The Truth About WordPress Plugins

One of the questions I received was, What WordPress plugins should I install, and how should I configure them?

Excellent question, thanks. The answer may surprise you:

Plugins are not that important. If you are looking for the magic plugin that will suddenly make you rich, you are wasting your time. I see this a lot where people get hung up in the little details like finding the perfect plugins, and they don’t spend time on the important things.

If you are just starting your blog, the most important thing is your content. Keep creating great posts. If your blog is informational, make your posts very informative and helpful. If your blog is mostly for entertainment, then work on getting a lot of entertaining and fun posts.

The more great content you have, the better. This will help in two ways:

1. Your visitors will see that you have a lot of great content, and that you update regularly, so they will come back again. They may even sign up for your RSS feed or your newsletter.
2. The search engines will have more content to index, so you will have more of a chance of showing up when people search for information in your subject area.

Once you have enough content, keep writing posts, but now you can also concentrate on gettting traffic to your blog. Traffic does not do you much good if you don’t have good content.

I will be discussing both of these topics, content and traffic, in future posts.

Now, back to the subject of plugins.

Plugins are a tool to do a specific thing. They are good if you have a need for them, and you can search for them at that time. Don’t spend a lot of time worrying about this in the beginning.

I am a big fan of the K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid ). I attribute a lot of my success to this principle.

With that said, here are the WordPress plugins that I use:

Akismet: This plugin comes already installed with WordPress if you use the one-click install at DreamHost. This plugin will filter out spam comments. It is very helpful if you have comments turned on. It does catch a lot of them. Some still slip by, so you do still have to moderate your comments. I use this on the few blogs I have that have comments enabled.

WP-Cache: This plugin also comes pre-installed with the DreamHost install, and they encourage you to use it. Otherwise I would not have heard of this one. I do use this. Normally, WordPress has to create each page each time a person visits. Your posts are stored in a database, and they are retrieved from the database to show to the visitor. With WP-Cache, once the first visitor has viewed a page on your blog, it stores that page in a cache. Then when the next visitor requests that page, it is already built and ready in the cache. This saves a lot of time, especially if you get a lot of visitors at once, say if you get dugg or slashdotted, etc.

You can set a time on this plugin, say 60 minutes. This means that it will check for changes every 60 minutes. Until the 60 minutes are up, it will just use the page it has already built and stored in the cache.

The one thing to remember about this plugin is that you should turn it off if you are making changes to your blog such as tweaking your template. I have already made a change to my template and then refreshed a page to see the changes, and wondered why they didn’t show up! (Oops, I forgot to turn off WP-Cache.) When I am done making changes, I turn it on again.

WP-Contact Form: This plugin can be found at http://ryanduff.net/projects/wp-contactform/. (As I am writing, the site seems to be down. Hopefully it will be back soon.) You can see this in action on my About page. It creates a contact form that people can use to send you messages through email, without them knowing your email address.

I used to post my email address on my blogs, but I soon found out that was a mistake, as I got tons of spam. There are automated bots that comb the internet for email addresses, so anytime you post your email address, you will get a lot of spam. This plugin eliminates all that. I highly recommend it.

And that’s it. Those are all the plugins I use at this time. As I said, I like to K.I.S.S. If I see a need for another plugin in the future, I will go looking for it then.

I have heard a lot of good things about the Adsense plugin, that helps you to put Adsense on your blog. I have never used it. I will research it before creating my course on monetizing your blog, so if I find out something useful, I will let you know. Right now, I insert my Adsense code manually and find it very easy to do. I will definitely cover that in the monetization course.

How do I install and configure the plugins? It is pretty easy to do, and I will cover that in my Beginning Blogging course. It is easier to show in a video than to talk about.

I hope this answer was helpful. Keep sending in your questions!

- Pat Doyle