Useful Collection of WordPress Plugins for Bloggers.

To handle a blog these days can be quite difficult if you are not well-organized and you don’t spend enough time managing it. That’s why there are plugins for WordPress. They literally make your job lot easier and if you work well with them you can put them to work for you.

Akismet

Akismet is a perfect spam catcher. Not sure how they do this, but 99% of spam comments will get under I’ve had the problem with Akismet only once actually shortly after installation. For some reason it was recognizing uberVU – social comments (the post mentions on twitter) as spam but once I approved it, the Akismet learned the algorithm and now it’s saving me from hundreds of funky comments. There’s also a cool option to “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month” which means that spam comments for the early posts won’t even be added to the Spam” section of blog comments, they will be deleted automatically.

Google Analytics for WordPress

A simple plugin allowing to add Google Analytics to your blog pages and enjoy a variety of tracking options available at Google Analytics account. Once you upload and activate the plugin go to the Settings section in the main menu and look for Google Analytics. Here’s the place where you can make a Google Analytics WordPress Configuration. All you have to do is enter your Analytics Account ID and click on save. Now you can go to your Google Analytics account and track visitors, traffic sources, search keywords and most popular articles.

FireStats and FireStats Charts

Firestats is without a dub my favorite plugin for gathering statistics about the traffic that comes to my blogs. It has a powerful monetization system so that you can get info about: user country, ip, browser, operating system and many more. Firestats and Firestats Chart can work separately as well, but I recommend you to use both of them in order to get a better idea about the traffic that comes to your site.

Custom Admin Branding

Many people consider this plugin not very useful, but I consider that once with your blog evolution there will be more people to write for you or just more people logging in to your blog and if you are like me you want your own logo to be the one that dominates your creation.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin comes on arena. It allows to show links to related posts at the end of the article, and you can set this relatedness by a number of options, such as keywords in the text, titles, tags, categories etc. You can define the number of links to show and the period of time to check on related articles from your previous posts. You will find related posts section under the main Sections menu of the blog admin area.

SocioFluid

Seeking blog promotion and popularity I had to look for a nice plugin that would allow submission of the article to social networks on the fly. I might have tested around 10 plugins before I found and fall in love with Sociofluid. This plugin adds keen social network icons below the post that get bigger on roll-over. SocioFluid settings can be found under the main Sections menu of the blog admin area. There are 20 bookmarking site you can choose from (including my favorite Twitter, Digg, Facebook and Stumble) and you can also choose from the several icons sizes. You can define whether to display SocioFluid Bar for posts in home page or browse pages, to show it on the top of the page or after the article, whether the icons should open in the new window or not.

Dean’s Permalinks Migration

Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin helped me to stay on board once I decided to update the URLs structure of the links on my blog to more friendly ones. I’m sure all of us do this from time to time having read some cool articles about SEO friendliness or deciding to test this or that option and to test the results. When your articles have been indexed by search engines and there are other websites linking to you, it’s vital not to lose this audience. What Permalinks Migration plugin does is it changes your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website. The settings are quite simple and understandable. Once you have updated the permalinks structure in the General settings section just enter the old permalink structure and the plugin will be automatically sending visitors from the old urls to the new ones.

Banner Plugin

I have tested, Banner Plugin doesn’t have many options like conversion and visitors tracking, multiple campaigns with multiple banners, deducting the cost per click from the deposit etc. But it’s extremely easy to work with, you don’t have to go to the blog code to update a single thing and it’s widgets supported. That means that having uploaded and activated the plugins you just add the pics and the links, save the settings and then simply drag and drop the banner widget into the sidebar. A perfect solution if the simple banner is enough for your needs.

All in One SEO Pack

All in one SEO Pack plugin is meant for advanced blog owners and allows to enhance your blog in terms of search engines friendliness. You may skip this one if you’re not into SEO yet as this one requires some basic SEO knowledge. One of the things that I like is that there’s a direct link to options configuration panel right from the plugins section and you don’t have to dive into the settings and check where they could have been added. All in One SEO Pack allows to set the titles structure of blog pages, use noindex attributes for the sections you’d like to close from the search engines and set meta title and meta description for the blog main page without going into the blog code.

jQuery Image Lazy Loader WP

Lazy Loader is the perfect plugin for those who want to upload lots of images to their blog, but maintain a snappy site. Rather than loading all of the images on a page at once, which can take a considerable amount of time, Lazy Loader loads the images at the top of each page first and continues to load images further down as the user scrolls downwards.

Frontpage-Slideshow

This plugin does exactly what its name suggests: it lets you create a professional slideshow on the front page of your WordPress blog. Each picture is clickable, leading you to its related post, and information about four different slides can be displayed at a time. Transitions between slides are faded to look extra sleek.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN is without question the best WordPress gallery plugin available and you should certainly try it out if you haven’t already. It’s comprehensive, with an easily understandable back-end. The only problem is that everyone’s using it. It does pretty much everything you’d want from a gallery plugin, looks professional and comes with a Flash slideshow option.