WP Spam Free

WP-SpamFree is the worlds greatest (in my opinion) anti-spam plugin for Wordpress.  No signups or registrations, no captcha forms, no configuration, and works with most comment forms and contact forms that I’ve ever used.  Prevents trackback spam, comment spam, and contact form spam.  Just install and you’re done.  The nifty little widget on the admin dashboard even tracks how many spam messages were blocked by the software.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a nice little plugin that helps speed up a site by caching pages, and making it act just like a static page.  Speed is a major factor to visitors of your site.  If the site loads slow, they may not ever return – no matter how good your message is.  This plugin does require a bit of setup, but makes you look like a star in the end for developing such a fast site.

DB Backup

Stuff Happens! (Or something like that).  The point is, always be prepared for the worst. Database backups that can be emailed to you  on a daily basis are a lifeline when your hosting companies machines suddenly fall ill.  Yes, it happens, but it doesn’t have to be the end.  This is always a major comfort to clients knowing that a backup is only an email away.

Google Sitemap Generator

Sitemaps are collection of all your posts and pages rolled up into one really nice XML file that Google, and the other major search engines recognize, and even look for, to help put your site into the search engines.  The really great thing is that after every post, your site will have a brand new sitemap file created, and will notify the major search engines that your sitemap file has been updated.  Hows that for convenient?

CFormsII

Contact forms are essential to a Wordpress blog or website.  I chose CForms II, not because of it’s simplicity, but because of it’s advanced layout and design.  There is a bit of legwork involved in setting up a new form,  but since I’m the admin of the blog, I never worry about it for clients.  But if you’re thinking of setting up a CForms II contact form, it’s a bit clunky at first, but the CSS styling & designs make it completely worth it.

Forms can be set to auto-respond a message to the form reader, a captcha form can be included (but if you use the WP SpamFree plugin, you won’t need it),  you can use it for your comment forms, you can install a Tell-A-Friend, and many other features.  The help page is extensive, and there is an active forum that CFormsII hosts as well for support.

HeadSpace2

There are only 2 real contenders in the Wordpress SEO plugin category, and I always use HeadSpace2 because of it’s ease of use, and expanded functionality.  Making Titles and Meta information unique and relevant is swift and painless with this little plugin.

StatPress SEOlution

Everyone likes stats, and real time complete stats are even better.  StatPress SEOlution is a branch of the original StatPress plugin, but includes some extra information and charts that the original didn’t have.  At a glance a client can determine how many visitors they’ve had, page views, spiders, referrers and what search terms are being used to find their site.

I also recommend clients have a Google Analytics account if they are serious about stats/tracking, but most have found that this plugin gives them all the information they need.  It also is one less username and password to remember, which is a big bonus for many as well.

WP Security Scan

In todays world, you can never be too secure.  In the online world, it’s not a matter of “If” it’s a matter of “When” your site will get hacked.  This plugin makes sure that your site is up to snuff to beat back a majority of the hacking attempts that will happen.  Things like file permissions, Wordpress version and more.  And remember, from a security standpoint, use the latest version of Wordpress.  Often times the updates are security enhancements that hackers have found and are exploiting.  Not upgrading leaves your site easy to compromise.

TinyMCE Advanced

This neat little plugin makes Post and Page writing in Wordpress a breeze.  If you understand the MS Word interface (or similar WYSIWYG ), then this will make creating pages/posts more intuitive than what the default visual editor can give you.

All of these plugins can be found on the Wordpress Plugins page, with the exception of CFormsII, which prefers to leave it’s plugin on it’s own site.

There are many other plugins that can be installed, but I consider these to be the core plugins that every client gets because of the versatility,functionality and value that each one of them provides clients.

HeadSpace2 is simple to use, and provides a reliable mechanism to change meta data on a per group basis, or on a finer grained per-post basis.

Titles of a page are about as important as important gets in SEO, so making sure that each page has the right title is important, but sometimes one doesn’t have the time to create a title every time, so a generic backup title is in order, and HeadSpace delivers beautifully.

You can set defaults for the following groups of Wordpress writings:

• Global (default if nothing else fits)
• Homepage
• Posts
• Pages
• Categories
• 404 (not found)
• Search Pages
• Tags
• Archives
• Authors

And besides title tags, HeadSpace2 allows one to modify data for:

• Tags/Keywords
• Titles
• Description
• Site Name
• Site Description
• Custom ‘More Text’
• Noindex & Nofollow Tags
• Robots.txt
• Custom Themes
• Custom Plugins
• And More!

There is also the ability to use some advanced features like Google Analytics, though I’ve never used any of the advanced solutions.

For the most part, I just use the defaults in case I forget to set a title tag and description, and use the text boxes inside of each page and post that reminds me that I need to add the proper title tags to each page and post.

HeadSpace2 gets two thumbs up from me, as I’ve found it easy to install, and use.   And having used it for more than a year, I’ve seen the plugin continue to be supported by the author, which is another huge bonus to have plugins continue to be supported by the author.  If you have a chance to, I highly recommend that you stop by the  HeadSpace2 site, and drop a few dollars his way to let him know you find his plugin useful as well.