Best Wordpress Plugins

PC Mag says: WPtouch automatically streamlines your WordPress blog for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Android, and other devices. Paying for the $39 WPTouch Premium gives supports iPhone Retina Display and ad monetization.

PC Mag says: The default username for a WordPress administrator is "admin," which gives potential hackers a head start, should they wish to misbehave. Using this plug-in improves your blog's security by changing the default "admin" administrator's name to something of your choosing. Now, you can sleep a little easier at night.

PC Mag says: The Disqus comments plugin adds a number of cool features to your WordPress-powered blog, but it sometimes throws off the database's comment count. The Web Ninja Comment fixes this by displaying the proper number of comments and social media reactions. This plugin can be easily configured to be set up on a timer of 1 hour, 6 hours, 12 hours, or 24 hours so you don't have to worry about your comment counts ever getting messed up again.

PC Mag says: This useful WordPress plugin automatically places an optional custom paragraph block (handy for affixing author bios, related links, or any number of other items) at the end of every post.

PC Mag says: Comment and trackback spam are an unfortunate price of website success. The more traffic you accumulate, the more likely you are to be inundated by fake comments. Automattic's Akismet checks comments and trackbacks against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam. If the comments and trackbacks are deemed bogus, they're automatically shuffled over to your WordPress installation's spam folder. Clicking Aksimet Stats (located in your Dashboard) shows a breakdown of your spam, missed spam, ham (Akismets term for real comments), and false positives (legit comments and trackbacks mistaken for spam by Akismet that you've since flagged as genuine).

PC Mag says: Widely considered a WordPress essential, Michael Torbert's All in One SEO Pack should be one of the pillars in your search engine optimization efforts. With it, you can give your page an SEO-friendly title (which shows up at the top of a Web browser), homepage description (which appears beneath your URL when people search for it via Google or other engine), and keywords related to your topic. Warning: Be careful with your keyword density. If Google suspects that you're stuffing keyboards or using black-hat SEO techniques, your search engine placement may be penalized.

PC Mag says: The Disqus (pronounced "discuss") plug-in integrates with WordPress' native comment system to allow more interactive Web talk. It features threaded comments and replies, social media mentions, the ability for moderators to approve or reject comments via email, and a load of other useful tools.

PC Mag says: This plugin implements the Dublin Core metadata information standard, which outfits your site with vital data as site title, creation date, language author name, and more.

PC Mag says: Do you want to ensure that Bing, Google, and other search engines recognize and index your videos? Digital Inspiration's Google XML Sitemaps for Videos plugin does just that by generating a sitemap for your YouTube clips that have been embedded within blog posts.

PC Mag says: JetPack is an official WordPress.com plug-in that gives your self-hosted WordPress blog a truckload of extra features. The plug-in serves up visitor stats, social media sharing options, and After The Deadline, a grammar and spell checker.

PC Mag says: nRelate is designed to drive eyeballs deeper into your site by displaying related content as either thumbnails, text, or both. You can also set it up to display related content from sites in your blog roll if you want to spread the traffic love.

PC Mag says: Social Author Bio acts a mini online resume. It display an article's author bio, total number of posts Gravitar photo, and links to social networks such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and more.

PC Mag says: SEO Friendly Images, designed by Vladimir Prelovac, is a WordPress optimization plug-in that updates your uploaded images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. The ALT attribute is considered an important part of SEO as it provides an image description to search engines, and helps create a match when someone keys in a search query. The TITLE attribute plays lesser role; the text associated with this attribute appears when a visitor mouses over an image.

PC Mag says: Vladmir Prelovac's other must-have plug-in lets WordPress automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your site. After installing the plug-in, you simply open its configuration option and enter the keywords you use the most often and the links that you'd like to associate to them. So, for example, if you want to link the word "cat" to "cat.com," the plug-in can do this automatically. SEO Smart Links lets you determine how frequently a single keyword or phrase is linked within a single post so that you don't end up with link overload.

PC Mag says: Want to add a forum to your WordPress setup? Simple Press lets you do just that. But don't think that it's not full-featured; you can customize the forum with skins, create sub-forums, grant user rankings based on post numbers, and more.

PC Mag says: Simple Pull Quote is the perfect addition for highlighting text of interest. You simply place text between the auto-generated tags and your blog will display the text on the front-end with enlarged text and quotation marks.

PC Mag says: A little courtesy goes a long way. Thank Me Later automatically sends a customizable "thank you" email to people who have commented on your blog. The plug-in lets you set the time when the email is sent, create multiple messages, and tinker with restriction settings.

PC Mag says: Google Analytics is the favorite site-analytics tool of many webmasters due to its meticulously detailed graphs, charts, and traffic numbers—it's also free! Wilfred van der Deijl's Ultimate Google Analytics plug-in adds JavaScript to each page (without making any changes to your template) so that you can track outbound links, downloads from your own site, mailto: links, and more without requiring you to install the code manually. Simply sign into your Google Anaytics account to see your traffic data. The only downside? Google Analytics doesn't supply real-time traffic numbers.

PC Mag says: If you're tired of copying and pasting HTML into your site's backend when you want to embed video, this plug-in can simplify the process. After you install Viper007Bond's plug-in, icons representing your favorite online video respositories (YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and more) appear above the main content area. Clicking one of them lets you enter the video's URL and dimensions. Clicking "Okay" inserts the video (centered) into the blog. It's just that easy.

PC Mag says: Protect your WordPress blog from sudden, huge traffic spikes, and pokey system performance with W3 Total Cache. This plug-in works by caching browser, page, and object data, as well as compressing databases. It also speeds load times by delivering fresh blog data only as needed.

PC Mag says: This is one of the few plug-ins that actually requires the use of another plug-in—WordPress.com Stats. But once both are installed, Frasten's WordPress.com Popular Posts can work its magic by displaying your site's most popular posts and pages over the course of a user-selected number of days. You can exclude select posts and pages, show excerpts (when applicable), and select the number of posts to be shown.

PC Mag says: Consider this the ultimate WordPress safety net for when disaster strikes. This sanity-saver backs up all of your files to either your server, desktop, or inbox once you select the frequency (hourly, twice daily, once daily, or weekly). The speed with which your file is restored depends on the amount of content that's been backed up (it once took me two hours to restore my personal site, 2D-X after a mishap), but I was more than happy to wait, given the alternative. You shouldn't go without Matzko's excellent plug-in.

PC Mag says: Thaya Kareeson's plug-in is all about welcoming new visitors and building loyalty. It displays a user-defined greeting to fresh readers depending on the referrer URL. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they might see a pop-up that asks them to digg your post. For new visitors who don't come from any matching URLs, you could set a message that suggests that they subscribe to your RSS feed.

Creates a floating sidebar with sharing options.

The Slide recommends related posts from within your site on a widget that "slides" in at the bottom of the page. The team at SimpleReach says that on average, they see a 3-4% click through rate on the suggested post presented through the slide.