5 WordPress Plugins to Activate Your Blog

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5 WordPress Plugins for Basic Blogging

WordPress plugins let beginners who can’t/won’t code a way to break through the technical brick wall preventing amateurs from building and improving blogs.

This article began when I was green and has been updated with my experiences.

1. WordPress Popular Posts Shows what the world likes most on your blog

Forget what you think is good.  Visitors will tell you.  This WordPress Plugin lets you set what “popular” means– whether it’s page views or comments — and shows popular posts in a Widget you place anywhere.

2. EZPZ One Click Backup Adventure with a safety net!

An early computer game had a robot sidekick who piped up every time you saved the game and said, “Oh goody are we going to do something dangerous?”  If you like to experiment with your bog (and who doesn’t?) back it up before you get nuts.  Note:  When using WordPress’ auto upgrade it is necessary to deactivate then reactivate EZPZ One Click Backup.  Postscript:  I couldn’t make EZPZ work.  Now using WP Tools Backup but looking for something truly EZ.  Comments welcome.

3. TinyMCE Advanced Old fashioned keyboard functions

Being an old-school typer, I enjoy being able to put in “carriage returns” as I write. See the post on TinyMCE Advanced.

4. HeadSpace2 Writing for Web Crawlers

The HeadSpace 2 blurb says it well, “Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.”  Lots of blank spaces to fool with and hope to generate web traffic.  Does it work?  Ask me in a few months.

Postscript:  Headspace2 is terrific but WordPress SEO by Yoast is scary powerful

5. W3 Total Cache An outboard motor for your bathtub duck

For your own peace of mind, back up your blog before attaching this amazingly powerful Plugin.  Some very weird stuff happened to me, but I checked loading performance before and after, and it works.  The part that didn’t work for me was “Content Delivery Network support via self-hosted / file transfer protocol upload.”  Still, the other parts improved performance.  Update:  This actually isn’t working that well — turning off minify seems to return the Theme settings.  Try WP SuperCache, which has been performing perfectly.  Here’s an article and detailed discussion on WP SuperCache versus W3 Total Cache.

Find any of these in the WordPress plugins by searching on Add New Plugins in your WP menu.

Detailed beginner instructions on how to use WordPress plugins