WordPress plug-ins are like sand at sea. There are at least a handful of plug-ins for every imaginable application that will add the necessary features to WordPress.
Quality criteria
However, as far as the quality, relevance and security of the extensions are concerned, there are enormous differences. Therefore, it is always worthwhile to stay up-to-date and follow the latest developments. You can find the overview in the official directory.
Our plug-in recommendations
The range extends from functional extensions to the integration of new social networks to plug-ins for optimization.
Simple Tags
When selecting plug-ins, you should pay attention to the following:
Infinite Scroll
If everything looks good, then install the plug-in first on a local copy of your site to test if everything works as desired. Database tables may be added. Most plug-ins can easily be removed, but now and then you get a black sheep, which makes more problems. Therefore, the use of a website copy or a trial version of WordPress is definitely a good thing.
We have chosen a plug-in from the fields of tagging, usability, social media and performance.
Simple Tags scans the content of the article using external, semantic web services and automatically suggests matching tags to the article. These web services are technically based on state-of-the-art methods of "Natural Language Processing" (NLP) and "Machine Learning."
They analyze the transmitted text, extract entities such as places, people, events and can even recognize connections. The services used by SimpleTags include Yahoo Term Extraction API, Opencalais, Alchemy, Zemanta and Tag The Net.
For some tools like Opencalais or Zemanta, you first register for an API key to use the service via web service.
Other features of Simple Tags are the automatic linking of the tags in the articles. You can use this method to generate many internal links. You can also edit the tags of many posts at the same time with the bulk edit function. This is handy if, for example, you have neglected the manual tagging function of WordPress and you want to use it again - for reasons of search engine optimization, for example.
You know it from the Facebook Activity Stream, the Twitter Timeline and the Pinterest Wall: the infinite scrolling. The content is always loaded when you reach the end of the page. Of course there is also a plug-in: Infinite Scroll.
The plug-in overwrites the page navigation on the home page or on the article page. By default, the most recent articles are listed there, depending on the setting. If you now navigate to the end of the page, the next posts will be automatically loaded by Ajax request.
In order for Infinite Scroll to work properly, specify the CSS selectors in the settings, ie the IDs and classes of the HTML tags that are responsible for the page navigation in the template.
Pinterest "Pin It" Button
The plug-in then exchanges them against its own logic. A funny message appears when you have reached the absolute end of the page, ie the first post ever written: "Congratulations, you've reached the end of the internet." This message can, of course, also be changed in the settings.
The behavior is usability aspects a nice thing for the visitor of the website, from search machine vision it is however not quite optimal, if the contents of the individual posts are completely available on the overview page. Also the amount of page calls is, of course, lower than if the user has to switch to the bottom of the page to see the entire mail.
W3 TotalCache
Pinterest is one of the newer social networks, which currently has enormous growth rates and focuses on collecting images. The Pin-It-Button can be integrated into the website in the same way as the Facebook Like or Twitter Tweet button with the WordPress Plug-in Pinterest "Pin it" Button. This allows content from the blog to be posted to the Pinterest Wall of the viewer.
The difference to Facebook or Twitter is that it is primarily at Pinterest. Therefore, after clicking on the pin-it button, you can select which image you want to post to your own wall.
The options of the plug-in can be used to comfortably set the pages on which the button should appear.
Conclusion
Furthermore, it is possible to determine whether an image which is intended for the pinning process can already be selected when writing the article, or whether the selection of the image is left to the user. The use of the Pinterest connection is particularly useful with very image-heavy sites such as fashion and lifestyle blogs.
Users are bored with slow-loading websites - Google has also recognized this and therefore the loading time of pages with its ranking algorithms included. In the plaintext, this means that fast-loading sites are preferred. Especially in the case of shared hosting packages, in which many customers have to share a server, the performance of the individual web sites often leaves something to be desired. Especially if the number of visitors increases or the database is bloated from the many contents, this can have a negative impact on the speed.
A variety of caching mechanisms can help. In doing so, contents are temporarily stored temporarily so that they do not have to be dynamically loaded from the database every time a page is called. Caching is not equal to caching, that is, in a complex web application can be temporarily stored on different levels. There are a lot of caching plug-ins for WordPress, but they usually only cover a small part of the possibilities.
W3 TotalCache (W3TC) is probably the most comprehensive and professional performance / caching plug-in for WordPress. It also offers many configuration possibilities beyond pure caching, such as code minimization, database, object and full page caching. Even the integration of a content delivery network (CDN) is possible.
WordPress plug-ins are, as already mentioned, massive. Do not overload your blog with unnecessary gadgets, because each plug-in is again a small piece of code that can not work and makes maintenance more complex.
If you pick out the raisins, you can easily improve the usability, performance and search engine-friendliness of your website with a few small, targeted measures.
Is the current plug-in current? That means: Is it compatible with your WordPress version? When was it last updated? In some circumstances, a plug-in will also work if it is not explicitly released for the latest version of WordPress, but you need to test it carefully. How many stars did it evaluate? How many evaluations are based on? 100 times 4 stars are certainly better than once 5 stars. How often has it been downloaded? Just read the title, but also the description, FAQs and support, and check out the screenshots.
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