me a Beer - This plugin can be inserted in the sidebar alone or at the bottom of every post. It’s a nice creative plugin that basically asks for a donation in a unique fashion. It’s quite strange that the huge majority of people will not donate if they just see ‘make a donation’ but some of those people will donate with this plugin simply because it’s a bit out of their comfort zone in terms of initial thought.
Download and instructions here
On top of those 5 I would also like to mention the Askimet plugin. This is automatically installed with Wordpress so no need to download it but if you haven’t already. Activate it! it’s a great spam protector plugin that will catch about 98% of all spam comments.
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October 22nd, 2007 at 11:27 am
I only use two of those listed out by you.
I use Popular Posts but I didn’t full utilised it by placing it onto my sidebar because the script is conflicting with my theme.
I don’t do any polls yet and I am not sure will people really donate with the buy me a beer because I am underage.
October 22nd, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Do you like Democracy over Wp-Polls?
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Um, I can’t even remember what WP-Polls is like actually. I think I used it once breifly but searched for a better alternative straight away so I guess… yes.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Thanks for reminding me about Askimet. I finally activated it. The spam comments were starting to become a bit annoying so this has been very useful.