Top 10 Underrated Wordpress Plugins

There are several lists of “Top 10” Wordpress plugins around the Internet. Most of them, however, refer to the best or most popular plugins. Guess what, I’ve had enough of Akismet, Adsense Deluxe, Related Entries and company!

Jokes apart, those plugins are certainly awesome, but there are many others out there that can be life savers, and people often neglect them. Below you will the Top 10 Underrated Wordpress plugins; if you think there is a plugin missing on the list just post a comment.

1. Custom Querry String

Wordpress is a very flexible platform, but regulating the number of posts that are supposed to be displayed on the different pages is quite difficult. Most of the times you will want to display a limited number of posts on the Homepage while displaying a larger list for the categories, archives or search results pages, and this is not possible through the control panel. The solution for this problem is the Custom Querry String plugin, which allows you to configure this number individually for each page type.

2. Head Meta Description

While the Meta Keywords Tag is no longer used by most search engines, the Meta Description Tag still has some influence. Having the same Description Tag on all your pages, however, might be inneficient and send part of your website to the supplemental hell. This plugin is extremely easy to install and it will create a dynamic Meta Description Tag for every page on your blog, based on post excerpts or on the first words of the page.

3. Clean Archives

Most blogs have a “Monthly Archives” section on their sidebar, displaying a huge list of months and wasting some precious space. A more efficient structure for your archives would be a single page where all the posts are displayed, month by month. That is exactly what this plugin will do (you can see an example here). Notice that you might need the plugin below to install this one successfully.

4. Exec-PHP

Many plugins or Wordpress features require that you run some PHP code. When you need to use those features or plugins inside static pages or posts, however, Wordpress will not recognize the code. The solution for this problem is the Exec-PHP plugin. Once installed the plugin will enable PHP code on virtually all the pages of your blog. There are similar plugins available, but this one is the most reliable.

5. Enforce www. Preference

If your site can be accessed through http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com you might have some problems over the long run. Most search engines treat those addresses as two different domains, spliting your backlink count. In order to solve this issue you need to setup a 301 Permanent Redirect. The are several ways to setup this redirect, but if you are not familiar with PHP or if your host is not Linux based (for the .htaccess file) this plugin represents the simplest one. You just need to activate it and all the visitors and search bots will get redirected to the address that is specified on the Wordpress control panel.

6. Chunk URLs

Ever experienced someone posting a huge URL on your comment section? Those long strings are not only ugly, but they might also break the design of your website on certain browsers. This plugin will trunk those long URLs into smaller ones, and you can even specify the amount of characters that the output should contain.

7. Sig2feed

Sploggers are feed stealers are spreading out like fire. The first measure to protect your content is to add a copyright notice to your feed, possibly with a link pointing to your site. Sig2feed is a very light plugin that will do just that.

8. FeedSmith

This plugin used to be called Feedburner Feed Replacement. It was so popular and efficient that Feedburner itself decided to buy it from the developer. Basically it will forward all the requests for your Wordpress feed to Feedburner. It is very useful if you started using Feedburner after having some subscribers, or if you want to make sure that your feed statistics are completely accurate.

9. Jerome’s Keywords

This plugin is very similar to the Ultimate Tag Warrior, but it is much more user friendly. Once the plugin is installed you will be able to tag individual posts and to create an internal tag system and tag clouds. Secondly you can also use it to generate a dynamic Meta Keywords Tag.

10. WP-Cache

WP-Cache is a very robust plugin that will increase the responsiveness of your website and reduce the server load. It is also very useful to handle sudden burts in traffic coming from social bookmarking sites. The plugin basically creates static versions of your pages and serves them without querrying the MySQL database.

Daniel Scocco on May 14, 2007 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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121 Responses to “Top 10 Underrated Wordpress Plugins”

Ajay on May 14th, 2007 5:04 am

Based on my experience, I wouldn’t agree with some of the plugins on your list being underrated.

e.g. WP-Cache is always on everyones list. So is CQS and Jerome’s who are dedicated users of both.
Daniel on May 14th, 2007 5:12 am

I agree that WP-Cache is the “least” overrated from the list, in fact I placed it on the last position :).

CQS and Jerome’s? There are people recommending them, but I don’t think they are “mainstream” as some other plugins out there, despite being equally useful (the guy that developed Custom Querry String even stopped supporting it hehe).

Examples: Subscribe to comments, ultimate tag warrior, contact form, adsense deluxe, akismet, top commentators, and so on!
Ajay on May 14th, 2007 5:25 am

Agreed on them being lesser rated than others, but wp-cache.. its on everyone’s list
francesco mapelli on May 14th, 2007 5:29 am

I am biased, but here are two plugins I developed:

1) Category Cloud: show a colored tag cloud using categories as tags.
Fully customizable with css

2) FeedCount: shows your feedburner subscriber count without that ugly feedburner chicklet.
Fully customizable with css

I also find very useful iMP download, that handle and count the downloads.
Rich Owings on May 14th, 2007 5:57 am

Great post. Thanks for the tips. Now I just have to find time to implement!
Daniel on May 14th, 2007 6:00 am

Francesco, thanks for the suggestions! If we end up with lots of plugins I will update the post with a “runners up” section!
Ajay on May 14th, 2007 6:13 am

Then you have to take a look at http://ajaydsouza.com/wordpress/plugins/
Shawn Blanc on May 14th, 2007 6:22 am

Great list, Daniel.

I am using 4 of those. I haven’t heard of the sig2feed plugin. That sounds excellent. I’ve had several posts ripped off before, it’s always a bummer.
Daniel Harrison on May 14th, 2007 6:45 am

Out of all of those plugins, the clean archives definitely works the best for my blog.
Dj Flush on May 14th, 2007 7:32 am

Ok great list Daniel

I already use 7 of them
Mr.Byte on May 14th, 2007 8:05 am

Yeah I use 5 on the list….
Joshua Dorkin on May 14th, 2007 9:23 am

Great list. I actually didn’t know about a few of these. They will soon be implemented on my blogs! Thanks.
Dave Butler on May 14th, 2007 9:31 am

Wordpress recently released a wordpress.com stats plug-in. All the details are available http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/05/06/stats-plugin/
Daniel on May 14th, 2007 10:50 am

Dave, thanks for that one.

I had seen when they released that. Are you using it? I still have to play with it to see if it is worth.
Brian on May 14th, 2007 11:25 am

Since I do a lot of series, I set up Custom Querry String to show categories in chronological order, so that new visitors can read the posts in order.
Dave Butler on May 14th, 2007 5:57 pm

Daniel, installing the plug-in is on my to do list for today. Unfortunately I’ve misplaced my to do list so i’m in stuck in a productivity limbo!!! I read that its installed in over 2,700 blogs already.
dalez on May 14th, 2007 8:37 pm

I have been considering WP-Cache. Is the added speed really worth the effort?
Unique descriptions are a must have.
Daniel on May 15th, 2007 2:39 am

dalez, Wordpress has a fast structure out of the box. Therefore if your web host is a top notch company maybe you will not need it.

If your server is not that fast though or if you want to save bandwidth or CPU usage than WP-Cache is an efficient solution.
Phil Van Treuren on May 15th, 2007 3:46 am

I just installed the WP-Cache plugin and activated it, but I have to admit that I don’t really understand what it does. I’m not noticing any difference in load time or anything.
Daniel on May 15th, 2007 3:54 am

Phil, check the bottom of the “source code” of your pages. There should be a message there saying “static page served by WP-Cache in 0.123 seconds”.

Alternatively you can use the service http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test to measure the loading time, test it with and without the plugin and see if there is any difference.
Patches and hacks on May 15th, 2007 1:22 pm

I use Jerome’s keywords because I like it’s simplicity . I have even created two other pluging one for integrating google sitemaps with jerome’s keywords so that the tag pages will be included in the sitemap generated by the google sitemap plugin and and modified another to integrate the optimal titles plugin with jerome’s keywords so that the tag pages will have nice titles
Mike Malone on May 15th, 2007 9:37 pm

I recently wrote a WP stats plugin that you can use to display the number of posts, post wordcount, comments, comment wordcount, and more on your blog… Sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but I thought someone might be interested :). You can grab it at http://immike.net/blog/2007/04.....log-stats/
Dean Taplin on May 16th, 2007 9:40 am

Many thanks for compiling this list. I’ve been looking for the functionality offered by the Custom Query String plugin for ages.
Pallab on May 17th, 2007 10:50 am

I did a similar list about a week back. The only plugin that is common to both the lists is SRG Clean Archives.
Daniel on May 18th, 2007 3:21 am

Delez, WP-Cache does not interfere with dynamic descriptions. It will cache every page individually, so they keep their unique description.
Nancy on May 19th, 2007 10:20 am

Thanks very much for this! I just set up FeedSmith and the “www” preference plugin, and I’ll probably do a few of the others as well…
Rolando on May 19th, 2007 8:52 pm

Cool, thanks for this!
steve on May 22nd, 2007 7:08 am

Great post. Just installed a couple of them. Head META Description should be very useful, thanks!

–Steve
vijay on June 1st, 2007 8:28 am

Cool list,
By the way currently I am not using any wordpress blog and thinking to switch from Blogger to wordpress from many days, but not getting exact idea how to do it..
I mean free hosting or own domain hosted, free blog theme or customized one ..

Plese if you did these things and are quite comfortable in it then help me fr this switch!

Regards,
Vijay
http://funny-lovely-cute.blogspot.com
Daniel on June 1st, 2007 8:44 am

Google “how to blogger wordpress” or something along those lines :). There is plenty of advice on how to do the switch.

Go with your own domain, that is a must.
Griffin on June 2nd, 2007 1:17 am

Man, I’m going to have to get on the ball with these, I’d never even heard of some of them before, but as soon as you said “Clean Archives” I was like YES!!!

If you have a lot of posts that have huge chunky paragraphs before the Read More (like mine do), it’s better to deal with something like Clean Archives than to mess with the usual archive set up.
Ravi on June 4th, 2007 9:41 am

Very useful plugins

Thanks for the post

Ravi
Abhishek Kumar on June 27th, 2007 4:02 am

wp-cache is quite popular, most of the WP users are using this plugin..
el barto was here on July 6th, 2007 2:43 pm

Rally useful post… thankz a lot!
tommy grub on July 16th, 2007 7:01 am

Thanks very much for this! I just set up FeedSmith and the “www” preference plugin, and I’ll probably do a few of the others as well…
Karen Bryan on July 28th, 2007 12:54 pm

I recently installed the Stats plugin to my blogs and as a stat illiterate have found it very useful. You can read how I use the stats to improve my blog:
http://www.businessblogboost.c.....your-blog/
Vic on August 2nd, 2007 7:18 pm

Thanks for such a great list of plugins, this list are so helpful for the new guy.

Thanks

Vic
wordpress jumpstart on August 5th, 2007 7:42 pm

I would love to use your recommended plugins but I would guess including SEO plugins would be great as well.;p
Peter Smythe on August 24th, 2007 7:53 am

One plugin that seems vastly underrated is Alex King’s Articles plugin. We installed it and now have a page of a comprehensive index of our posts under category headings. It is our most used page.
krizsa on August 24th, 2007 4:33 pm

Thank you for posting this! =)
The Credence Dot Com on September 7th, 2007 11:48 pm

Thanks, I was just looking for sig2feed for such a long time and always used to wonder how to do it. Any idea of how do it in Blogger feed ?
Trucking Nerd on October 6th, 2007 2:03 pm

Very useful posting, will be checking some of these out!
Popcorn Ninja on October 10th, 2007 8:57 am

Thanks for the list, I’ll have to check some of these plugins out.
simon on October 10th, 2007 10:38 pm

some excellent and useful plugins
Patrick on October 23rd, 2007 4:05 pm

Where have these been all my life? Oh, I guess I had my head in the sand. Thanks for the tips!
David Tan on November 1st, 2007 11:20 pm

Custom Query String sounds lovely.
Btw, I’ve got a top 10 wordpress plugin list too.
MarkB. on November 11th, 2007 8:00 pm

Thanks for such a great list of plugins, this is very useful, thanks for sharing it with us.
Jimm on November 19th, 2007 1:02 am

Thanks for such a great list of plugins!
Pony on November 25th, 2007 6:20 am

I actually didn’t know about wp-cache - hopefully one day I’ll need it.
Aneesh on December 3rd, 2007 5:07 am

Yea these plugins are real awesome and are often neglected..
jakes on December 3rd, 2007 6:23 am

great ideas and comments…. installed some of them. Descriptions should be very useful, thanks!
Danny on December 18th, 2007 1:21 pm

I have a pretty cool and very much underrated plugin: It allows you to post a fully customizable poll on your blog/forum for free. I’ll link it for you — SodaHead Wordpress Plugin — Just thought this would be handy to you bloggers
snowgirl on December 20th, 2007 12:07 pm

thanks for the list
raffyman on February 4th, 2008 3:03 pm

I was just looking for sig2feed for such a long time and always used to wonder how to do it. Any idea of how do it in Blogger feed ?
Doc Meyer on February 21st, 2008 5:10 am

Plug in thread, love it! Adsense Deluxe!
Moshe on March 2nd, 2008 5:31 am

Well done - there are a lot of great, obscure plug-ins out there that are well worth noting.

This site has some great plugins: http://www.stuff.yellowswordfi.....s-plugins/ (and note, I have NO affiliation with them). One of my favorites from them is called Advanced Admin - here is his description:

“Replace the admin menus with proper dropdowns. Save mouse clicks and page loads!”

Also, I think with Wordpress 2.3 tags have changed (and thus I’m not sure if Jerome’s Keywords is the best option anymore. I personally use Simple Tags and very much like it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tags/ (again, no affiliation)
John on March 6th, 2008 9:53 pm

Wow so great that u can collect them all.. Ehmm which one i haven’t use?…:)
Moncef on March 11th, 2008 5:33 pm

I’m pretty sure the functionality provided by the “Enforce http://www. preference” plugin is now built in Wordpress 2.3. It automatically redirects to the site you have configured in the control panel.

As for “Head Meta Description”, there is another SEO plugin that does that and much more: http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....-seo-pack/
Petalac on April 18th, 2008 12:13 am

Thanks for the great plugins list you have a very good looking and informative site cheers maybe you could give me some advice on mine. http://petalac.blog-city.com
webhosting guide on June 12th, 2008 4:02 pm

thay don’t say much to me. They are underrathed yeah. But effective? don’t think so. there better versions for every plugin mentioned…
Susan on June 13th, 2008 3:44 am

I installed Custom Querry String and followed your video blog about showing only post titles in archive search. Works great! Thanks for the great tip!
Emily on June 13th, 2008 7:42 am

DivvaFlip makes photos gallery more glamorous with a flipping engine.

Just try DivvaFlip, a page flipping engine, with a very easy
backoffice in AJAX and working with WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 !

Have a glance to the demo here http://www.divva-plugins.com/
enjoy!
IHG on June 30th, 2008 5:57 pm

An interesting list …. I think I need to make a ‘trial’ blog to test out new plugins, etc. Not quite brave enough to try thinks on my main site.
njaneardude on June 30th, 2008 6:55 pm

FYI,Clean Archives link is dead
shopping on July 10th, 2008 7:31 am

You’re quite right about the description tag having some influence over the Search Engines. This is one thing I kept forgetting about my site and when I finally employed it my pagerank increased dramatically. Now, finally, you can find my website amongst the top players in a search for a number of keywords. It really does play an important part – plus, it allows for a neat and great description when someone conducts a search.
photo oil paintings on July 16th, 2008 8:44 am

You are right in saying those are underrated. I don’t even know some of them. I asked some blogging friends and most of them never heard about items 3 – 9.
yoyo on July 20th, 2008 1:50 pm

A lot of things I do not understand.
Alexander Higgins on July 25th, 2008 4:05 am

This is a great list and definitely helped to point me in the direction of some excellent plugins to install. I have already installed a couple and plan on blogging about them as well.

I also have uploaded a modified version of the sig2feed taking the original authors suggestions in account, so the plugin allows you to add a permalink back to the original your post or even a link back to your blog. You can read more about it here http://blog.alexanderhiggins.c.....feeds.html. Again great post.