Most Popular WordPress Plugins For Your Blog [Infographic]

WordPress is definitely the most preferred blogging platform for bloggers. With WordPress, you are having the full control to modify and tune the performance of the website  accordingly to your requirement. So it requires few essential plugins which help your blog to sustain over net and increases feasibility on search engines. Here I have listed 25 Best WordPress Plugins of 2014. The plugins mentioned below will make your WordPress website fast and secure.

When it comes to functionality and performance, it’s hard to beat a WordPress website. But all that power doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of the plugins you select to solve problems and add features. There are thousands of plugins in WordPress database. Out of those many, this infographic recommends 30 of WordPress’s most popular plugins.

Source: WPtemplate

Top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins For Your Blog [Infographic]

Most of the bloggers choose WordPress platform for their blog because of its useful plugins. With the right plugins, your WordPress blog can reach out the huge audience according to your niche. SEO opportunities will become easy if you use some essential plugins.

There are many reasons webmasters should adopt WordPress as their content management system. Having access to thousands of plugins available for this platform is a pretty good reason. Plugins can enhance your site’s functionality and enhance your visitors experience on it. Let's look into this inforgraphic that explains the top 10 WordPress plugins uses and features. 

 Source: OnlineMediaMasters

How To Remove Comment Spam In WordPress

Comment spam has been one of the common problems with any blogging platforms. Being the most used blogging platform WordPress is also having the problem..

Comment spam is done by some website owners who want to boost their Google rankings by having lots of links pointing to their own websites. The result of this might be any of the following:

1. Once Google finds content spam, they will often block the site it’s coming from because it messes up their ranking system.
2. It consumes and wastes your valuable time and internet bandwidth to remove them.
3. Commenting spams heavily is a situation in which the server tries a lot to post bad information or deliver notification emails to you for each comment which in turn increases you server load.Consider a situation where a blogger received over 1 thousand email notifications of the comments on a single post which needed approval. In this case that bloggers will be getting more and more gradually and ultimately crashing his mail server resulting website unavailability.

If each of the comments goes for approval then it would be a serious problem. WordPress is having multiple plugin but one of the mostly used and popular is Akismet plugin for WordPress.

How Akismet Plugin for WordPress Helps In Removing Comment Spams :

Akismet is a WordPress plugin which is there to help you filter out those spammers. It is very easy to get it installed into your WordPress system. 

Follow the below steps to install Akismet Plugin :

1. Download the plugin, and upload it to the blog directory on your server in the plugins subdirectory under wp-content. 

2. Now activate from the WordPress plugins menu. 

3. If you get any message which says that you need the Akismet API, go to the WordPress website and search for one.

There will be an instruction in Akismet, which says “forget that spam was ever a problem.” So you don’t have to do anything else at all. Eventually the spam will simply be bounced. You will not receive a notification, nor will you have to delete spams wasting time.

Did You Pass Math plugin for WordPress :

Among the various plugins for WordPress, one more popular plugin is there for eliminating spam is the “Did You Pass Math” plugin. It basically makes the user perform a simple math problem before submitting a comment. The advantage of using this plugin is that most humans can understand this and most spambots can’t. So it is obvious that a comment posted through this is a legitimate comment. Here you can show a notice of caution that comments will be deleted if the math answer submitted is wrong.

What if all plugins fail ?

If all the plugins fail to remove spammers then there is one option by denying them access to your comments area. It does not mean you have to disable your comments section. For this you need to set up a filter.

Blocking their IPs would not help this. Most of the spammers use random IPs, while blocking IPs may reduce for a short time. Spammers are also experiment hijacking other people’s IP addresses. But if you are looking for short duration solution, you can try it. The IP address is included in the information packet for the comment. It is as easy to detect like traceable phone number. Search for patterns in your IP numbers.

Working with .htaccess file :

Best way to prevent them by using the .htaccess file to block unwanted IPs from even seeing your blog. Fro example, below lines can be added to the file:

order allow,deny

deny from 123.123.123.123

deny from 456.456.456.*

deny from 789.789.*.*

allow from all

As we all know that IPs are four-part numbers, such as 192.168.0.1, and if you see a pattern with the first two sections being identical, you can block all IPs of that type by simply listing them as 192.168.*.*, as you see above. It screens out all these IP numbers. In this case all the blocked IPs will get a 403 error page. Now you can customize yours so that your contact details are listed in case you’re blocking out a legitimate user. Never use your regular email because a spammer can harvest that too. Instead, encode your email so that it’s not automatically readable.

Once you realize that your problems are addressed, you can remove the block from your .htaccess file. If it still doesn’t work, or if you don’t see an IP pattern, it’s likely that spambots are hijacking someone else’s machine to attack your site. In this case, do not use the IP block. In other case, if you don’t have an IP pattern of attack, this may not work. An IP follows almost the same pattern, with the last of the four sections referring to the specific computer it is attached to.

Google’s Nofollow Attribute

You can use the Google Nofollow attribute for links. This attribute is embedded automatically by modern versions of WordPress.

It does not remove links, instead it makes those links irrelevant to Google. As a result it doesn’t hurt your rank in Google, and it doesn't allow a spammer to send data to your site.

It is not a quick fix. But it is a way to make your website resistant to spammers in the future. In case your website is already a target, you’ll have to work with it slowly, incorporating all these fixes. else you can turn on the nofollow option in your WordPress system; this will reject any spambots. Better you should upgrade your WordPress version or use soem similar plugin which will work in this principle.

12 Important WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins are the keys to blogs SEO practices. We will discuss about the 12 most downloaded WordPress plugins which have been downloaded from web the most. In this post we mentioned all the the 12 plugins which have been downloaded a trillion times. So needless to say that these are the best plugins you can use in your blogs.

Here we go with the 12 plugins for WordPress by listing them in most downloaded to least order.

1. All in One SEO Pack : Mostly used and almost each and every WopdPress blogger use this. It automatically optimizes your blog for Search Engines (A preferred tool for Search Engine Optimization) 

2. Google XML Sitemaps : It creates a Google sitemap compliant XML. A complete reference to the Sitemap of your blog.

3. WP Super Cache : This one is a very fast caching engine that generates static html files.

4. Contact Form 7 : This plugin is very simple to use and flexible too. 

5. Sociable : It automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking websites to your posts, pages and RSS feeds.

6. WP-DB-Backup : This is mostly used when there is a need for on-demand backup of your database.

7. Google Analytics : It adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics for better working.

8. Google Analyticator : It is also similar to the Google Analytics which enables Google Analytics tracking.

9 Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button : It basically provides readers the platform where readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using a service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google+ and over 100 more.

10. WP-Polls : It basically adds an AJAX poll system to your blog. So you can add a poll into your blog post or the pages individually as needed.

11. Sidebar Widgets : It adds “Sidebar Widgets” panel under Presentation menu. 

12. WP-PageNavi : It adds a more advanced paging navigation your blog which enables better nevigation.

Most of the WodrPress Bloggers use All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, WP Super Cache and Contact Form 7 on their blogs. So there plugins can be considered as the mostly used plugins. 

**Akismet is not included as it comes with the default installation for WordPress blogs.