Fresh

Everybody loves WordPress here at eROI, and over the past year we’ve fully embraced using it not just as a blogging platform, but as a full blown content management system.  But although it has so many great features built-in (and more to come with WordPress 2.7), there are certain plugins we always add on to bump it up to the next level of CMS greatness.  They mostly work in the background, doing all the hard work and not getting much credit.  Our clients may not necessarily notice they are there, but they would probably notice if they weren’t.

There are a few categories of plugins that are essential (or at least extremely beneficial) to any WordPress-as-CMS installation:  SEO, Spam Prevention, Tracking/Analytics, and Feeds.

SEO

WordPress makes it easy to create nice, descriptive, pretty URLs for all your post and pages – all of which can be edited to your liking.  This is an excellent way to optimize for search engines and is easy to set up right out of the box.  But if you want more control over your titles and meta tags, you need a plugin.  And the definitive WordPress SEO plugin is the All-In-One SEO Pack.

Not only does this plugin add a section for customizing meta titles, descriptions and keywords on every individual page and post, it also gives you easy access to format page titles.  Generally I’ve found SEO experts recommend your homepage have the name of the site first, while subpages have the page name first, followed by the site name (for example “About Us |  Our Company Name”).  But what if you want your website name shown first on all pages?  With the All-In-One SEO Pack you can easily change how your titles display across your entire site.  Your page titles are especially important because they will be what users see first when your site pops up in search engine results.

Another important element for SEO is the XML sitemap.  This friendly little file sitting silently in your root directory will give search engines a road map of your site (or “tube map” if you will) so it can find and index everything.  How nice is that?  You can generate an XML sitemap with a sitemap generator, or use the Google XML Sitemap plugin.  After installation and some setup, this plugin does all the grunt work for you.  You have control over which types of pages to include or exclude from the sitemap, and setup how often each of these types of pages are updated.  If you want to learn more about XML sitemaps and why they are important, here is a great resource: XML-sitemaps.com.

Spam Prevention

As soon as you open up your site to feedback and comments you run the risk of being overwhelmed by spam. It happens to every website and it’s a problem that’s not going away anytime soon.  Luckily for us WordPress-junkies there are some excellent anti-spam plugins out there.  Right now the best of the best is WP-SpamFree.  After some extremely painless configuration you will be instantly free of spam.  No CAPTCHA words, no annoying questions to confirm you are a human being (”is fire hot or cold?”) – there is no inconvenience to the legitimate commenter, and no extra work for the site owner.  This plugin just knows spam and knows how to deal with it.  Period.

Tracking/Analytics

Everybody likes looking at charts and graphs.   It’s human nature.  Give me some colored bars and pie charts representing numbers or percentages and I’m happy.  And when websites and graphs collide, that is pure heaven.  And Google Analytics is my hero.  There are other tracking methods out there sure, but they aren’t made by Google and Google owns the world.  And my heart.  OK, enough mushy stuff.

Here’s the best Google Analytics plugin, from yoast.com. What does it do? It puts your Google Analytics code onto every page in your site.  Why do you need a plugin for that when you can just add the code to your footer file?  Well we had that very conversation today in the eROI web development department.  As explained by our own Don Ortega (dondonDON), the cool thing about using this plugin is that it does not add the code if you are logged in as an administrator.    So if you are working on the site and constantly refreshing pages for testing purposes, the tracking results will not be skewed.  Even though it’s fun to see your pageview numbers go up as you troubleshoot a javascript problem, it’s far better to have an accurate, realistic view of how many visitors are coming to the site.

My one issue with Google Analytics is that there isn’t a reliable way to bring those statistics into the WordPress admin area; clients have to go to the Analytics website and login there.  Though this may not be a problem for a lot of people, it would be nice to have a quick overview of page views and top performing pages right inside WordPress.  I had been using the WordPress Reports plugin, which pulls in both Google Analytics and Feedburner stats and displays a set of graphs for the last 7 days of traffic.  Unfortunately this plugin has had problems lately, and has stopped pulling information from Google (although it’s still accessing Feedburner like normal).

As an alternative, I’ll be checking out Automatic’s own WordPress Stats plugin. It looks quick and easy to set up, and the best part: it’s made by the people who make WordPress so hopefully it will never have compatibility issues and stop working after a WordPress upgrade.  I’ll be sticking with this plugin for quick stats until Reports becomes more reliable.

Feeds

You gotta have feeds.  And after you got the feeds, you gotta burn ‘em.  Feedburner allows you to see how many people are subscribed to your feed, and what content they are clicking on.   WordPress makes it easy to create feeds of your content and can auto-generate links to those feeds, but if you want to use Feedburner, you used to have to change all those links manually.   Now you can have your cake and eat it too, with the Feedburner FeedSmith plugin.  Although originally created by Steve Smith of orderedlist.com, development of the plugin has been taken over by Feedburner itself.   With this plugin you can still have WordPress auto-generate your feed links, but associate those links with your Feedburner feeds.  It’s a quick and painless setup, and oh-so worth it.

What did I miss?

I tried to cover the basics here, but there are so many awesome essential plugins out there I’m sure I missed some.  So let’s hear it!  Which plugins would you never launch without?