Alex Pooley's Blog

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This will be the last post in my series of posts on Wordpress plugins. I’ve lumped my final three plugins together as they are either pretty straight forward to understand, or they are just not as important as the other plugins I’ve spoken about. You can find a reference to the other Wordpress plugin posts that I’ve made at the end of this article.

Akismet
Akismet is a free plugin to stop comment and pingback spam. This plugin uses a central database to store known spam so it knows what to trash. If you are unfortunate enough to receive new spam, you can mark the comment or pingback as spam and all users of the Akismet plugin will benefit from your effort. You will need to grab a Wordpress.com API key before you can use the plugin. I’ve only recently installed Akismet but I’ve read posts from many happy bloggers.

Find out more at the Akismet web site.

Google Sitemaps
Sitemaps help Google crawl your blog so it can ultimately find better search results for it’s users. This plugin will automatically create and update a sitemap to Google’s own sitemap specification. The Google Sitemaps plugin will also ping Google to signal that the sitemap has changed after you post new content.

Download the Google Sitemaps Plugin

Contact Form
This is one of those plugins that you expect to be core functionality. It’s a nice straight forward contact form. Just whack in some markup in whatever page you want a contact form to appear and that’s it! It was so easy to add a contact form that I added a form to both my about page, and my contact page.

Grab the contact form plugin from Ryan Duff.

WP-Cache
Give your users the ultimate in performance and cache your pages with wp-cache! Without this plugin, Wordpress re-creates the page from code every time someone requests a page on your blog. By caching the pages automatically, you can reduce the time taken for pages to load, and you can avoid database, network, and server overheads.

Optimize your blog and download wp-cache.

That’s it for my favorite wordpress plugins series. I hope it was of some value to you. Please feel free to contact me if your interested on any of the other plugins running on this blog.

Update: I just wrote a post about how to make money from your blog. Check it out!