Use The Right Plugins For Your Blog

If you use WordPress you will inevitably look at extending it with a few, or a lot of, Plugins, and there is certainly no shortage of those on the web. Since starting up one of my own WordPress plugins, an auction widget, I’ve come to highly appreciate the work that all plugin developers put into their products.

Some plugins are pretty much mandatory like Akismet and the Feedburner plugin. As your blogging increases you soon realize that you would like to add more, especially since it’s so easy to do so. Upload, activate and personalize - who can argue with that.

I’m pretty plugged myself, I started with just Akismet and then went up from there. I’ve also deactivated quite some plugins from my blog as frankly they ended up taking space and being of no benefit. So how do you exactly figure out which plugins you should use and which ones to avoid? No matter how strong the urge. Here’s a short checklist that could help you out.

Checklist: Use The Right Plugins For Your Blog

1. Do You Really, Really Need It - Most of the time you will not ask yourself this, but you should seriously do so - at least twice. Don’t get bought into if it’s being offered for free. It was nice in 2006 to have your blog with the latest widgets, but today the name of the game is to have your blog load as fast as possible. Sending multiple server plugin requests will just slow it down. Do you still need that plugin?

2. Is It Compatible With Your Version of WordPress - Let’s face it, not everyone likes to update their WP install as much as Matt Mullenweg would like us to. Before you decide to download the plugin check from the developers notes if it’s compatible with the version of WordPress you are running.

3. Does The Plugin Compliment Your Blog - Many a times a plugin will have a feature that you need yet it somehow does not fit in with the natural scheme of things. For instance, I’ve used AdSense Deluxe on this blog before but it didn’t give me the flexibility that the WhyDoWork plugin does. So I ended up using that instead. Both plugins fill the need, but the WhyDoWork one compliments my blogs needs better.

4. Use Plugins To Offer A Better Experience - Your ultimate blogging goal should be to offer a relaxed reading atmosphere. Any serious user of WordPress will tell you that you need to do quite some tweaking to get your blog at that level. Using plugins can help get you there faster. Plugins like Share This and Related Posts will help your blog become more social and keep readers around longer. Remember, people like to click on the web so give them as many opportunities as possible within your blog. Hopefully keeping them on your blog longer.

5. Automation - If you are blogging then you are also exploring the opportunity at making some money on the side. Plugins like OIO Publisher can help you automate this process, once you’ve set it up to do so. Also, technically this is not an exclusive WordPress plugin, but ScribeFire is a great way to blog faster and efficiently. The less time you spend thinking about how to get things done, the more time you can spend on blogging. Always keep that in mind when looking at installing a new plugin.

6. Will The Plugin Help You Do A Task Better - Everyone needs help with something, at some point of time. So ask yourself, Is this specific plugin going to help me get this task done better? You may need the All In One SEO plugin to better optimize your blog for search engines, the Google Sitemaps Plugin can help in a better indexed blog and the Photo Dropper plugin will help you in getting creative commons images for your blog posts without leaving your admin area. These are all tasks that if you decided to do by yourself would cost time and money.

In conclusion, using WordPress plugins to enhance your blog is probably the most wise thing that you can do for it. Just make sure you end up using the right ones.

Speaking of which, please raise your hand if you use the “Hello Dolly” plugin that WordPress includes by default. If you do, then please drop your URL in the comments as I’ve never seen it in use anywhere…at all!

Also Read -

Top 16 WordPress Plugins

Make Money With Your Blog

photo credit: Matt From London