A popular topic from so many publications, the top 10 WordPress plugins you must have, or top social media plugins for your blog. Eagerly you click to it and for a couple of plugins that sound very promising, only to find out "warning this plugin has not be updated in over two years." Yikes – how did that make the cut?
I’m not going to bother you with repetition but hopefully one or two may help you maintain your WordPress site and better yet, make your life easier! We like easy!
Social Media
Flare – Easy Social Media Sharing and Following
Wow, impressive plugin. For a while now I’ve been frustrated with the lack of updates to share plugins, and my latest one, Digg Digg floating share bar, is becoming unrealiable. Checkout Flare.
After two weeks of searching, I found Flare! Super simple social media sharing and follow icons – it looks good and (drum roll please) is up to date! Additionally, hat tip to Kathy Colaiacovo for educating me on this, has the all-important Tweet via your name. So when users share to Twitter, Flare allows you to preset this to include your Twitter name. Check my blog posts and see it in action.
Facebook Like Box – directly from Facebook
Yup – no plugin – just paste in the code. The others mostly imitate Facebook and add to your list of stuff you have to update. You can catch my blog post on how you can easily do this yourself. It’s mostly a copy and paste process – no coding needed!
Sidebar Goodies
Display Widgets
Adds checkboxes to each widget on the widget dashboard so you can hide or show a widget by page. Very nice feature – after all, not all widgets need to be on every page. Great feature. Checkout Display Widgets.
Testimonials Widget
Have you wanted to have rotating testimonials? This one is the gold standard without needing code. Checkout Testimonials Widget.
Security/Maintenance
Better Plugin Compatibility Control
Is your plugin up to date? If you update WordPress will your plugins keep working? It’s time consuming to research each plugin (one of many reasons not to go overboard loading up on plugins; go lean). This one is a gem. Activate this one and it will display in your plugins dashboard the version of WordPress it is compatible with! Those in red are out of date. Checkout Better Plugin Compatibility Control.
Email Address Encoder
Very handy! Unfortunately, if you have your email address as text in your website – it gets picked up by spambots. Gmail and other services might be good at filtering spam but who wants to further clog the Internet and worse, rising costs to fight it. Checkout Email Address Encoder.
Don’t Get Hacked – Stay On Top of Updates
You probably know someone who has had their site hacked, or worse, you experienced it firsthand. Your best defense is to stay on top of WordPress and plugin updates; use a strong password, quality web hosting and security monitoring.
If that sounds overwhelming, we now have a security maintenance package.
Ooh, I love these! I’m going to have to check some of them out on my blog. By the way, have you checked out the Send to Kindle plug-in?
Hi Kimberly,
Thanks for stopping by. No, haven’t explored that one yet but thank you for pointing that out. Checking it out now!
Love to know what you think of Flare, so much nicer than Digg Digg share bar.
Nancy
Thanks for the info.Made my choice easier