But what’s lesser known is that you not only have a variety of caching plugins available for you on WordPress, but they aren’t all the same.

This isn’t to say that one is “better” or “worse” than another, but rather, that they have different aims, goals and purposes. A cache that is right for a friend’s site might not be right for yours and vice versa.

So how do you find which caching plugin is right for you? It starts with understanding why these plugins are different and then evaluating your needs honestly so that you’ll be able to pick the right one.

Simply put, this isn’t so much a guide to tell you which caching plugin is right or best for you, but rather, a guide to help you understand that there are options and figure out which one is the best for your situation.

Why and How Are Caching Plugins Different?

On a fundamental level, all caching plugins do the exact same thing. They are designed to make your site load faster and require fewer resources by allowing your server to offer static pages rather than having to generate a new page using PHP and MySQL for every visitor who comes to your site.

The trade off is that, while your pages will be less dynamic, meaning they won’t update as frequently, they will load faster and your site can handle more visitors. For most sites, the drawback on the tradeoff is barely noticeable.

But while all caching plugins do the same thing, they get there by dramatically different ways. Simply put, there are a lot of ways that a server can create, store and deliver a cached version of the page and how a plugin achieves the effect can have a great impact on its performance and it the actual impact it has.

For example, W3 Total Cache, by itself, has six different options for page cache settings, just one of its options. Some of the options are aimed at simplicity, some are aimed at sacrificing server resources for additional speed and some are designed for heavily customized and unusual environments.

Using a caching plugin or a caching plugin setup that’s a poor fit for your server can actually slow your site down or create more problems for you.

So, how do you choose which one is right for you? I would advise doing your own research as the plugins available are constantly changing, but your evaluation always starts with an honest look at your site and your site’s needs.

What Do You Need?

The first step to picking a caching plugin is to take a honest look at your needs. What kind of traffic levels are you seeing? How big of a threat are traffic spikes? How complex is your site? What kind of hosting do you have? Are you having any issues with slowness now?

The truth is that most blogs can get by with a relatively simple caching plugin such as Quick Cache, Lite Cache or Hyper Cache. In all of the above cases, the plugin is geared toward simplicity and toward helping the largest number of WordPress sites possible.

While you’ll still need to research which is right for you, you probably don’t need W3 Total Cache, which is meant to be more of a caching framework than a plugin. The deluge of options, many of which aren’t even available on shared servers can not only confuse but can actually open the door to poor settings that can slow a site down or overly tax a server.

For those needing more power than a basic caching plugin but less than W3 Total Cache, a system such as WP Super Cache might be a good fit as it’s a compromise between the simplicity of the basic caching plugins and the power of W3 Total Cache. However, it too may be too much if you don’t need to choose your caching type or use a content delivery network.

Generally, when choosing a caching plugin, it’s more important to choose a plugin that has the features you need and not necessarily the one with the most options. More options, while important to those who need them, are often just more problems, especially if you’re out of your depth.

So what features do you need? Your average blog with a routine updating schedule will see a significant boost with any caching system that uses disk-based caching (other alternatives are faster but generally use more memory and server resources) and either through mod_rewrite, which requires you to edit your .htaccess file, or through PHP caching.

Database caching, object caching, etc. probably aren’t necessary. In fact, Hostgator recommends you turn them off if you use W3 Total Cache. While they’re powerful tools in some situations, for most blogs with typical hosting setups they don’t add that much, if anything.

In fact, if you overtax your server with the wrong settings, it could actually go slower than without caching at all.

Bottom Line

While W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are both great plugins and can work wonders for your site, it’s important to remember that they are not the only caching plugins out there and others might be better tuned to your server and your level of expertise.

While it’s tempting to choose the caching plugin with the most options or the longest history, if you’re going to use a fairly standard setup for your site, it’s likely best to go with a plugin that was built from the ground up around that setup and not one that includes it as one option among dozens.

Simply put, caching plugins are not magical fixes for a slow site and they can, if used improperly, create problems for your site and the decision of which to use should be weighed carefully.

However, when making that decision, don’t limit yourself to the one or two best known ones. While they are certainly well known for a reason, there are other options out there and they might be better for you.

In the end, if a different caching program can provide less stress for you and your server, it’s probably worth going with it, even if it isn’t the one everyone else seems to be using.

Search Engine Optimization or popularly known as SEO, plays a key role in popularizing your website. If you have a WordPress blog and wish to bring some visibility to it, you don’t have to go to great lengths. There are exclusive plug-ins available to do the job for you. Organize your traffic and increase your visibility to the right audience using these tools. Here are a few effective SEO plug-ins for WordPress:

All in One SEO Pack:

It is one of the most popular ones used on WordPress. You will be able to personalize all the features of your content including the title, description, individual tags, etc. It is an ideal choice for both starters and advanced users. It also has the feature to avoid duplicate content from being found on your blog. Some of the features include Google Analytics compatibility, custom post type support, default optimization of titles to adhere with search engine rules, etc.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

HeadSpace 2:

If you want a multi-functionality plug-in, then this is the one to go for. It can cover assorted SEO functionalities. You get to tag your posts, create custom-made descriptions or titles which help in enhancing your page ranking. HeadSpace 2 is modular and offers module features that help you configure the blog the way you want, without the requirement of too many plug-ins

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2/

Sitemap Generator:

Sitemap Generator helps create a sitemap for your blog. This is not similar to the usual XML sitemaps available, but a genuine sitemap generator that helps you customize the page anyway you want. The key features Sitemap Generator offers are multi-level page navigation and categories or pages, supports or permalinks, content customization, the order for lists, etc. The XML sitemap generated by the plug-in is ideal for Google (which is the most used search engine).

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sitemap-generator-wp/

Broken Link Character:

Broken Link Character automatically searches all your posts for broken links and sends you notifications if it finds anything. It also checks for links that don’t work and redirects them, and searches for missing images. It stops search engines from following the broken links. You can update the links directly through your plug-in instead of manually changing and updating the posts. The minute you install Broken Link Character, it starts searching for links, bookmarks and posts. The search time will depend on the amount of content you have on your blog. Based on the content it might take a few minutes to an hour. You can keep yourself updated by going to Settings and clicking on Link Checker.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/

SEO Friendly Images:

Not just your content, you have to optimize your images for the search engines as well. If you don’t have ALT or TITLE set for your images, SEO Friendly Images will do it automatically for you. ALT is a key to Search Engine Optimization as it helps describe the image to the search engine that is indexing your site. When a user is searching for a particular image, it plays a key role in pushing the search engine to index your image higher. Though TITLE is not s important as ALT, it is an important feature for users as they can read the title given to the image by hovering over it.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

Google XML Sitemaps Generator:

Google, Yahoo, Opera, etc. are some of the most used search engines by people around the world. If you want your blog to be visible, you have to abide by the rules set by this search engine. The Google XML Sitemaps Generator helps generate particular XML sitemaps that will help your blog get indexed better on these sites. When you have a good sitemap in place, it makes the job of the crawlers to view the full layout of your site and index them, swifter. The plug-in is compatible with all the WordPress pages. It also notifies the particular search engine automatically when post a new content on your blog.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

These are a few plug-ins you can consider downloading to improve the chances of your page being visible to various search engines. With these Search Engine Optimization add-ons, you have chances of getting higher rankings for your websites. Use these to bring in more traffic to your blog and popularize your page in return.

This is a guest post by Jake Anderson of fastinternetdeals.com, a site that offers savings and current information on att internet as well as att.com services.

After relaxing for a bit with my wife, I checked my site only to find that it wasn’t there at all. Instead, I was greeted with an error message saying that WordPress could not connect to the database.

I logged into my server’s control panel and noticed that the server load was unfathomably high, much more than it could ever take. I’d been dealing with a weird CPU issue for a while so I restarted the server, expecting it to correct itself.

But when my server eventually restarted, the site came back but only for a second, it quickly went down again. Whatever was causing it wasn’t just a temporary issue.

I contacted my host, which told me that they were seeing very high levels of traffic to the server, more than it could handle. It turns out the article I had written about a recent plagiarism case on Reddit was getting some attention both via Reddit itself and Google searches. The volume just seemed too high.

But then I looked at the sample level of traffic that I managed to snag when the site came back up briefly. It was high, many times my normal level, but nothing the server shouldn’t be able to take easily. It had, in the past, handled spiked much bigger than this.

My host agreed and we worked together to keep the site offline but give me access. Once in, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake.

The week before, I had to, in an emergency, create a new theme for my site. As part of that I had disabled W3 Total Cache. While a great move at the time, when I was done I had forgotten to reenable it and the site was without any kind of caching.

I reenabled the plugin, checked that it was working and then opened the site back up to the rest of the world. Sure enough, though the load was high and the server was straining some, it was nowhere near buckling. The highly-elevated traffic remained for several days and, through it all, there wasn’t as much as a glitch or a hiccup.

If I had remembered to reenable W3 Total Cache, or any caching plugin, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the traffic spike until I checked the stats the next day and I certainly wouldn’t have people on Reddit commenting about how quickly my site went down.

It was an embarrassment that ended up being minor, but it serves as a reminder to every WordPress user: Make sure you are using a caching plugin.

Why Caching is Important

Most people don’t think about what happens behind the scenes every time someone visits a page, but your server does.

If you use WordPress, or any other similar content management system that doesn’t have caching, there are a series of steps that your server has to complete to go from page requested to page delivered.

Basically, without caching, when a visitor tried to load a page, the page itself doesn’t exist. Instead, the server receives the request, WordPress queries the database for the content that’s supposed to be in the page and builds the page on the fly before delivery. Once that visitor is gone or goes to another page, the page disappears and the process starts over again.

While this is an over-simplification, the main issue is that the server has to create the page every time someone looks at it. While this is great in that rapidly-changing pages are updated for each visitor, it’s a lot of work for a server and even a decent VPS, such as my own, can struggle under that if there are a lot of visitors coming at once.

A caching plugin, ont he other hand, keeps WordPress from having to create a new page every time. The page is created once and held onto (or cached) for a period of time, usually a few hours. Subsequent visitors to that page get the cached version, which prevents the server from having to check the database and assemble the page from scratch.

To the visitor, this is much faster and to the server, this is much easier.

To use a personal computer example. Imagine, if instead of using copy and paste, you had to retype a paragraph into a new document every time you wanted to repeat the text. Though retyping it lets you make changes to it as you go, copying and pasting is much easier and faster for you.

But as great as caching is, it’s something that’s frightfully easy to forget and the reason is very simple.

Why Caching is Easy to Forget

A lot of bloggers don’t see the need or importance of caching and it’s easy to see why. Caching is most useful when a lot of people are trying to load the same content. Most blogs don’t see the kind of traffic level where caching has a major impact one way or another.

For example, if a page your site only gets a visitor once or twice a day, then it probably is being loaded dynamically every visit, caching or no. The reason is that the cache, most likely, expires between visitors, forcing the creation of a new page.

On low-to-medium traffic sites, there are probably only a few pages that get enough traffic to regularly deliver cached content and, even then, it’s probably doesn’t adversely impact the server. A well-optimized server can serve a decent number of dynamic pages without a problem.

So while caching probably has at least some speed benefit, it’s usually one that’s difficult to notice, especially to the naked eye.

This prompts many bloggers to skip on caching or, in my case, forget to check if it’s working, because everything functions fine without it.

However, as my case showed, it can be a road to disaster.

When Caching Matters

One of the strange things about the Internet is that it has a way of quickly giving a lot of attention to something that had very little of it previously. Between social media such as Facebook and Twitter as well as social news sites like Reddit, a tidal wave of traffic can hit any site at any time.

These types of moments are what bloggers work for, an opportunity to reach a large audience and a chance to capitalize and maybe grow your reach long-term. However, you can’t do that if your site is down.

But it doesn’t make sense to buy and pay for hosting strong enough to survive those waves when 99% of the time you will only need a fraction of it. It’s like buying a huge bathtub to hold a glass of water, expensive and wasteful.

Instead, the best thing you can do is make sure your site is as efficient as possible so it can survive waves of traffic visiting the same page without trouble. Caching is the best way to do that.

So, if you don’t cache, you’re severely limiting the number of visitors your site can receive. While that may be fine most of the time, it basically shuts the door in the face of potential visitors who are coming to see you at your most popular.

Bottom Line

In the end, WordPress is a great CMS for many sites but its lack of caching means that it can easily overpower even decent servers quickly. Fortunately, a decent caching system is never more than a plugin away.

Truth be told, my reminder was not a particularly painful one, it could have been much worse. An hour or sporadic downtime could have turned into much longer since the site wasn’t “down” in a sense that my monitors would detect. It could have gone until the next morning before returning to normal.

However, I’m not going to let dumb luck be what helps me get my site back up. I’m going to make sure to always run a caching program and, though I’m certain I’ll have to disable it from time to time to do work, I’m going to make double sure to reenable it when done.

I don’t want to risk another Reddit wave shutting me down…

WordPress (Photo credit: Adriano Gasparri)

Setting up a business online has proven to be a winning move for many people. Taking advantage of the explosive growth of online commerce is something you can also take advantage of with your site.

If you want to start your own e-commerce site, conversion is quite easy. One of the things you need to do is to install an e-commerce or shopping plugin. There’s no reason to worry about the platform on which your site is built on. There are many e-commerce or shopping plugins being developed for various platforms. In fact, you can even convert your WordPress-powered blog into a shopping site by just installing a plugin. There are many WordPress plugins that will put a shopping functionality to your blog. Her are some of them:

Quick Shop

This e-commerce plugin supports WordPress sits that uses the Sidebar Widgets. With this plugin, a widget will be placed on the side that shows the items in the cart. The user can remove items from the cart directly from the widget.

WP e-Commerce

This is one of the most popular plugins for shopping or e-commerce. The plugin has full features for selling products or services and even paying fees through the site.

Yak Shopping Cart

This is a great plugin if you want to pair your blog entries with certain products or services that you are planning to sell. With this plugin, the post ID also turns into the product code. There are three different pages that will appear in the WordPress management screen – product display and order fulfillment, product management, and a rudimentary sales report.

eShop

The eShop plugin for WordPress has many useful features that you will find essential for your ecommerce site – You can use the WordPress editor to create pages or posts to make product descriptions, the ability to list many products, the ability to have multiple options for products, the ability to upload downloadable products, generate and download sales data, Three different ways to calculate shipping charges, and a feature to input various zone settings by country or US state.

ArtPal

This is a plugin that caters to a particular niche – namely, artists. The plugin allows for the seamless integration of PayPal with your WordPress blogs so artists can sell their work on the internet.

About The Author

Dana has recently established her own e-commerce site, which now also offers the best credit card deals Australia.

In that spirit, last week on Performancing I discussed legal nightmares that can happen to you and your blog. Specifically, there were three scenarios that, while sounding like nothing more than legal theory, actually happened to one or more bloggers.

In that spirit, here are five more practical horror stories to keep you awake when it comes to your blog. Best part of all is that I don’t have to give specific examples because each and every one of these have happened not once or twice, but hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

So if you’re wondering about the gruesome ways your blog can be mangled, kidnapped or killed, here are just five of the more common (and more sudden) ways to consider.

1. The Ghost Blog

If there’s one thing that Halloween reminds us of, it’s our own mortality. Today we are living, breathing and thinking creatures but that could completely change in an instant. But ghost stories tell us that, in some cases, we can live on, at least briefly, as ghosts of our former selves, mere shadows that terrify the living.

Such is true with blogs as well. Blogs, as with all websites, are surprisingly fragile creatures. Database crashes, hard drive failures, natural disasters, human error, etc. can all destroy a website in seconds and leave only a trace of it, the caches, behind to wonder the Internet like a ghost.

Though various backup and cloud technologies have made websites more durable, in an Internet where cheap shared hosting is still the norm and most webmasters forget to backup their sites, it’s not uncommon for sites to simply disappear from the Web, never to be heard from again.

That is, save the whispers of the dead.

2. The Invisible Blog

The idea of the invisible person has been a part of science fiction for at least 1897, when H.G. Well wrote the famous novel “The Invisible Man”. Invisible man stories always raise interesting questions about what it means to be a person and what life would be like if no one could see nor hear you.

However, that’s nearly the exact plight of many blogs on the Internet.

The problem is very simple. By far the most common way to discover a new website is through the search engines and the largest search engine, by a long shot, is Google.

However, Google is a notoriously fickle mistress. Known for dropping or deeply demoting sites in its many updates, shake ups and algorithm changes.

But it doesn’t take a Google shakeup to make your site invisible, human error can result in your site blocking the search engines, essentially making it invisible to them.

While many of these problems can be fixed easily and a site can recover, it can be frightening to realize that no one can find your site, anywhere. That, in turn, raises an interesting philosophical question: If a site exists but can’t be found, does it really exist at all?

3. The Zombie Blog

These days, thanks in large part to George Romero and Night of the Living Dead, we equate the word “zombie” with the undead. However, for most of history a zombie was a living person turned into a mindless drone, an unthinking, unfeeling slave to their zombie master. Movies such as “White Zombie” take this approach.

The same thing can happen to your website. Blogs, basically are applications that display content, usually pulled from a database, in a certain way. But like any software, blogs are vulnerable to attack from the outside.

Spammers, virus authors, pranksters and others are constantly searching for blogs that they can take over and use for their ends, whether it’s posting spammy links, spreading malware or just deface them.

The consequences for this can be dire. Google tends to quarantine hacked sites by either removing them or reducing them in the results. For visitors, things can be even worse as they run the risk of becoming infected themselves or being subjected to unexpected and inappropriate content.

Though most sites can recover if they have a good backup, the best defense is a good offense and that means good security procedures and constant vigilance against possible attacks.

4. The Disfigured Blog

Horror movies, like all scary stories, are filled with tales of disfigured people, often caused by tragic accidents, who despite their outward appearance, have a heart of gold but are still shunned by society. “Phantom of the Opera” being, most likely, the best known example.

But while it’s tempting to say that, for a blog, content is king, that is akin to saying “it’s what’s on the inside that counts”. It’s a theoretically true, but still somewhat naive statement.

Appearance is important that is doubly true for a website, which is a visual medium. But website themes are evolving and are no longer static themes filled with dynamic content. Increasingly, they are more like plugins, using the database to determine your site’s appearance.

This opens the door to a new slew of opportunities and problems. Database corruption, crashes, error and problems can leave your site disfigured, mangled. But even if you don’t use an advanced theme, any third-pary elements you include can suddenly break or change, causing your theme to fall apart.

It’s entirely possible that you could wake up one morning and find that your site is not how you left it. Shocking both you and your visitors into wondering what happened.

5. The Dead Blog

In horror movies, death is rarely final. Villains and heroes alike often find ways to come back from beyond the grave, whether it is for a sequel, a final showdown or just to scare the audience one more time.

However, in real life, death is much more final and blogs, like their owners, die every day. Most are abandoned by their owners, left to freeze to death in the cold, uncaring blackness that can be the Internet.

Other sites are shut down more directly, with accounts being closed and sites deliberately shuttered. Though this may seem the more humane way to end a site, it’s often much worse, leaving a deluge of broken links across the Web and harming other sites that were referencing it.

These sites, and the errors they create, are missed deeply by those who try to visit it. However, some times, even online, they can be resurrected though here it doesn’t take a voodoo curse, instead, it just takes a webmaster, either the same one or a different one, who wants to give the idea another try.

Bottom Line

The bad news is that all of these nightmares are fairly common. The good news is that they are all, more or less, relatively avoidable. With good backups, solid security and dedication to your blog, you can either avoid or easily recover from most of these scenarios.

So if you want to sleep better at night and not have nightmares about what could happen to your site, the best thing you can do is be smart about how you run it. If you take reasonable precautions to protect your site, you’ll likely avoid any major disasters.

That being said, it’s still worth being aware that all of the work you’re doing amounts to zeroes and ones on computers across the world. Your work can turn out to be nothing but dust in the digital wind.

In short, what you spend years to create could be taken from you in a second. That’s just the nature of the digital world.

Here’s a look at 8 of the best free Contact Forms we’ve found for WordPress.  We selected these plugins based on some features that we felt were key to defining a complete plugin.

Customization

A customizable contact form plugin is one that allows you to create custom fields, change the look and style of the form and define what steps to do after the visitor hits send. We like plugins that also give you the option to:

• Send a copy of the email to the visitor that sent the message.
• Define a list of recipients for each contact form on your site.

Ease of use

The ia a huge trade-off between having great customizability and having a plugin that works out of the box. Improving customizability involves increasing the amount of CSS and HTML a user would have to know. A good plugin manages to have a great user interface which still allows the user to customize but replaces the need for html/css input with a huge list of options and buttons.

Management

A contact form plugin that gives you a dashboard to manage all the contact information you receive through your form and helps get rid of the spam is a great Contact form plugin.

Looks

A good looking contact form that matches the style of your website easily is a feature that is very high up on our list.

Spam protection

A good Contact Form helps keep the spam away by way of :

• Maybe using Akismet to provide spam prevention.
• Using Catpcha’s to keep the robots away.
• Using AJAX to load forms so that the form is hidden from bots.

Extra features

We give extra points to plugins that provide features that keep them out of the ordinary list.

If you’re still here, keep reading for our extensive review of 8 of the best free WordPress contact form plugins.

JetpackContactform

Jetpack is one plugin that’s installed on most WordPress sites. It comes packed with a decent ContactForm. Users of WordPress.com will already be quite familiar with the form building interface.

Screenshot of the Contact form by Jetpack

Here are some features of Jetpack that I think work in it’s favor:

• Create multiple contact forms, only one per post though.
• Each form can have its own recipient list.
• Create your own custom fields.
• Jetpack uses Akismet so the amount of spam should be minimal.
• A feedback management area is provided where you can see and manage all the messages sent to you.

There are some negatives to be considered:

• You cannot provide a file upload field.
• You cannot includes CAPTCHA’s for better security.
• You cannot easily modify the structure of the form.
• It does not use Jquery and AJAX for form submissions without page reload

Although you can’t change the style and structure of the form easily, it is very simple to use and it would suit a beginner WordPress user’s needs. It being bundled with Jetpack is another advantage, as you already have it installed and that’s one less plugin to install.

Unfortunately, Jetpack, in its current version, conflicts with the plugin SimpleFacebookConnect, a plugin that is quite popular itself.

Points

Customization: 5/10

Ease of Use: 8/10

Management: 8/10

Looks: 6/10

Spam Protection: 7/10

Extra Features: 6/10 ( Jetpack’s contact forms’ extra feature is that it comes withJetpack, score! )

Points for bad behavior: -2 for not working along with SimpleFacebookConnect

ContactForm

Settings for Contact Form

Contact form, brought to you by the people at bestwebsoft, is a plugin that is very easy to use and it offers a few more features than Jetpack.

Some features that stand out;

• The ability to provide an attachment field in the form.
• Option to send a copy of the message sent to the visitor.

Similar to Jetpack, this plugin is not very customizable. To add extra fields, you need to modify the plugin (contact_form.php file). You can configure only one email address as the recipient for all the contact forms on your site. In order to customize the styles for this form you need to have knowledge of html and css or you could contact them and pay them to customize the form for you.

Some negatives to worry about:

• No catpchas, no akismet, no spam management
• No message management from the dashboard itself, like Jetpack

The plugin developers do provide great support on their forum and you can pay them 10$ to get your form to suit your needs.

Points

Customization: 6/10

Ease of Use: 7/10

Management: 0/10

Looks: 6/10

Spam Protection: 5/10

Extra Features: 4/10 ( For their great support on the forums )

EasyContactforms

Custom Field management

Easy contact forms is exactly what they say it is, a very easy to use contact form. It’s almost completely customizable with great support on their website.

I’ve listed some of its features below to help you make a decision.

• The form builder is very easy to use and it provides you with tools to completely customize your form.
• You can create your own custom field types.
• You can upload files.
• You can add CATPCHA’s to the form.
• Reasonable antispam protection and multiple data validation layers.
• You can create multiple forms and the plugin dashboard provides a great Form management interface.
• Easy to use contact management and entry management tool.
• Each contact form has a separate notification message recipient list.
• Each contact form has its own email templates.
• Contact form data may be added to Contact History.
• Any contact form may be configured to have its own style settings.

Easycontactform is loaded with features and only feature i see missing is the use of AJAX to submit forms.

Points

Customization: 9/10

Ease of Use: 9/10

Management: 8/10

Looks: 7/10

Spam Protection: 8/10

Extra Features: 7/10 ( Great form, contact management )

Customcontactform

Form management for Custom Contact form

The Custom contact form plugin is pretty feature packed, as good, if not better, feature wise when compared to  the EasyContactForm. One disadvantage I see is that the dashboard interface isn’t all that appealing. It could be improved.

Some standout features are:

• Custom HTML Forms Feature – if you are a web developer you can write your own form html and use this plugin simply to process your form requests. Comes with a few useful features.
• Export form submissions to CSV.
• Create custom styles in the style manager to change the appearance of your forms: borders, font sizes, colors, padding, margins, background etc
• Show a stylish JQuery form thank you message or use a custom thank you page.

Points

Customization: 9/10

Ease of Use: 6.5/10

Management: 8/10

Looks: 7/10

Spam Protection: 8/10

Extra Features: 7/10 ( Export to csv and the style manager )

Fastsecurecontactform

Extra fields

This is a highly customisable contact form that blocks all automated spammers. The dashboard interface can be a bit overwhelming as there are a options that can be configured, but with time you can easily get the hang of it. Here’s a quick look at some of the features that make this plugin so popular.

• Backup/restore tool. You can backup/restore all your forms or single forms and settings.
• Easy to hide subject and message fields for use as a newsletter signup.
• Supports sending mail to multiple departments.
• Optional – posted data can be sent as a query string on the redirect URL.
• Optional – autoresponder E-mail message.
• CAPTCHA can be turned off or hidden from logged in users and or admins.
• Auto form fill for logged in users.
• Customizable form field titles.
• Customizable CSS style.
• Pre-fill in form fields from a URL query string. SeeFAQ
• Save emails to the WordPress database, or export to CSV or Excel. SeeFAQ

Fast secure contact form comes bundled with with vCita, vCita extends your contact form and lets your users Schedule Meetings based on your availability. You can meet users with web-based video, talk over phone conference, set a location for meetings and collect payments for your time and services. For those who aren’t keen on vCita, the plugin gives you option to disable it.

Points

Customization: 9/10

Ease of Use: 8/10

Management: 9/10

Looks: 8/10

Spam Protection: 9/10

Extra Features: 7/10 ( Loads of them! )

AJAX , Modal contact forms

Slickcontactforms

Slick contact form

Widget settings for the Slick Contact Form

This plugin creates a widget, which adds a contact form using either a floating, drop down button or a sticky, sliding tab. It can handle multiple forms on each page and the location of the floating button or sliding tab can be easily set from the widget control panel.

Each form includes up to 3 text input fields and one text area. The input labels and type of validation can be set via the widget control panel. You would need to edit php theme files in order to add the widget control panel to the dashboard. Slickcontactforms do provide a good tutorial on how to do that.

The widget control panel is used to edit the style of the widget. You can pretty much change the whole look of the form and choose among 4 skins that are provided. The contact form also includes a “Honeypot” style captcha to help minimize spam – this works by having a blank input field hidden from view of the user but visible to spambots. If the field contains text the mail will not be sent – no more annoying & tricky captcha systems.

Some advantages of using slick:

• Form processed using jQuery & AJAX – no page refresh!
• You can choose to make the form either a floating or sliding form in true AJAX style.
• The widget control panel is very easy to use.
• You can add multiple forms to your site.
• You can configure multiple recipients and differe;nt recipients for each form.

We can’t but mention some disadvantages of the form

• No comment/feedback management tool.
• Can’t add more than 3 text fields and one textarea.
• No file attachment field provided.

Points

Customization: 8/10

Ease of Use: 7/10

Management: 0/10

Looks: 9/10

Spam Protection: 9/10

Extra Features: 7/10 ( good spam protection )

UsernoisemodalFeedback/ContactForm

Settings for Usernoise Contact Form

Usernoise contact form

If you’re looking for a very good looking and well designed AJAX feedback form, this is it. This plugin is more tuned for Feedback than just for contact. It’s got some great UI elements that allow the user to select the type of feedback: Idea, Problem, Question and Praise. Notifications of new messages pop up right in your admin navigation bar, making it simple and convenient to stay up to date on what your visitors are thinking.

Usernoise also records all of the messages submitted through your site.

The Usernoisecontactform is virtually spam-proof. This is the beauty of having a modal contact form. The form is not visible to robots because it is loaded with AJAX when the page is loaded and therefore the bots don’t see it.

Some standout features:

• The flexible typography feature causes the text to automatically match your site’s style.
• It is very easy to setup and it requires no code ( compared to the slick contact form )

Some negatives to consider:

• The form isn’t very customizable in terms of fields. You can disable fields provided but you cannot add your own.
• There is not option to add a file upload field.
• Multiple forms aren’t possible.
• There can be just one recipients address.

Points

Customization: 6/10

Ease of Use: 8/10

Management: 8/10

Looks: 9/10

Spam Protection: 9/10

Extra Features: 7/10

ContactForm 7

Contact Form 7 settings

Contactform 7 is one of most popular contact form plugins. It is a fully featured plugin that includes all of the best features expected in a contact form plugin, like

• File Upload & File Attachment.
• Multiple contact forms.
• Akismet Spam Filtering.
• CAPTCHA.
• Drop Down Menus / Radial Options.
• Ajax-powered submitting.

The interface is a bit more technical than other plugins which can act as a deterrent if you’re not that familiar with HTML and CSS.

Contact form 7 has great support and a host of other plugins have been developed to compliment Contact form 7

• Contactform 7 todatabaseextension
• ContactForm 7 SelectBoxEditorButton

Points

Customization: 9/10

Ease of Use: 7/10

Management: 5/10

Looks: 7/10

Spam Protection: 8/10

Extra Features: 7/10 ( For all the extra plugins you can add to CF 7 )

WordPress Form Maker

WordPress form maker is powerful and functional tool for websites owners . With the functionality and ease of use of this plugin can be compared just a few plugins. It have a user-friendly interface, that allow you easily and quickly add the form from admin panel.
The form includes Ten main elements for creating a new form Custom HTML, Text Input,Time and Date, Select ,Checkbox, Radio, File upload*, Captcha, Map*, Buttons
Spider form plugin can be used for creating contact, mailing list, survey, application, event registration and party invitation forms.

You can download it from official website of this WordPress Form plugin.

Conclusions

For us it’s a tie up between the EasyContactForm and the FastandsecureContactForm for their ease of use and exhaustive feature set. The forms can be easily and completely customized.

If your looking for a great looking AJAX form and you don’t need a lot of fields in your form then we’d recommend the SlickcontactForm.

For those of you who are looking for a contact form with character and who don’t require complex contact forms, don’t look further that the UsernoiseContactForm.

That’s it from us, look out for more plugin reviews as we do them.

About The Author

Sheela Sequeira is the product marketing manager at BlogVault, a premium WordPressBackup and Restore service. Sheela spends her time mastering WordPress and getting people to backup their websites. Tweet with Sheela @blogVaultnet

Some popular SEO Onpage Plugin

There are several plugin available in WordPress which works exactly on the website page and process all functionality that manages and helps to build a strong SEO venture with the dynamic WordPress website.

SEOProcessor Plugin

SEOProcessor is one of the most popular SEO Onpage Plugin. This plugin control everything within the page from HTML tags to font decoration. It also guides to place keywords with proper highlighting decoration and also controls the keyword density. It also controls the blog posts and blog pages to upkeep with the SEO Strategies. It offers an interactive and detailed control option to monitor and handle the SEO process without any external tool or software.

Broken Link Checker

This is a very useful plugin for checking broken links in a WordPress website. Broken link is always very harmful for SEO, because it interrupts the crawling process and thus website rank may be lowered than usual. That is why developers need to keep a close eye on the links and should manage it seriously to keep up the smooth running of the SEO process. This plugin is very useful for that very factor.

Google XML Sitemaps

Creating sitemap for a WordPress site is really very tough job to do. This is very complicated and hectic process. That is why it is really necessary to use some sitemap creating plugin like Google XML Sitemap. This plugin helps to create XML site map for the WordPress website and can also interact with the developers account so that the newly updated sitemap can be posted to get ranked. This is Onpage plugin that works under the main interface of the website and do not require any special tool panel.

SEO Smart Links

Link is a very important issue in every SEO venture. That is why this really necessary to maintain the links profile. Not only external links but also internal. SEO Smart Links is a plugin that controls and modifies the link to smoothen the SEO procedure. This plugin helps completely to manage the link profiles and create a better SEO impact during search crawling.

W3 Total Cache

This is another backend plugin that helps to increase the page rank of any WordPress website or blogs. For every website speed is very important issues and every developer are concuss about making a fast loading website. But it can only be done by intelligent cache management. This plugin manages the cache intelligently and thus helps to build up a better visitor’s satisfaction along with better crawling convenience for the Blog or website.

So we can see that there are a huge numbers of Onpage plugin available for WordPress website that may help to create a better website or blog without much labor with coding and programming. And all these plugins are also very helpful for SEO process and helps to improve the search engine rank.

About The Author 

Margaret Jules lives in Finland and has been doing internet marketing for last 5 years. She loves travelling, meeting new people and works at SEO Morpheus.

My Top 10 Selections for 2012 of the Most Downloaded security plugins

1.   WP Security Scan - raises the level of the security for your Thesis theme for WordPress installation. It does this by scanning your site for security issues then suggests the methods you can use to fix them.

2.   WP-MalWatch - is designed to alert you when hackers have invaded your blog. When hackers do get into your WordPress blog site, they infest your site or blog with links to their sites. When you know they have invaded you can take the necessary actions to remove them from your world.

3.   WP Secure plug-in - provides security for your WordPress installation by hiding your plug-in directory and WP version from hackers and others. This is important to do because the cyber scum that inhabits our virtual world use the version and the list of plugins to locate one that they have hacked before to hack their way into your blog!  Add this plug-in to protect your website or blog.

4.   Website Defender WordPress Security plug-in - free and comprehensive security tool that helps you secure your WordPress installation and offers suggestions for strengthening your passwords, securing your database, and lots more

5.   Akismet - program that checks comments left on your blog or website to see if they appear to be spam and then allows you to review the spam it does catch through the blog “Comments” admin screen. Akismet comes pre-installed and once you apply for and install your API key you will find the controls for it in your options panel in your Dashboard.

6.   BackWPUp - plugin that backs up your WordPress files and database and store them wherever you decide.  You can schedule automatic backups and pick out which folders and tables you want to backup.

7.   CAPTCHA - adds anti-spam methods to WordPress on all your forms, comments, registrations, lost passwords, logins, or you can actually require a code for everything on your site.

8.   Exploit Scanner - strengthens the security for your WordPress installation by scanning your site for security vulnerabilities and suggesting methods in which you can fix the problem.

9.   BulletProof Security - security protection against: XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection hacking and on and on. Like the name says, it protects against attacks of all kinds.

10.  Better WP Security - This really is the easiest way to secure your WordPress site. You can improve the security of your WordPress site in seconds.

I would urge a bit of caution when it comes to downloading and using third party plugins. No offense is intended to any of those folks. WordPress is only able to stand behind those plugins that they test prior to offering them to WordPress users. That means that you are on your own when you use something other than what WordPress offers. Proceed with caution.

Now that you have some idea of what the security plugins are all about don’t hesitate to spend some time – now – installing that security into your site. Doing so will provide you with worry-free time, time that you can use creating more content for your site!  Either you run the day or the day runs you. – Jim Rohn

About The Author

David Crawford has been working on the internet since 2003 and found early on that he really enjoys research and soon discovered that a research hound such as himself makes an excellent freelance writer as well.  As a huge fan of WordPress and the StudioPress themes he has worked within the WordPress Dashboard for years adding content for clients such as ShopWPThemes and writing Professional WordPress Themes reviews.

ManageWP Worker is a WordPress plugin that lets you take complete control of multiple WordPress sites from a single interface. From installation to monitoring, its suite of management tools has got you covered. Here are the highlights of this plugin to make you understand how it could help you manage your army of WordPress sites.

Deployment

ManageWP has a website cloning tool that lets you easily and quickly create new sites based on existing ones. This means you can tinker and play around with a test site and efficiently turn it into a production site with as little effort as possible. Mass migrations are also made easy because you only need to input FTP details and other hosting information into a single dashboard and you’re good to go. If you have ever experienced problems with switching a site from one host to another before, you know that this kind of convenience is very welcome.

Management & Backup

Once your WordPress sites are set up to use ManageWP, you can access each of their administration panels. This direct access to multiple admin panels bypasses the need to input a password for each site. Management of themes, plugins, and scheduled backups of multiple sites can be done in one clean and intuitive interface. In addition to that, you can also upgrade WordPress core files, plugins, and themes right from the ManageWP control panel.

Publishing

If you are maintaining multiple blogs on Tumblr and other similar sites, you are familiar with the convenience of publishing content on multiple sites without logging in multiple times. Combine this type of convenience with the ability to bulk post content to multiple sites and you can cut back on time spent publishing content. You can spend more time developing brilliant ideas and engaging content instead of wasting time on publishing content one site at a time.

Optimization

ManageWP includes SEO analysis tools including keyword research and ranking tools. Combined with Google Analytics integration, you’ll get an extensive view of sites’ performance. You wouldn’t need other SEO plugins for generating reports and SEO analysis, but if those other plugins are working for you and they can play well with ManageWP, there’s no reason not to have all of them under the same roof, right?

Monitoring

Uptime monitoring and traffic alerts are also included in the ManageWP suite of features. These tools let you know if something has gone wrong with any of your sites or if there is a spike in your traffic. These tools give you the chance to resolve problems as soon as possible and take advantage of opportunities presented by a sudden increase in traffic.

Security

Of course, it’s easy to assume that managing multiple sites from a single location may present security risks, but ManageWP Worker makes sure that your sites are protected with the use of two-factor authentication, state-of-the-art encryption, and integration with Sucuri.net, a leader in website malware protection.

ManageWP Worker seems like overkill for people who handle only a handful of WordPress sites at a time especially because of the fact that it’s not free, but for those who are working on dozens of self-hosted WordPress sites as part of a business or professional blogging efforts, it’s definitely a solid investment.

Though integration has always been possible, it’s been a bit of a headache requiring a mashup of plugins and/or coding to integrate with Facebook’s notoriously verbose and complex API.

The new plugin makes integration easy. With a few minutes of setup and no coding, WordPress users can now add a social publisher that blasts their posts out over their feeds and fan pages, replace their WordPress comments with Facebook’s alternative, add a recommendations bar that finds related posts and also add like, subscribe and send buttons.

The plugin is both so powerful and useful that Samuel “Otto” Wood, the creator of the popular Simple Facebook Connect plugin, will eventually stop supporting it in favor of the official plugin.

But is integrating your site so tightly with Facebook really a good idea? The answer isn’t simple and it depends heavily on your site and the best way to decide is to look at the pros and cons while making the decision for yourself.

The Case in Favor

Facebook has, by most estimations, about 900 million monthly active users and over 500 million daily active users. You will be hard pressed to find someone who does not have a Facebook account available to them and, despite issues with its IPO and a survey that found users were spending less time on the site, a recent study by Comscore found that, once you factor in mobile usage, time spent on Facebook is still growing.

In short, Facebook is a behemoth of a site and one that most people either use regularly or have access to readily. Therefore, by integrating with Facebook, you aren’t likely turning away many of your readers. In fact, you’re likely making it easier for readers to interact with your site, by giving them the chance to log in, leave comments and otherwise participate with an account they already have.

However, integrating with Facebook gives you a great deal of features from easy sharing that encourages others to spread your work to their friends, a powerful commenting system that is almost completely spam free since only Facebook accounts can use it and the ability to have you and your site both subscribe-able so casual visitors will stay in touch for a long time to come.

This opens up a lot of great opportunities for promoting your site on Facebook and using it to reach a new audience.

Also, with the new Facebook plugin, you can introduce social sharing to your site, sometimes called “frictionless sharing” so that people are putting out articles on their feed as they read them (Note: The user has to select to turn this on) and give users recommendations on what they should read next so they are more likely to stay on your site when they are done reading.

In short, Facebook can be a major part of your marketing and promotional efforts, helping to make your content more viral, more sticky and more approachable to others.

However, these advantages come with a darker side and, on that front, the biggest problem that Facebook likely has is its own reputation.

The Case Against Facebook

The biggest problem that Facebook has is that it simply is not very trusted. Facebook has a history of controversy over its privacy policy and much of that centers around how Facebook has been accused of tracking people on other sites, namely sites that integrate Facebook into their offerings.

To make matters worse, Facebook is also deeply personal for most people as it uses their real name, hometown and other personal information. Those who want to remain anonymous, or even pseudonymous, can’t use Facebook.

So, even if your readers do trust Facebook, they may not be willing to trust you and your site with that level of intimacy. This could be especially difficult for sites that are in fields where people want their information kept private, such as sites offering medical and financial information.

Finally, you can get many of the benefits of Facebook integration without having to partner so closely. You can create a fan page, use a Like Box and even add various sharing buttons without getting overly involved with Facebook or forming a more permanent connection.

In short, it’s very possible Facebook integration could scare off your readers and, even if it doesn’t, it might not be necessary at all.

Bottom Line

So should you integrate your site with Facebook and, if so, how far should you go? The answer really depends on your site and your audience.

If you have an audience that demands privacy, security and/or anonymity, Facebook integration is a bad idea. It can seem invasive and inconsiderate to anyone concerned with those matters.

For more casual sites, integration might make sense. It can be a great way to help your site reach a new audience and encourage sharing while not putting a major burden on your readers. It can also add some new features to your site that might be compelling to readers, especially those already heavily involved with Facebook.

But then comes the most important question, is Facebook someone you want to partner with over the long haul? That’s a difficult question and it’s made thornier by the fact that, while Facebook is a juggernaut with no immediate signs of stopping, it’s recent troubles do show weakness in the company’s armor and, even as it continues to grow in numbers, its popularity seems to be declining.

This is especially true since Facebook has had so many struggles in the area of mobile, enough to encourage them to spend $1 billion to buy Instagram. It feels to many as if Facebook is behind the curve when it comes to the next evolution of the Web.

Combine that with Facebook’s tendency to make unpopular changes, such as their privacy policy shifts, powerful competitors, including Google, and general distrust, it’s easy to see why many wonder if Facebook isn’t already an empire in decline.

Indeed, the release of its WordPress plugin may not be an example of a rising tide lifting all boats, but rather, of Facebook trying to buoy its own ship.

You can install Jetpack just like you would any other WordPress plugin; just download the package and install, that’s it. You will need to connect it to a WordPress.com account to activate the features, so make sure you already have a WordPress.com account before strapping on your Jetpack.

If you’re still not using this plugin on your self-hosted WordPress blog, here are some of the features and benefits you’re missing out on:

WordPress.com Stats

While there are other plugins that allow you to collect and view stats about your blog. WordPress.com Stats is known to provide the most important metrics about your blog in a clean and pretty interface. Plus, it doesn’t put more load on your server, a huge advantage if you’re experiencing slow loading times.

WP.me Shortlinks

URL shortening services are pretty much everywhere these days and that’s because they let you share cleaner and shorter links. Jetpack lets you shorten your blog post URLs even before you leave your blog to share your entries on social networking sites or via email and SMS. Actually, you don’t even have to leave your blog to share your posts thanks to another Jetpack feature: Sharing.

Sharing

This feature allows you to share your posts with a range of services including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, and more. You can even define your own custom services. You can customize how the service buttons will appear on your blog, which includes the option to display smart buttons.

Contact Form

Similar plugins can provide more customization options in terms of functionality and design, but if you want  a simple yet still customizable contact form builder, there’s nothing wrong with relying on Jetpack’s Contact Form feature. Additionally, if you have Akismet running on your blog, messages that are sent through this contact form feature will be filtered through the spam-fighting service.

Spelling and Grammar

This feature uses the After the Deadline service which points out your errors and provides smart suggestions to correct them. You can customize how this feature proofreads your posts from your profile page. You can either go hard on yourself or take it easy by turning off some proofreading features. The bottom line is if you’re not very confident about your writing skills, you can have this feature check your work before you publish it.

Jetpack has other features like extra sidebar widgets, shortcode embeds, Gravatar Hovercards, VaultPress, subscriptions, and more coming soon. Aside from VaultPress, all of the currently active features are free to use.

Take note that some of these features may interfere with similar plugins you already have installed, so check your installed plugins before installing this one. Jetpack for WordPress will also let you know if there are plugins that may be affected now that you’ve strapped it on.

I’ve been using Jetpack for almost a year now and I think it’s a must-have especially if you want to get the most number of features with as little effort as possible.

I am all about value added services, It is my personal belief that your websites visitors are more likely to revisit your content if you provide them with all the tools they need to succeed. For that reason a strong job board is essential if you run a tech reporting, freelance writing or related website in which your readers likely want to stay up-to-date with openings in their field.

For more than a year BloggingPro.com has been utilizing a paid WordPress Job Board Software platform known as WPJobBoard and we could not be any happier.

For just $99 the WordPress plugin allows us to save unlimited job postings, unlimited job applications and unlimited resumes, all on our own trusty server which means no reliance on outside systems.

One of the best parts about WPJobBoard is the simple fact that it scales for your template, that means as you change the look and feel of your website you can easily continue the WPJobBoard integration process. For example take a look at our output on http://www.bloggingpro.com/jobs/ and you will see a template that matches the websites design (the $99 package comes with one free job board theme valued at $79):

Once a link is clicked users are then greeted with information about the company they are examining including the company name, the type of job, its location and the type of posting such as sponsored or free.

Under the description section users can examine the “How To Apply” section which is clearly defined based on the job posters own requirements for new workers.

Posting a job as an employer could not be any easier, simply click on “Post A Job” on the front of the job boards main page and then fill out the necessary information about the posting which includes the following fields:

Job posters can then choose what type of ad to place, for example a paid ad will be displayed first. Options on BloggingPro.com include:

Listing Type *

• Free Listing | Blogger Jobs Board
• USD 25.00 – Featured Listing, 30 days | Blogger Jobs Board
• USD 10.00 – 45 Days Listing | Blogger Jobs Board

Using the WPJobBoard plugin you can of course create your own cost structure based on the size of your community and the niche you serve.

WPJobBoard can be utilized in whatever ways your imagination can take you. While there are other “Free” services on the market the time you will waste optimizing many of them is simply not worth the frustration or “man hours” needed to operate them. I should probably mention that for $99 you get one full year of free upgrades and full technical support.

Give WPJobBoard a shot today and let me know what you think.

By now you are finished with installing WordPress as the blogging platform on your blog and want to convert your first simple WordPress blog into professional blog which is SEO Optimized and User Friendly. Today I’m going to share the list of 10 WordPress Plugins that you should install on Your WordPress blog straight away if you are installing plugins on your blog for the first time:

1. 1.     Akismet Plugin

First plugin you should install on your blog once you start receiving comments on your blog contents is Akismet plugin. This plugin is smart enough to differentiate between a good comment and spam comment. This plugin will automatically send all spammy comments in to Spam folder and you will just need to moderate and reply back to quality comments only.

Download Plugin

1. 2.     Related Post Plugin

There are lots of related post plugins available in WordPress plugins directory. But I would recommend using YARPP (Yet Another Related Post Plugin). And it’s not me only who is asking to use this plugin for your WordPress blog, even Matt Cutts is recommending YARPP on his personal blog here. Presence of related post plugin in your blog posts will make them more search engine friendly and will have positive impact on your blog overall engagement metrics.

Download Plugin

1. 3.     Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

Presence of XML Sitemap for your blog will help it towards faster indexing in major search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you are don’t know how to create XML sitemaps and just beginning your blogging journey with WordPress, Google XML Sitemaps plugin will be really handy for you as this plugin will automatically generate XML sitemaps for your blog. You can submit the same XML sitemap to Google via your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Download Plugin

1. 4.     WP Smush.it Plugin

WP Smush.it plugin will help in reducing the size of images that you are uploading on your blog. Best thing about this plugin is that it used to run in background and you don’t need to do anything after installing it into your plugins directory. And since website load time becomes one of rankings factor on Google, plugins like WP Smush.it will be really helpful in improving the speed of your blog by lowering down the size of images available in your blog contents.

Download Plugin

1. 5.     Broken Link Checker Plugin

As the name suggest, broken link checker plugin can find all the broken links in your blog and help in fixing them as well. Presence of broken link checker kind of plugin will help you get rid of broken links problems on your blog from day one. Your blog readers will be really annoyed on seeing links which are not working on your blog. Not only your blog readers, but if your blog contains too many broken links that will have a negative impact on your blog rankings on search engines. So broken link checker is one of must have plugins for WordPress blogs from day one.

Download Plugin

1. 6.     SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Link plugin will help in interlinking your blog contents in an optimized manner. You can use this plugin to automatically link targeted pages and posts with their predefined anchor text’s in your blog posts and pages etc. Apart from blog contents interlinking, there are many more feature you will enjoy after installing this SEO plugin on your blog like adding nofollow tag for external links and opening links in new window etc.

Download Plugin

1. Contact Form 7
   As the name suggests, Contact Form 7 plugin can be used to add a contact form on your blog. You can use this plugin to add a contact form into your blog posts and pages etc. There are lots of customization options available with this plugin that you can use as per your need like you can modify the number and type of fields you want to show on your contact forms. You can include a Captcha as well through this plugin on your blog contact form to tackle spam activities.

Download Plugin

1. 8.     All In One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is the most popular SEO plugin available in WordPress plugins directory. This plugin will help in making your blog more search engine friendly. You can easily optimize titles and meta tags for your blog home page, internal pages and posts etc with this SEO plugin. This plugin can automatically take care of canonical issues that you may be facing on your blog.

Download Plugin

9. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress blogs and the only motive to install this plugin is to experience a faster loading WordPress blog. WP Super Cache after installation will convert dynamic pages of your blog into static HTML pages and start serving those static pages to your blog audience.

Download Link

10. Subscribe to Comments

As the name indicates, Subscribe to Comments plugin will allow your blog readers to subscribe to incoming comments on blog posts of their interest. Presence of this plugin will help your blog readers in managing their comments subscription on your blog easy. With this plugin, they can easy subscribe or unsubscribe to certain posts of their interest and also can change their notification email address.

Download Link
With this, it comes to the end of this special guest post mentioning all the plugins you must have if you are Beginner to WordPress blogging. It would be interesting to know which plugin you guys are using on your WordPress blogs, please share in the comments section below.

Author Bio

Anil Agarwal is the CEO of BloggersPassion.com blog where he writes on variety of topics around WordPress including WordPress web hosting, free WordPress installation, WordPress themes, WordPress plugins and traffic building tips and techniques for WordPress blogs etc.

To begin using the program you can visit http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-facebook-google-plusone-share/ or you can search for Add Twitter, Facebook Like, Google plus one Social share via your “add new” option in the plugins section of your WordPress admin area.

Once installed the program is located in the “Settings” tab on the left navigation bar of your websites administrator area under the name “TF Social Share.”

Once you launch the program the first options you will see are the “General Options.”

As you’ll notice the first option is to have the program “auto display” this is a great option if you plan to have horizontal share buttons at the top or bottom of each post in any WordPress theme or if you want to hover buttons on the “left side of the post.” However you can also uncheck the automatic box and instead insert the programs PHP coding directly into your template as you see fit.

Next you simply choose which share buttons you would like. Unlike the “Sharebar Plugin” this program doesn’t allow you to add new social share buttons at will but it does have Pinterest already included which is a nice added bonus.

The next option simple asks you to choose which parts of your website the plugin will appear. If you choose “homepage, categories, tags, etc” I would highly recommend checking the output immediate as the buttons on several of my websites have shown up in strange places that broke the flow of my article output.

Once you’ve chose those options you can then choose the button placement and decide whether or not you want a border around the buttons. Notice that you can also “show background color” or leave it unchecked for transparent. If you have a certain background color you want to use it can also be entered in hex decimal format.

My favorite part of this plugin however is the ability to have it load in the Footer. This is a nice touch because occasionally Twitter will change its API and conflicts will occur that can mess up the sharebar and other WordPress plugins. By loading the plugin in the footer if it created conflicts the rest of your website loads and the share ption is the only thing missing.

As you’ll notice you can also disable on mobile devices and add your Twitter ID so your Twitter shares include the @twitterhandle response.

The next options focus on setting up your share options for the left side floating bar and for button sizes:

The first several options allow you to determine exactly where the social sharing bar will float on the left side of the page. I kept the bar in a fixed position which allowed it to always show on the page without an annoying “follow the scroll” tyep of setup. You can easily change left side spacing and the top spacing to match optimal output on your website which is a very nice feature, especially for uniquely setup pages.

The second option lets you choose the size of each button and to decide if you want count display to show. This is a self explanatory section and it comes in handy when you want to make everything match up nicely on your pages.

There are a lot of social sharing plugins for WordPress however the Add Twitter, Facebook Like, Google plus one Social share Plugin so far has been the easiest to implement on my WordPress created properties because it helps me avoid scripting conflicts with other programs.

Give this easy to implement WordPress plugin a try today and let me know what you think.

Using this plugin developer Mark Jeldi has made it simple to ignore the NextGen Gallery plugin script and style calls on all posts where the Nextgen shortcode  [nggallery id=x] is not being used.

To start using the plugin simply search for “NextGen Gallery Optimizer” in your “add new plugins” section of your WordPress setup or download it from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery-optimizer/ and install the plugin in your plugins program via FTP or through the upload function.

Once installed the program offers a very simple interface:

Notice that to get started all you have to do is choose the NextGen Gallery theme or the URL path to a custom theme you are using and then choose if you want the plugin to support the Fancybox lightbox effect. By selecting the lightbox effect option you now have that feature sync’d with NextGen Gallery as an added bonus. Mark says he included Fancy Lightbox integration after realizing that many NextGen Gallery users were having problems getting the two to work properly together.

As this is the first release of the plugin the developer admits to some drawbacks:

“NextGEN Gallery Optimizer ONLY looks for the [nggallery id=x] shortcode, and ONLY on Posts! This means it will not add scripts and styles on posts embedded with NGG’s single images or slideshows, or add anything on WordPress Pages…well, at least not yet!

The plugin is still a work in progress, however I downloaded and installed the plugin on a test platform and found that the NGGallery script wasn’t being called when the gallery wasn’t available on my posts and those posts saw increased load times after the plugin was installed, verifying the authors claims of faster WordPress load speeds.

Give NextGen Gallery Optimizer for WordPress a try today and let us know what you think about it’s simple to use features and increased performance.

My biggest qualm however comes from the way images are handled through the WordPress platform. Let me fill you in on this process, whenever you use a specific theme and upload a picture that photo is uploaded using all of the thumbnail sizes available for the template being used. For example if display pages require 300 x 250, 500 x 500 and 30 x 60 photos to be created that’s what you’ll receive.

Now let’s say you jump over to a new template and the thumbnail sizes require 250 x 250, 500 x 425 and 30 x 60. Two of your images will not show correctly (they will be too small to fill in available space).

That last statement is where the Ajax Thumnail Rebuild Plugin for WordPress comes into play. This plugin easily allows users to rebuild thumbnails from all of their pictures based on current theme requirements. 

You can start using the program by visiting this link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ajax-thumbnail-rebuild/ or by searching for “Ajax Thumbnail Rebuild” via the “add new” plugin section in your WordPress install.

Here’s the display screen you will be provided with once you navigate to “Tools” and then “Rebuild Thumbnails.”

As you’ll notice you can choose which files to rebuild and which files to leave alone, this is good if you only want several file sizes to be used with your new theme since it means less stress on your server as the plugin skips over certain file types.

In many cases a new WordPress template may only require several featured thumbnail images to be used throughout the theme in which case you can simply click the “Only rebuild featured images” to cut the workload severely down for the plugin.

While there are other thumbnail rebuilding plugins for WordPress they typically tell your server to rebuild all images at once, however your server will likely place a time constraint on that process and for larger sites with more images you’ll eventually receive a time out error. Unlike those plugins this program rebuilds images one at a time, avoiding time out issues since a new thumbnail rebuild command is sent to the server when the last process has completed.

Having rebuilt thumbnails for websites with hundreds of posts I would highly recommend the Ajax Thumbnail Rebuild plugin to anyone looking for a quick fix to image display issues within their new WordPress template.

When I’m building websites I prefer to not leave the placement of social buttons to chance and I don’t like to place buttons in multiple positions because it can adversely affect pageload times. For that prefer to use the Sharebar plugin for WordPress which can be found at: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sharebar.

The plugin is extremely easy to install, simply search for “Sharebar” from the plugins screen in your WordPress administrator screen and the program will show up under the “settings” at which point you will see the following screen:

As you’ll notice the setup screen allows for automatic displaying of the Sharebar based on “Posts” and “Pages” and it also provides the ability to choose when the bar shows up, for example you can have the bar only show up when the screen display of the user is a certain resolution size such as 1000px or higher. Users with different sized templates can also choose to left or right offset Sharebar so it doesn’t interfer with the templates content area.  Also notice that you can have the sharebar display as horizontal buttons if the minimum display size isn’t available. The buttons in the horizontal display are the small sharing buttons shown in your settings area.

One of my favorite parts of Sharebar is the ability to change the programs background and border colors using simple HTML HEX codes, this means a users with a black background can blend the sharebar just as easily as a user with a white background.

Once you’ve setup the actual Sharebar display you can then choose which social buttons (Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) you want to display. You can also choose which order those buttons will be shown. For example you can place the Facebook Like button first then the Twitter button and so on.

As you’ll notice the ability to place buttons is as simple as pushing the up and down arrows to create a placement order. You can also “Edit” buttons to change the “large” and “small” button outputs by placing new code in each area.

One of my favorite parts of the WordPress Sharebar plugin is the ability to add new social sharing buttons by simply naming those buttons and adding in the code for small and large buttons. Here’s a quick look at the easy to use button sharing setup.

As you’ll notice once the buttons are added you can then click “enable” to auto add the button to your Sharebar plugin.

Once you’ve installed all of your required buttons and created the settings placement for your sharebar the display will look similar to the Sharebar page shown below:

Now scroll down your page and watch as the social sharing bar following your screen as you scroll.

Give Sharebar for WordPress a try today and let me know what you think.

The program can be downloaded at WP Really Simple Health and offers users just three simple options for setting up the program.

Here’s a screenshot for the program’s health settings:

Once installed the program then provides instant access to a users server setup in the admin bar at the top of their WordPress page setup. Having immediate access means you can quickly see your servers health without needing to navigate to a specialized area for the program.

Here’s a quick look at the navigation bar for one of my personal sites that runs the WP Really Simple Health plugin:

As you can see the uptime is listed as “up from” while the systems RAM output is shown along with CPU% which is blank in that example because it only displays Cpu last minute load.

One really nice part about Simple Health Settings is the fact that it uses classes to avoid naming collisions which in turn means you won’t have conflicts with your other plugins, wordpress files and the plugin.

Overall WP Really Simple Health is a simple to use WordPress plugin that offers users easy access to some very important statistics without any extra work on their behalf.

Since this is a new WordPress plugin I will provide my standard disclaim: Server load, stability and other issues may exist and have not fully been tested, if you use this plugin on a platform that charges for compute cycles, CPU usage or other load variables you will want to closely monitory your user account.

But while most WordPress users are well aware of Akismet, various caching plugins and other near-essential tools for blogging, over the years I’ve found a slew of lesser-known plugins that have become indespensible to me and my bloggging.

Though the full list could probably go on for quite some time, here is a list of five of the more important plugins I’ve run across and how they’ve helped to make me a better blogger over the years and are plugins I probably wouldn’t build a new site without.

Editorial Calendar

Have you ever had a great idea for a post but forgotten what it was when you sat down to write it the next day or the next week? Have you ever finished a great brainstorming session but had no idea when you’d have time to post all of your new ideas? Then you need an editorial calendar.

The editorial calendar plugin for WordPress makes it easy to jot down your post ideas, arrange them by date to plan out when you’ll run each one and then rearrange them as things change. Did you get an urgent news item that has to run today? Drag today’s planned post to another day and keep moving.

The process is incredibly smooth and efficient, making it easy to manage your posts and plan out your blog weeks, even months in advance.

WP CleanFix

One of the things that makes WordPress great is its use of MySQL database for storing posts, comments and other data. However, that database is often WordPress’ greatest weakness as it can get bloated and slow very easily.

Between post revisions, spam comments and other, largely unneeded, database entries, your database can be many times the size of what it should be. That puts extra strain on your server and can slow your site down.

WP CleanFix goes through your database and removes all of the unneeded gunk. It can then optimize your database to make sure that it’s as small and as efficient as possible. It can also do find/replaces in your post and comment content to help you bulk edit your site.

With WP CleanFix, as with any other plugin that manipulates the database, you’ll want to make backups of your database before using it just in case there are any problems.

Smush.it

Images are an important part of blogging and nearly every single post does better with an image or two included in it. However, those images can add a good deal of data to your page and, as such, can take a lengthy amount of time to download if not properly compressed.

The Smush.it WordPress plugin makes compression effortless. Simply install the plugin and it will put every image you upload through the Media Library through Smush.it, which will in turn strip out unneeded data and reduce your image size, often drastically, without reducing image quality.

In some cases, I’ve had images shave as much as 20% or more off of their file size, a small difference that can add up in a big way on a large site.

Article Templates

Many sites have recurring post types that follow a particular pattern. Whether it’s a podcast post in a consistent structure, a weekly linkroll that always has certain information, etc., repeating these posts can be a real pain with WordPress as you have to copy and paste a previous post, remove the old information and then add the new.

Article Templates plugin offers a much better way to do it. Simply create your template for the post, meaning a blank version of it, and then when you create a new one you just apply the template and fill it in. You can edit your templates at any time and create new ones if needed.

The plugin is a tremendous time saver for any recurring posts and it also prevents a lot of human error by automating as much of the process as possible.

P3 – Plugin Performance Profiler

One of the great things about WordPress plugins is that they enable WordPress to become a custom fit for the site you’re building. However, those plugins can also bea performance hazard for your site, slowing it down and frustrating your readers.

It can be a real challenge to know which plugins are causing the problem as often times the most innocuous-looking plugin is the one gobbling up all of the resources.

Plugin Performance Profile, written by GoDaddy, one of the largest WordPress hosts in the world, takes a look at your site’s loading time and analyzes which plugins are the ones causing things to slow down. You can then either delete those plugins or, if needed, swap them out for more efficient alternatives.

It’s extremely simple to use, just install and scan, P3 provides its results in simple-to-read charts and graphs that clearly highlight any plugins gone wild. It’s a great plugin when building a new site as it lets you see what plugins are problematic before you launch.

Bottom Line

With WordPress, plugins are both the true power and the true danger of the system. They can expand the functionality of WordPress far beyond its core and create an almost custom CMS for any site you want to run,

However on the other hand, they can create problems and conflicts, especially with certain themes. They can also slow your site down, create security vulnerabilities and other problems.

As such, it’s best to use plugins with caution, being careful that you need the plugin and that you can’t solve the same problem with simple HTML. Sometimes you can actually install a plugin temporarily, copy the HTML code it produces and use that instead of running the plugin constantly.

Still, there are many times plugins are necessary and useful. In those cases, you shouldn’t shy away from them but, instead, bask in the power that is the extensible WordPress.

Of course, PHP can do just about anything if you know how to tell it to. I thought it would be awesome if I could have a shared links box on the sidebar of each WordPress blog, and have a form online that I could enter in the name and URL to each new blog as I built them, and then have PHP add that link to all 98 blogs instantly. Thankfully, I was able to set this up exactly how I needed it. This is what I am going to show you today, and you can use it however you see fit. One thing I want to remind you of is that even though I am using the shared content box for links, it technically can be used for anything, your imagination is the limit. Let’s get started.

Requirements

WordPress Blog(s)
Hosting with PHP and MySQL Database (this is a common setup, so your host should have it)
PHPMyAdmin Access

Step 1

Download the Samsarin PHP Widget to your WP blog;  install and activate it. This plugin lets you create a widget that can execute any PHP code right in the widget. This is crucial for you because it allows you to connect to your PHP database and display the content right there on your blog.

Step 2

Open up your PHPMyAdmin dashboard, and create a new database called links_database. You do this by clicking on the “databases” tab from the PHPMyAdmin home page, then you can specify the name of the database you want to create. If you don’t have enough admin rights to create a database from PHPMyAdmin, then you have to create it from within your hosting panel (CPanel, etc.).

Step 3

Once you have the database created, you need to execute the following SQL code to create the table that will house the links. Do this by clicking on the SQL tab up top and pasting in and running the following SQL code:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `links` (
`site_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`url` varchar(100) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

That SQL code will create a table named links inside the links_database database. Notice that it has two columns/fields:  site_name is the anchor text, and url is the URL of the site that the anchor text will point to.

Step 4

Next we are going to create a PHP file named connect.php which will contain the login and password for the specific database that we want to hook up to in our other scripts. Go ahead and create connect.php with your text editor and insert the following code into it (be sure to change the username and password to your own):

<?php
# Type="MYSQL"
# HTTP="true"
$hostname_links = "localhost";
$database_links = "links_database";
$username_links = "DB_USERNAME";
$password_links = "DB_PASSWORD";
$conn = mysql_pconnect($hostname_links, $username_links, $password_links) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR);
?>

Step 5

Now we create another simple PHP script called update.php, which will actually update the database every time we create and add a new link. Fill the update.php with the following code:

<?php require_once('connect.php'); ?>
<?php
$site_name = $_POST['site_name'];
$url = $_POST['url'];
mysql_select_db("links_database", $jim);
$query = "INSERT INTO links (site_name,url ) VALUES ('$_POST[site_name]','$_POST[url]')";
if (!mysql_query($query,$conn))
{
die('Error: ' . mysql_error());
}
echo "1 record added";
?>

Step 6

Next we are going to create another PHP script called enterblog.php which will serve as the online web form that you will go to every time you want to add a new link to the list. Create enterblog.php with the following code in it:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Enter New Blog</title>
</head>
<body>
<div align="center"><form id="form1" name="form1" method="post" action="update.php">
<table width="500" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4">
<tr>
<td width="190">Enter name of new site:</td>
<td width="294">
<input name="site_name" type="text" id="site_name" size="50" maxlength="50" />
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Enter the url of the site:</td>
<td><input name="url" type="text" id="url" value="http://www." size="50" maxlength="100" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td align="center"><input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Add Site to Database" /></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Step 7

We now will create another PHP script called displayurls.php which will be the script we call from the widget in WordPress. This script simply pulls all of the rows from the links table in the links_database. Put the following code inside displayurls.php:

<?php
// Connects to your Database
mysql_connect("localhost", "DB_USERNAME", "DB_PASSWORD") or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("links_database") or die(mysql_error());
$data = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM links") or die(mysql_error());
$rt=mysql_query($data);
while($nt=mysql_fetch_array($data)){
Print "<table border=0 cellpadding=3>";
echo "<tr><td><a href=\"";
echo $nt['url'];
echo "\">";
echo $nt['site_name'];
echo "</a>";
echo "</td>";
echo "</tr>";
Print "</table>";
}
?>

Step 8

Okay almost done! Upload all of the PHP files we created here to the root directory of your site. Then change the file permissions on them to 755. Once you are done with that, it is time to bring up the web form and enter in a few links to the database. To do that, just type in the URL to your enterblog.php script, which should be something like http://www.yourblog.com/enterblog.php and you will see a two field web form. Enter in a few sites and URL’s, and hit enter after you type each one. It should tell you that 1 row was added if it went through successfully. Once that is done we can move on to the final step.

Step 9

Go into your WordPress admin and click on the Widgets option under the Appearance menu. In the widget selections you should see a widget titled something like “Samsarin PHP 1″, make sure you drag that widget somewhere onto your visible sidebar. When the widget pops up, enter in the title of the widget which might be something like “Links” and then in the body field type in the following PHP code:

<?php include("displayurls.php"); ?>

Then hit Save. If you should run into an issue where you cannot see the links, try typing in your Absolute Server Path inside the above PHP include code (so instead of “displayurls.php” you might put something like “/var/www/displayurls.php” but the exact path is different for everyone’s server). You can get the absolute server path from your hosting company. When you bring up your blog, you should see the links box on any site you put that widget on. If you have this widget installed on every blog on your server, you can add a link to them all instantly just by entering the link info once into the web form and hitting enter! Pretty cool huh?!

Just a side note, I am not a PHP programmer. I know enough to modify some things and write simple scripts, but if you are a PHP guru and you see something that can be improved in these scripts, or see something wrong, feel free to voice your opinion in the comments and I will listen to all of your ideas. Good Luck!

You can start by downloading the nRelate plugin directly from your Admin plugin section with a simple “nRelate” search. The program is in active development and currently supported databases up to WordPress 3.3.1.

Once installed you will go to the nRelate tab on the left side of your administration screen and click on the “Dashboard” option which revealed this screen:

As you will notice you have the option to set a default image (in case all your posts don’t have images). However I would actually suggest uploading images to all your posts and then placing the image URL in a custom field. This was you can use the “Custom Field for Images” to display an image thumb using nRelate without displaying images on posts when they are not needed.

You will also need to setup an account with nRelate if you would like to earn money through their program. You will receive an ad ID number which is inputting to earn cash.

Below those options is the ability to exclude WordPress categories, simply click on each checkbox you see if there are certain sections in which you don’t want nRelate to appear.

After the dashboard options have been set you simple go back to the admin NRelate area and choose “Related Content.” The first section you will see contained the image size for your nRelate platform output:

After you have chosen your image size and your default image below those options you’ll then move on to fill out some other important information, for example you can choose the relate content box output. In the screenshot below the box reads “Related Articles” but this could be anything you choose. Next you’ll choose the number of related articles to show from your website. If for example you want to show 2 advertiser ads and three ads from your website you’ll choose the “3″ option.

One of the most important options is choosing the strength of relevancy for the post. The more relevant you can make your content the higher CTR (Click Through Rate) you will receive. Keep in mind that Low relevancy should be used with sites that may only contain a few dozen posts, otherwise there might not be enough relevant content to display any posts.

I like that you can also choose how far back in our archive to go. For example if you write evergreen content that won’t go out of relevancy to your readers you can literally go back 10 years.

Finally choose to display the post title (recommended) and then limit the number of characters if you chose. I wouldn’t make this number too high since it could leave an undesired look in the widget if you tend to use really long titles which you shouldn’t be doing anyways.

In the next set of options more settings are available including the ability to show an excerpt for each post, the ability to set content from your blogroll and even the option to choose which sections on your website (posts, pages, archives, etc) receive the NRelated Post.

After those settings have been chosen you can finally setup the actual placement of the nRelate platform. This section is pretty straightforward, you can check “top of post” or “bottom of post” to have the widget show directly below or before your content. You can also leave those unchecked and use the manual method by adding the programs php call directly into your template where you want it to display.

This is also the section where you can choose if you want to display advertising through the nRelate program.

You’ve likely noticed that there is a style gallery option, this gallery allows you to choose the CSS output for the type of nRelate image overlays you would like to choose. Here’s a quick peak at a few of the options:

With gallery options you can make nRelate content match your site which in turn means better click through rates and more earnings plus a better bounce rate as users peruse other articles on your website through the program.

Overall nRelate has become my favorite WordPress based plugin. I love that it works with any wordpress theme and that it’s easy to install with plenty of customization options.

Working with an open-source platform that provides open-source plugins means it’s often cheap to build and maintain a website using WordPress, however because the platform and plugins are often open source it can also create a security headache for site administrators and that’s where Ultimate Security Checker comes into play.

The program is simple to use, essentially users simply search for “Ultimate Security Checker” in the WordPress repository and upload it to their server or they just install it direct from the WordPress plugins search section inside the admin area of their websites WordPress setup.

Once installed the program will ask you to run a diagnostic at which time Ultimate Security Checker will examine your blocks file settings, server settings, WordPress database and required plugin updates for stability.

Here’s the output for the program after a check has been completed:

As you’ll notice each area that is checked is ranked, this shows users where areas of improvement can be made, the program also gives each WordPress blog a security points score, in this case my blog scored 102 out of 115 points because several server configuration steps could be better optimized.

Users can choose to “Run the tests again!” whenever they want while the settings tab at the top of the screen will also allow them to set a reminder scan for 1 or 2 weeks (this can also be set to “never” if you choose).

Next to the “Run the Tests” tab at the top of the screen users will also fine the “File Analysis” tab, in this option you can have Ultimate Security Checker scan each file on your blog while searching for suspicious code, this of this tab as the virus scan portion of the plugin.

Once you have found areas that require improvement simply click on the “How To Fix” tab which will in turn lead you to helpful resources that explain how to better your blog through simple fixes that you can handle on your own or with the help of your hosting provider.

And just in case you forget about Ultimate Security Checker I wouldn’t worry to much, your security score always shows direct at the top of your admin bar, ensuring you can keep an eye on the security of your blog at all times.

Use Ultimate Security Checker alongside WP Clean-Options and you’ll have a nicely secured blog that runs safe and fast for years to come.

As you may already be aware when some plugins are deleted they fail to remove their database tables from your websites MySql database, conversely they leave commands nested inside your WP-Options table. In some cases poorly constructed plugins can slow down your website and keep it slow even after removed.

WP’s Clean Options plugin however helped you find those orphaned plugins and delete them with just a few simple clicks.

To get started simply search for “Clean Options” from the “Add New” screen in your WordPress admin areas Plugins screen or download and install the plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/clean-options/

One installed the plugin is located under “Tools.”

After clicking on the plugin you will see the following screen:

As you’ll notice I only click on the “Don’t show the Known WordPress Core Options for this “Find” and that’s because I’m only trying to find Plugin files that were left behind. If you don’t know what you are doing or want to error on the side of caution I would suggest only clicking on the top box. Next you will simply click “Find Orphaned Options.”

The next display will take several seconds (10-20 seconds on average) to display the orphaned plugin and the output will look something like this:

As you’ll notice the plugin options are typically named directly after the plugin you have installed or may have removed. For example if you were using the Sharebar Plugin you would see “Sharebar_bg.” At this point you simply click on all of the plugins that you want to remove tables for. At the bottom of all your options that have been selected you then simply choose “View Selected Options Information.”

The final output screen will look like this:

After you have verified that the plugins displayed must be removed you just click on “Yes, Removal ALL of these options from the wp_options table. You can also select “No. Don’t remove them, return to the first screen” if you have made a mistake. Click submit and your choice is processed.

One qualm with this plugin, if you have installed 50 plugins over the life of your website and there are 1000 orphans options there’s a good chance the program will time out, this is because it will take longer then the typical 30 second timeout option found on most hosts. To fix this problem you can have your host extend your timeout function or add a command to your .htaccess file to do so on your own.

If all else fails you can always access your phpMyAdmin area, open the WP_Options table and select each orphaned table by hand and choose delete. However when used regularly Clean Options allows you to avoid fiddling manually with your WordPress database.

As always remember to backup your WordPress database regularly to avoid any issues that this plugin or other plugins may cause for your website.

Give the Wordress Clean Options plugin a try today and let me know what you think.

Once you have uploaded the programs plugin to your WordPress install you will find a screen explaining the different post update shortcodes that can be used by the program. As you’ll notice you have the option with each tweet to add such output as post titles, blog name, a short excerpt from your content, category information, date timestamps, the posts URL and even the post author name. These options are all great ways to brand your content in a unique fashion that isn’t your standard “Post Title – Link – Blog Name” format.

The first step of the setup process is to create a Twitter App for the program. The application will actually show you how to create that application so we will skip that step for now.

Once you have your Twitter username, consumer key, consumer secret, access token and access token secret options from your Twitter developer account you simply enter them in the provided space and click on the Connect button. This step will verify your account and give WP to Twitter access to post information from your blog posts on your behalf.

Once you have setup your Twitter application you can then choose when to Tweet posts. For example the first option allows you to choose “update when a post is published.” Below that checkbox you enter the shortcodes we talked about above. For example “#title# #url#” will post your tweet at “Title of Post – URL Link” which you can change through shortcodes. You can even add words before those codes such as “New Post - #title# #url#”

I mention added words because the new option is to send a tweet when a post has been updated, in this case you might have all edited posts go out as “Updated Post - #title# #url#”

Users can also choose to tweet out new pages or updated pages, this is especially good if you run a website with a strong privacy or copyright page and you want users to be aware of changes. For example perhaps you want a group of writers to see your privacy policy update on a page.

You can also set tweets for comments and links however those options can quickly crowd your Twitter accounts timeline.

One of my favorite parts of Wp to Twitter is the ability to choose which shortcodes I use. The system had direct support for Su.Pr (StumbleUpon) and Bit.ly shortening services along with the YOURLS Service.

To use all three services just sign up for an account at your service of choice and enter in the desired information, it’s that simple. Once installed whenever you use the #url# tag as part of your chosen output you will receive that shortened URL using your service of choice.

Of course if you don’t use one of those options Twitter will shorten the URL using the Twitter URL shortening service.

The next section is for Advanced Tweet output. One of my favorite parts of the WP to Twitter plugin is the ability to set Hashtags from tags. For example my tag could be “Facebook” at which point my Twitter message would read “Title – URL #Facebook” If you run a blog that is focused on very specific topics you can even create your own tags on your posts that match targeted hashtags you have created.

You can even choose how many tags to include in case you use 3 or 4 tags instead of one. The advanced settings also allows you to choose a Twitter date format and even choose wording to put before ALL tweets if you don’t want to specific that information in the basic settings on a per tweet basis (which I don’t see the point in doing personally).

Not pictured in the screenshot above is the “Author” tag, this allows you to use the #Author# code to make reference to a specific author in a tweet. For example my Twitter name is @TechObsessed and if I specific that name in my user account via WordPress my Tweets could read “Title – URL #Facebook @Techobsessed.”

If you want to build branding for your authors the author tag is a great way to accomplish that goal.

Overall I find WP to Twitter to be the most customize and user friendly option available in the WordPress repository, give it a try today and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.