Tag Archives: Wordpress

WordPress Page Numbers Plugin

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This plugin sounds a little insignificant but its far from it. If you set up your blog with, for example a free theme, its quite typical to have the pages on your blog use a “next post” or “previous post”.

This isn’t good for two reasons.

Firstly, it won’t help search engines find the pages on your site because they are set in series by this method, therefore to get to the earliest posts the search engine spiders will have to follow and scan, follow and scan follow and scan in this method.  Cumbersome and not very friendly. Secondly, visitors will work in the same way.  They have no desire o cycle though 12 pages one at a time to reach a desired post.

What WP Page Numbers does is add a line of numbers (surprise surprise!) in one of 5 styles you can choose from, to the bottom of the page allowing spiders to reach all the following pages from one place, effectively opening up the site in a friendly manner and allowing them to search and scan in parallel rather than in series.

This is the same for visitors.

They can simply click the page numbers and skip to that page immediately rather than being forced to cycle through all the irrelevant content they have no interest in.

Not all themes will need this plugin, but if you realise that you do, it will require a little editing in the theme code in order to work so you may need som help to sort this out. Definately worht it on a search engine level and a usability level.

Author: Jens Törnell

Download the WordPress Page Numbers Plugin.

WordPress plugins for Greeting Visitors

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I absolutely adore this plugin. Greet Box is exactly what it says it is, a box that greets your visitors.

The beauty of this plugin though is that it can see where your visitor has come from and presents them with a greeting related to the site they originated from. For example, if a visitor has come from Twitter, the icon displayed in the box will be the twitter icon and the message will read:

“Hello fellow Twitter user! Don’t forget to Twit this post if you like it, or follow me on Twitter if you find me interesting.”

The great thing about this is it adds a little magic to the greeting by recognising where the visitor came from but also, because the messages are fully customisable you can change the greeting to suit your site and make the whole thing a lot more personal, allowing the visitor to feel just that little bit more special.

Greet Box Placement in Posts

One bit of advice I would give here is regarding the placement of the Greet Box.  Many people will be inclined to place the greeting at the top of the post due to the format of the message it contains but I would suggest that you use the options to have the box appear at the end of the post allowing the visitor to read your information and make a decision rather than asking them before they have even begun reading.

I think it is a little obnoxious to ask people to subscribe to your RSS based on the quality of the article before they have had that chance to decide from themselves, but thats only my opinion.

Simple to install and configure, this plugin is a no brainer!

Author: Thaya Kareeson

Download WordPress Greet Box plugin.

WordPress Super Cache Plugin for fast loading blogs

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WP-Super-Cache is probably one of the most widely used plugins ever created.

Recommended by the likes of Matt Cutts right down to yours truly, it is the essential tool to safeguard your site when it comes to managing and maintaining site stability when your traffic is high and your server resources are being stretched to the limit.

If, during the life of your site you should gain a traffic surge, for example you write something very in depth or challenging or insightful and your visitors decide to use the Digg button a lot, hence driving more traffic your way quaikly and in bulk, the PHP scripts that access the MYSQL database that your site runs off, will be stretched to and possibly beyond, breaking point and there is nothing worse than a dead site for new visitor!  The reason for this is that each time someone visits your site the page is served or “called” from the database on the request of the visitor via PHP.

Database Caching Explained

With a traffic surge or even consistently high traffic, this puts a lot of pressure on the database as it continually serves the page to each new visitor.  Imagine it like a restaurant that’s got one waiter and suddenly it fills up with a queue outside, each person must be seated, the order taken, served fresh food, which is freshly cooked and then shown out. The waiter would in this example be your blog and the cook or chief would be the PHP scripts. That’s not really the best way to run things is it and the inevitable outcome is disaster!

Now imagine that the waiter and chief where prepared in advance with a set menu and 1000′s of plates all ready to be handed out immediately.  There is no expiry date on web pages so don’t worry about hygiene or food poisoning :P. People would be surging into the restaurant and the chief and waiter would be able to manage and serve all their requirements, not without strain or pressure but certainly with more efficiency, speed and less chance of a meltdown.

WordPress Super Cache is Essential

That’s exactly what this plugin does for your blog. In technical terms it creates a cached version of your page in HTML without accessing the PHP allow your site to say live, serve visitors and do it quickly and with minimal problems.

Just to clarify, even if your site hasn’t got massive traffic, speed loading time is still a major factor and using this plugin will make the pages appear faster regardless of server load or the amounts of visits you have so even on a low traffic site it is still worth using.

Author: Donncha O Caoimh

Download the WP Super Cache Plugin