PHP memory limit warnings. As a general rule of thumb, most errors with your WordPress blog result from excessive or incompatible plugins. While many find the selection of essential plugins a problem, I believe in testing each plugin one by one with the latest version of WordPress to isolate the problem and determine the cause of the slow load times, call function errors, etc. The most valuable tool I can tell you about plugins is to look for existing code that can accomplish the same result when possible.
Of course, there are certain plugins that I even use in my WordPress Blogs. I’ve compiled a list below of the top 10 plugins that I use daily that I believe will help any tech blog:
* AdSense Now – There are many ad insertion plugins for WordPress, but if your tech blog is using AdSense – this is the plugin I recommend. It allows you to insert your ad blocks aligned left, center, or middle in 3 post sections. It also allows you to suppress ads on pages, category pages, tag pages, archives, and more.
* Audio Player – Inserting MP3 clips or podcasts into your blog can be problematic. Audio Player is a plugin that simplifies this process – create a music folder on your site via FTP and then upload MP3 tracks to the directory. You can insert the built-in audio player into any of your posts or pages with a simple line of code – painless, simple, and easy.
* Facebook Share count – It’s no secret that social networking sites like Facebook are effective ways to create a fanbase, but harnessing that power relies on an easy way to share your great content. Facebook Share count will make it easy for visitors to share your posts and monitor your content.
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While the importance of meta descriptions is debated, I still believe a summary should be written for each post.* Foliopress Descriptions – Once your tech blog has hundreds or even thousands of posts, you will need a way to mass-edit your descriptions. Foliopress Descriptions supports post excerpt, These, and All In One Seo meta description fields.
* Google XML Sitemaps – If you’ve read my previous post on how to get indexed by Google and Yahoo, you know that having a sitemap is essential. This plugin auto-generates your sitemap in a nice and neat XML file and lets’ search engines understand the content on your tech blog. After installing and activating the plugin, Google XML Sitemaps will take care of the rest.
* NextGen Gallery – Managing your images and photo galleries can be a pain, but NextGen Gallery makes this simple. With features like auto-resizing, watermarks, thumbnail creation, and gallery effects, NextGEN Gallery is a must-have plugin.
* Star Rating for Reviews – When you run a tech blog, you will receive products for review sooner or later. Creating a solid review is as much about content as it is about presentation. Star Rating for Reviews allows you to develop ratings for the products you review or even rate different aspects of the development and average the ratings to determine a final score. The possibilities are limitless with the plugin – a must-have for anyone looking to review tech.
* TweetMeme Retweet Button – If you look at the posts on TechBlogStartup, you’ll notice a yellow Retweet button aligned to the right. The power of Twitter is growing by the day, so making it easy for your reader to re-tweet great content can prove very valuable. If you’ve installed Google Analytics, as I explained in my previous post here, you can monitor just how many visitors enter your post through Twitter. If you are wondering why I haven’t included ShareThis, I manually inserted the code instead of using a WordPress Plugin.
* WP Super Cache – If you’ve heard of Digg, then odds are you’ve heard of the Digg Effect, where an article on a website becomes so popular so quickly that the flood of traffic to the website causes the server to crash. Since WordPress blogs are built on SQL Databases, they are highly susceptible to this condition, but installing WP Super Cache can almost eliminate this threat. The plugin makes a cache of your posts and creates a static HTML page to reduce the server load, and your site can handle more visitors. If your tech blog is brand-new, I would install the plugin but not activate it until I start to see spikes in traffic or one of my articles is picked up by a major tech blog like Engadget or Gizmodo.
* All-in-One SEO – Search Engine Optimization is key to driving organic traffic to your tech blog. Writing great content is key, but after creating that content, you need to ensure that it targets keywords and includes some basic optimization to make it search engine-friendly. All-in-One SEO does this job very well. If you are using the WordPress theme I use (Thesis), then you will not need this plugin, but for pretty much every other WordPress theme, I recommend installing it right away so that you can start writing your custom meta descriptions
All the plugins mentioned above can be downloaded manually and then uploaded to your blog via FTP, or you can add them from within your WordPress Dashboard. I prefer the latter. If you wonder why certain plugins are not on my top 10 list, I don’t find them essential to a tech blog. You will notice that I do some things with TechBlogStartup that many people use Plugins or Widgets to do – e.g., the top 6 articles aligned horizontally at the top of the site or the Recent Posts section in the sidebar. For tech blogs that receive a large volume of traffic, limiting the plugins helps reduce the SQL memory load, and if you’ve ever had a website crash, you know just how important this is. Do you have some WordPress plugins on your tech blog that you think we should know about? Drop your list of links to the plugins in the comments section below so we can check them out.
