5 WordPress (P)lugins That Will Rock Your Blog

Wordpress Plugins

One of the most awesome things about WordPress is the vibrant user community and large database of plugins to choose from, thus expanding the functionality of WordPress sites. Here are 5 of the ones that we think – will help your blog dominate the interwebzzz … or maybe just help your blog not blow up.

cbnet Different Posts Per Page

For this blog, we wanted to show 6 posts on the front page. But when you go to the category archives page, 6 is just too few to show – we wanted to show you 10. But we needed a plugin for that.

The cbnet plugin will allow you to customize the number of posts, order by, and order parameters for all index page contexts, including the blog posts, search index, and all archive indexes. It solves a problem you didn’t even know you had!

WP Author Bio

WP Author Bio is a WordPress author bio plugin that supports single and multiple authors, by showing an author box below posts for each author. It can also configure the social media links for each author. Girlxoxo is configured with author bios for each of us, Tanya, Kim and another one for “Kim and Tanya” when we collaborate on a post.

Author bio

Top 10 Popular Posts Plugin

To show the popular posts on the sidebar, we’re using the Top 10 Popular Posts Plugin.  This will count the number of page views of your posts, pages and any custom post types. You can then display the page view counts as well as display your most popular posts – you specify the time period and the number of posts. We have it set to show the 5 most popular posts over the last 30 days.

Jetpack

For hosting Girlxoxo.com, we use Dreamhost – specifically the Dreampress package that comes with the Jetpack premium plugin (+ Vaultpress for backing up your site on a regular). But even the free version of Jetpack is worth it – for site stats and analytics, automatic sharing on various social media sites, related posts at the bottom of your blog entries, free brute force attack protection 🔐 … and more.

Super Emoji Plus+

The Super Emoji Plus+ plugin puts an “insert emoji” button in your post content editor, giving you a huge selection of emojis to choose from and insert in your blog post 👋. This is a recent addition, so we’re still playing around with it.


Are you using any of these plugins on your blog? Or are you using a different blogging platform?

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// Comments //

  1. I’ve been toying with adding Popular Posts to my sidebar…now I know how to do it when I’m ready – thank you!