WebCoder

Improve Your Wordpress with Plugins

WordPress (WP) is great as is, but did you know that you could improve it? Plugins add more to the functionality to your blog. The official plugin directory has a lot, but I will focus on my favorites.

All In One SEO Pack

Blogs are useless unless they have some readers. If you write articles, you should try to optimize them for search engines. This extension has many options, such as changing the home page title and description and changing the format of the titles of various pages.

Google Syntax Highlighter

If you run a coding blog, you need a plugin like this. This one uses JavaScript to highlight code in many different languages. You can see it in use on this site.

NextGEN Gallery

This is a plugin for you artists/photographers. It displays a gallery of images on a page you specify, and contains many admin features such as uploading from a zip file, albums, and roles, so people other than the main admin can modify the gallery.

ShareThis

Social media sites are among the best ways to get a lot of traffic (assuming your server can handle it!). This plugin adds a button to the bottom of each post. Click it, and the users can submit the post to sites like Digg or StumbleUpon, email it, or post it on their own blogs.

WP-SpamFree

Spam is very annoying for blog owners. It adds lots of junk to the moderation queue, and spams your inbox if you have notifications enabled. This extension uses multiple tests to verify that the commenter is human, and does not require an account on another website.

And now you know 5 more methods of making your blog better. Happy blogging!