In a prior post we saw 5 wordpress plugins which you should always install. If you have missed that article then you can read it here.
In a follow-up post we will discuss some more WordPress plugins. Today’s plugin will be those which I and many other WordPress authors use to enhance the visibility and performance of our site.
WP Super Cache
I am in love with this particular plugin as it has helped me a lot in my WordPress development.
All webmasters know that the site response time is an essential part of your Website SEO as well as site statistics. Studies say that most visitors don’t like to wait for more than 10 sec while the site keeps loading. This is one of the main reason behind scrapped articles which results in higher Bounce rates.
WP Super Cache helps you reduce the site load time by serving your site from cache to the visitor. This plugin serves your dynamic site as a static HTML website to the visitor. Thereby reducing the load time significantly. It also has an compress pages option which compresses your JS, Images and other scripts and html adding to the site reduction.
Following are recommended settings in the plugin
- PHP caching.
- Compress pages.
- Don’t cache pages for known users.
- Cache rebuild.
- CDN support.
- Extra homepage checks.
This plugin helped me achieve a Pagespeed of 87 from 81 which is at significantly higher side of the marking being a WordPress news/articles website.
WassUp Real Time Analytics
Wassup is my personal favorite Analysis plugin and I’ve been using this plugin for the past 2 years. Wassup provides almost realtime analysis of the visitors. This plugin comes with a dashboard widget giving an idea of the traffic and online visitors.
When we visit the plugin settings page it provides much more in-depth details of the visits. It provides
- IP
- Pages visited
- Type of visitor (Spam, Spider, Bot, Human etc.) and much more info.
My personal experience shows that the plugin provides almost same statistics as the Google analytics just this is a compact version and worth a try.
Adminimize
This particular plugin is most helpful when there are more than one contributors to the site or you are developing a website in which you required to display only certain menus to the user as they may not require most of the menu.
Now WordPress does offer some default role based accesses, however, I have noticed that more often than not these roles are not completely usable.
Above image is sufficient to give you a hint at what this plugin is capable in doing.
Enable Media Replace
This is a real helpful plugin. Most developers have a habit of uploading new content on the site when any wrong media files are uploaded. But mostly they forget to delete old incorrect files. Enable media replace helps in such situation.
When installed and activated this plugin puts a Upload new File button in the media file .
This can be found in Media →Media File Name
In this it allows to replace the media file with the new one and also it replaces all the references of the old file in complete site with the newer file.
NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster{SNAP}
SNAP is a very helpful plugin for connecting all the social media to the wordpress blog. All the SMO’s out there love such plugins as these reduce their efforts.
WebMaster have to just write the article. SNAP will automatically post the said article to all the connected and configured social media accounts.
Following is the networks supported by the plugin
| Blogger/Blogspot | Delicious. |
| Diigo | |
| FriendFeed | Instapaper |
| Google+ (with third party API library) | |
| LiveJournal | Pinterest (with third party API library) |
| Stumbleupon | Tumblr |
| Plurk | |
| vBulletin | vKontakte(VK.com) |
| WordPress | YouTube |
Free version of the site allows adding only a single account of all above mentioned social sites.