20 Useful Wordpess Plugins That Will Save Your Life

Yeah, right. Well, they won’t actually save your life, but they will definitely help out in the process of creating a great WP website.

There are many WordPress plugins out there, and it takes a load of valuable time to try them out,  see if they perform well and setup all (or just some) of the options needed for them to work the way you want them. This is a list of some of the most useful plugins I ran into in the past – and yes – I actually used and still use them on the sites Atraktor Studio maintains, including this one. Being a designer myself, I paid a lot of attention to the ease of use and the functionalities that I needed over and over again in various scenarios I (or the client) could think of.

Akismet
Author: Matt Mullenweg (yes, that’s the same brain responsible for the birth of WordPress)

Definitely the best spam fighter for your blog comments. Not only does it protect you from the boring spammers on your site, it will also look for the commenters identified as spammers on all other websites using Akismet. It needs a WordPress.com API Key to work and you can get one here.

Wp-DB-backup
Author: Austin Matzko

Yes – it happens from time to time. You accidentally overwrite some important fields in your database, got hacked by a Viagra-selling bastards or just need to transfer your blog from one hosting company to another. Don’t panic – you have previously installed the Worpress Database backup plugin so you can import a complete database and get the least possible downtime. If not – well that’s a bummer.

It needs a little bit of setup on the server side, but it is well worth it. You can set the time interval for the automatic backup, store in on your server or even have it sent by email – just in case. In case you need more info – visit the WP-DB-Backup plugin homepage.

Apture
Author: Apture Inc.

Apture is a plugin that will help you add any multimedia content to your website without ever leaving the edit post area. I am quite surprised I haven’t seen it featured in the best wordpress plugin lists and posts so far, because for me it was quite an eye opener. It requires a signup (that is also possible to sign in from the plugin interface, once you install it), but really helps a lot in making your site a true multimedia experience.  You can embed or link reference articles, images, pdf’s, wikipedia definitions, videos, maps with pins and descriptions and much more, with just a click of a button. And the best thing is that the visitors don’t have to leave your site – all links can be opened in a modal pop-up window like this (which by default looks very cool). Oh yes, it is FREE.

All in One SEO Pack
Author:  Michael Torbert

Google is in love with WordPress – that’s a fact. And by getting the most downloaded WordPress plugin ever (excluding Akismet, because it is a part of the default WP installation) you are sure to boost you on-site SEO. There is also an option for the Pro upgrade – so if you like it, take that $39 and invest into having even more bells and whistles.

WP Super Cache
Author: Donncha O Caoimh

You got the need for speed? Then head out to the WordPress plugin highway and drive without any danger of ever wrapping yourself around a telephone pole. It serves the static HTML pages instead of the regular php WP pages, resulting in a much shorter loading time which will keep you (and the users) jumping around in joy. After spending a few minutes form the initial setup – you will be seeing and experiencing your site on steroids! And the fact that the author is one of the guys from Automattic certainly gives it a bit of credibility, doesn’t it?

Form builder
Author: TruthMedia Internet Group

Although there are many form plugins out there – this one seems to be one of the best I found so far. not only does it have a great and easy to use interface, but also enables you to track and store the results on your server for future reference.

From simple to very complex forms – you can build it all in minutes without touching the code. I know that designers will love it cause of that fact

TweetBlender
Author: Kirill Novitchenko

Think of a spoon when you are eating soup made of tweets from selected tweeple. It’s like that – delicious and very intuitive way of collecting the tweets and displaying them live via AJAX in the sidebar or any other widget areas on your site. Has options for RT and Follow built in, so users can use it directly from your site, reducing the bounce rate (and that is something I don’t like bouncing around my site for sure).

As the author states (and he is not lying): “Tweet Blender is tag-aware and has support for multiple authors, lists, hashtags, and keywords all blended together.”

FancyBox for WordPress
Author:  Jose Pardilla

Out of the box image modal pop-up with a completely customizable look. Also has the options for customizing the animation and is completely adjustable via CSS. It only takes a minute to set up – and it works!

Google XML Sitemaps

Author: Arne Brachhold

Guess what this one does? That’s right. Install Google XML Sitemaps and get automatic updates of your site structure map every time you change or add something. Really useful for SEO – and we love SEO, don’t we?

NextGEN Gallery
Author: Alex Rabe

Definitely the most popular and (over)used plugins in the WP repository. It has A LOT of options and works great with galleries, thumbnails and albums alike. It allows for the batch upload via zip files, and tagging, organizing and adding descriptions to photos has never been easier. Works great with all Javascript libraries (like Fancy Box).

Scribe SEO Tool

Author: Copyblogger Media

Now, for me – this was a game changer. I consider Scribe Tool somewhat of a SEO teacher. It can calculate the SEO Score of your article based on the keywords, link density, text lenght, title and tags, meta descriptions and more. Hell, it even suggests the right keywords.

SwfObj
Author: Matt Carpenter

So, the designer made a nice little jump-around animation for your site. That’s all nice. But, how do you integrate it into your content, and not lose the hard-earned XHTML Validation?

I think you know the answer by now – SwfObj uses WordPress native media tools to embed flash and seamlessly integrates with your WP install. It uses the object tag, which seems to be the best practice for embedding flash nowadays.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Author: mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)

Here’s yet another plugin that works really great. What it actually does is calculates the relatedness (does this word even exist?) of 2 articles by taking into account their titles, content, tags, categories and what-not. The result is an appended list of similar articles at the bottom (or top) of your posts. When logged in as administrator, you can even see the score and actually compare how similar they are.  I have been using it for some time now and am very pleased with the results and the fact I haven’t encountered a single bug. Sometimes I even surf around my site, clicking on related articles, just to see the results.

Dynamic Headers
Author: Dan Cannon

This is one of the plugins I use on almost all of the sites I own or work on. It gives a really nice option of adding different images to your header (actually any place you like on the site, but header is the most natural place in most cases), and assigning links to them. Most of the time I use it to display different headers on the pages, or even just a single image that is clickable – I like having the whole header picture as a link to the homepage – it is intuitive and easy for people to use. You can manage pics in a fashionable manner, replace and delete them in just a few clicks and even chose a different header for each of the posts if you feel schizophrenic. And last, but not the least – it also supports flash!

Ecwid Shopping Cart
Author: Ecwid Team

Ecwid (which stands for e-commerce widgets) is a fully functional drag-and-drop AJAX shopping cart. There are many reasons why I put it on the listm instead of choosing some of the more popular e-commerce plugins for WordPress and the main one being is that it looks really nice compared to the other ones, has a very intuitive interface that even  a total beginner can understand (this is a first-hand info as I have trained a few clients in using it and they all loved it) and is packed with features for a small to mid-sized shop. In my opinion, it works best with shops and stores that don’t have thousands of products, because it still lacks some of the options for fine tuning and bulk- managing products. Seems like the guys at Ecwid thought more about the actual user experience – all the buttons and text are large and easy to read, the layout of the categories and products is nicely designed and clean-cut, and drag-and-drop AJAX features make it even more esthetically pleasing.

This plugin is free, but also has a premium version for just $17 a month which I never regretted paying, as it does a really good work on our software and service store on bizcloudnetwork.com.

IntenseDebate Comments
Author:  IntenseDebate & Automattic

Engage the users of your site by providing them with a full comment/debate experience, featuring threaded comments, RSS subscription to comments and replies, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations and seamless social networking integration with Facebook and Twitter. On the backend side, it provides a really nifty interface for moderation and every other comment-ralted action you can think of (!)

Widget Logic
Author: Alan Trewartha

Adds one more field to the widgets, which is used for WP conditional tags and determines the conditions under which the widget is displayed (or not). Very simple and ingenious, seems like one of the functionalities that should be included in the future releases of Worpdress.

WPtap NewsPress
Author: WPtap Development Team

This is a plugin/theme used for mobile devices (currently supports iPhone, Android and touch-based BlackBerry devices). It automatically detects if a visitor is using a mobile device to access your site and serves them the mobile theme of your choice.

Very usefull – one-click solution for most of your mobile needs with a lot of customization options.

Secondary HTML Content

Author: Jacob M Goldman (C. Murray Consulting)

Secondary HTML is a very useful tool for adding up to 5 HTML blocks anywhere on your blog. In the backend, the blocks look and function exactly the same as the post editor. After editing the blocks, just add a widget with the desired Secondary HTML blockm and you’re done.

SexyBookmarks
Author: Shareaholic

There’s a vast choice of bookmark/sharing plugins to choose form and I did my fair share of trying (most of) them out. Not until recently I installed SexyBookmarks and I am still very pleased by how it functions. Compared  to other sharing plugins I used, it seems to have the smallest impact on the page loading speed and using up the WP resources. It looks really nice, but could use some more customization options (like changing the default text to a custom one), although I like the taglines like ‘Sharing the wealth’ or ‘Sharing is sexy’. Makes me want to wear an ‘iShare’ T shirt (if I had one).

That’s the end of the lifesaving list. I know that there are a lot more – but these are the cream-of-the-crop in my opinion. Your thoughts?

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