3 WordPress Plugins You’d Be Crazy Not To Use

There’s hundreds of plugins out there to increase the functionality of WordPress. Some of them are must-haves for any WordPress site, others are site-specific and cover functions that I need on that site but wouldn’t incorporate into all my website designs. There are a few plugins which just make life easier for anyone using WordPress though. They do the little things that remove some of the annoyances and frustrations of running a WordPress site.

Insights

Interlinking your own blog posts is really useful, not just for SEO purposes but because you’ll probably blog about the same kind of thing a lot. It’s a pain to link those posts though, because you have to find the relevant post, copy the URL and then go back to your editing window to add it to your text. It used to drive me crazy. Insights fixed it though, because it let me search my own blog directly from the post editor, so I can quickly find my other posts and insert links.

Insights does a bunch more as well. It’s like adding a great dedicated search bar to your WordPress admin section. While you’re writing a post you can find internal links, pictures, books, news, Wikipedia articles, or just search Google. Then you can just as quickly use the plugin to add links and images to your text. It’s absolutely invaluable.

pageMash

Take a look at the WordPress codex. There’s a lot of advice on how to tweak your template code to call or exclude specific pages from menus, how to administer sub-pages, etc. Good advice, but it’s all about coding and it’s not the most user friendly of options. pageMash renders a lot of the advice redundant by letting you do all this page administration from within your WordPress admin section.

Really simple. Install the plugin, and you can drag and drop your pages into the order you want (great for overriding the default order that WordPress places on pages). You can hide pages from the main menu, quickly see page IDs, and generally just create the page structure you want in a user friendly graphical interface.

Advanced Excerpt

Excerpts are really handy in WordPress. They’re great for listing search results or archival material, linking to posts from a front page, etc. They’re also not very flexible. The standard WordPress excerpt is a set number of characters, it strips HTML tags, and it uses carriage returns instead of the paragraph tag. We could really do with greater functionality.

…which we now have, with Advanced Excerpt. Great plugin that lets you choose which HTML tags each excerpt will keep, and which it will strip. It lets you define the number of characters in an excerpt. You can override the standard the_excerpt tag in your code, and also use the_advanced_excerpt to tweak things more directly (e.g. you can have different excerpts calling different numbers of characters – I do that on my blog index page).