Back from Vegas and Pubcon, can't say enough good things about this conference! Here's a quick recap of what I talked about on the panel and a list of some of the plugins I mentioned.
The gist was this: be aware of what plugins you are using on your site. Check out the plugin before installing, know what it's supposed to do, check it's stats, who wrote it, is it maintained, is it documented, is it current and will it work with the latest WordPress. There are a lot of good free WordPress plugins out there, but there are also a lot that will cause you problems. I also touched on premium plugins – they're worth it for the development cycle and support.
Don't leave unused plugins installed – clean up after yourself. Unused plugins that are still activated can slow things down and unused, un-updated plugins can be a security risk for your site.
Not all plugins play well with others, some may conflict with your theme, they can even slow your site down depending on how they're written/coded. To take a page from Carolyn Shelby's presentation: If you have a site, you should be familiar with enough html, php, and the general workings of WordPress to be able to spot something not quite right. I'll add, if you're not, then you need someone on your team or that you can go to, to help you make the call.
Scott Hendison did a great overview of WordPress SEO by Yoast on the panel, and Ben Cook covered some of the reasoning on how to best use Categories and Tags in WordPress – and if you weren't there, you missed Ben's great Lego slides – I looked for the Panda one for this post, but didn't spot it.
SEO and Performance
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- W3 Total Cache
Social
- Socialize
- Share This
- Social Media Widget
- Simple Facebook Connect
- Simple Twitter Connect
- Google Plus Widget
Other Plugins
- Broken Link Checker
- Viper’s Video Quicktags
- Cookies for Comments
- Redirection (although I'm a fan of working directly in .htaccess)
- Login Lockdown
Premium Plugins
- Gravity Forms
- Wishlist Member
- BackupBuddy
- WordPress Mega Menu
- Cart66
I saw a few tweets that mentioned some other plugins, I'll be checking those out – do you have any favorites?