5 WordPress Plugins That Have Saved My Life

Although there are hundreds of WordPress plugins in existence there are 5 in particular that should be installed by default. These 5 plugins have literally saved my sanity. Automation is never a bad thing, is it?

Google Sitemap Generator

This is the single best plugin I have come across. Google Sitemaps is an excellent service introduced by, of course, Google back in 2005. Instead of the search engine trying find your pages you can tell it where your pages are. Before I used it only half or so of my pages were included in Google’s database, and now nearly 95% are. It’s not 100% but it’s still pretty darn good.

The plugin will automatically generate a compressed XML sitemap for your WordPress blog and it will automatically ping the service when you update your blog. Usually Google will download your sitemap every 24 hours or so, but when you ping it then it will usually download it within a couple minutes. Because of this the GoogleBot will be informed your page exists now (instead of 24 hours from now), and your page could be indexed in hours, not days. A must-have for any SEO addict.

Spam Karma

Before using this plugin I had to manually clean out nearly 20 comment spams per day (I previously used a different anti-spam plugin but it was horrible). However, thanks to ProBlogger I found out about this wonderful gem and installed it right away. Guess what? No more Viagra spam :).

What makes Spam Karma so unique is that, in my own experience, it has a very low false-positive rate when compared to some other plugins I have used. In the first few weeks of having it installed it has caught over 280 spam comments and only 1 of them was a false-positive. Simply amazing.

The plugin lets you control every aspect of how it decides whether a comment is spam or not, such as the number of links it contains and whether or not newer users should be watched closely. You can set the strength of each filter at different levels ranging from weak to super-strong, or you can disable the filter all together.

An excellent plugin for those who suffer from horrible comment spam.

WordPress-DB-Backup

WordPress-DB-Backup does one thing but it does it very well - it allows you to easily backup your WordPress database. The plugin is very simple and straightforward. It lets you save a compressed database backup to your server, to your computer, or you can email it to yourself. If you have plugins installed that create extra tables you can choose to backup those tables as well (the core WordPress tables are always backed up).

Database backups should be done at least once per week. If you hardly ever back it up and some terrorist hacker decides to hijack your blog, then well… You can guess the rest.

Feedburner Plugin

Feedburner is a powerful site feed analysis tool. If you have not yet set up a Feedburner account for your blog then you should.

The Feedburner Plugin is a little something that someone whipped up to let you automatically point all your subscribers to your feedburner feed. This is much easier than having to go through your theme and manually change the HTML around. The setup is simple, just enter your feedburner feed and boom. Done. You can even set it up for comment feeds too.

SimpleTags

And last but not least is SimpleTags. SimpleTags makes it easier than ever to insert Technorati tags at the end of your posts. Once activated all you have to do is put [ tag ] and [ /tag ] (without the spaces) before and after a keyword that you want to use as a tag. SimpleTags will go in, get the word, and then insert the tag at the end of your post.

Some helpful links

This list is very small compared to the number of plugins available. Here are some more links that list even more cool plugins:

• ProBlogger - WordPress Plugins for ProBloggers
• Weblog Tools Collection - WordPress Plugins
• John Chow - My Top 10 Best WordPress Plugins
• John TP - WordPress Plugins

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