When it comes to blogging (much like any form of social media) there really is no ‘silver bullet’, but these three plugins will instantly create a better experience for your readers. Which is always a good thing.
1 – Comment Redirect. Easily the best plugin I have ever added here. What this plugin does is when someone leaves a comment for the first time here, it redirects them to a page of your choosing. For me, it sends first-time commenters here to this page and thanks them for commenting! You can read the comments for yourself to see what everyone thinks about the idea.
2 – WPTouch. This is a plugin that I wish I had added at least a year ago. It makes a mobile-friendly version of your blog! From a useability standpoint it makes a night and day difference when viewed on a smartphone. Here’s a recent review I did of the plugin with before and after screenshots. Anyone viewing your blog on an iPhone will LOVE you for adding this! Now there is a caveat that a few people said the plugin didn’t play nicely with their particular theme, so check the comments in that post for more information on that.
3 – Popular Posts. This creates links to your most popular posts for the life of the blog, and parks them in a widget on your sidebar. Several times, this one plugin has sent me a flood of traffic as a major site will pick up one of the posts from the sidebar under Popular Posts (look to the far right sidebar and you’ll see it). It’s a great way to pull out some of those classic posts you wrote 2-3 years ago and have forgotten about.
So there’s three plugins that you can quickly add and immediately improve the experience on your blog for your readers, especially #1 and #2.
Which plugin are you using to create an amazing experience for your readers? What would you add to this list?
The free PlugIn “Anti-Spam” has reduced spam from all of the sites I manage from approximately 500 daily to less than 10!
Also, for translation, the folks behind “Ajax Translator Revolution” have created an excellent product and even better support! It is well worth the $20! (http://codecanyon.net/user/SurStudio)
Thank you so much for this informative post. I’m loving the WPTouch plugin right now!
Very helpful. Thanks for the ideas.
I’m a huge fan of the Gravity Forms plugin. Although it’s a premium plugin, it makes forms powerful and easy to set up. I love that you can create a form for people to submit guest posts and when they submit the form, it automatically creates the post in WordPress for you.
I also can’t speak highly enough of having a powerful caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Both of those are pretty awesome.
And, if you’re into SEO, or aren’t but want to be better at it, I totally recommend the SEO plugin by Yoast. It’s pretty amazing.
You mentioned the popular posts plugin and I had to chuckle. The popular posts plugin that I had been using was taken offline and the update that the developer posted to the plugin repository effectively deleted it’s entire functionality. When I clicked the update button, the plugin basically just disappeared. So I ended up programming my own into my theme.