Category Archives: Wordpress Plugins

Tried and tested wordpress plugins that have proven themselves to be effective and in certain cases, essential for wordpress deployment, development and maintenance.

WordPress Navigation with Breadcrumbs Plugin

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Another one from Joost de Valk, this little plugin is great if your site’s theme doesn’t have breadcrumbs installed.  Not sure what breadcrumbs are?

Yoast describes them as :

Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. They are good for two things:

  • They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
  • They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

As you can guess they are pretty important but this plugin is a backup in case your theme hasn’t already got them included.  It does take a little messing with the theme files, but the support details are excellent on the plugin page, so they should guide you through.

Author: Joost de Valk

Download the Breadcrumbs Plugin.

WordPress Blog Metrics Plugin

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A great little plugin from Joost de Valk for measuring and monitoring the amount of “work” you do on your blog during the month.

Small and unobtrusive, it’s a handy little application that let’s you see which months you have done too much (if there is such a thing), and which months you’ve been a lazy slacker. :P. It can come in especially handy if  you run a multi author blog and want to see how the authros are maintaining their overall averages and input.

It’s not a game breaker plugin, but I find it useful for some self-analysis on occasion, and to break down the averages of my overall output.

Author: Joost de Valk

Download the Blog Metrics Plugin.

WordPress plugin Apture for linking

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Apture is a lovely, smooth little plugin that integrates itself as a button onto the post WYSIWYG editor.

Admittedly, it’s a bit of an aesthetic plugin rather than adding any SEO, blog loading time or speed benefits. It’s dead smooth, works a treat and its one major attribute is that it adds some nice stickiness to your site.

What do I mean by stickiness? Well, without digressing too much, links to other sites are all well and good, but when you give a link to something else, there’s a healthy chance that the visitor will click this link and move to that landing page, meaning they will have left your site. Stickiness means that you can still serve that link via the Apture plugin, but when they click the link, it springs into action with some really cool pop up boxes and windows rather than a new browser window. This helps you retain the visitor and encourages them to stick around. Hence: stickiness!

Once you install the plugin, you’ll see the buttons appear on the top bar of the WYSIWYG editor. The step by step instructions are dead intuitive, so get it on and enjoy.

Heres a video to explain a little more about it.

Author: Apture

Download the Apture plugin