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10 Plugins to Improve the Usability of WordPress Blogs

Home » Blog » 10 Plugins to Improve the Usability of WordPress Blogs

Last updated: October 4, 2012





WordPress is a quality platform that many of us use. It is very popular and has much to offer. In fact, there are almost too many options in terms of plugins and widgets to add to our blogs. These may make our sites look great and add value to what we are offering, but they can bloat the blogs making them slow to load and at times producing a cluttered look and other problems.

The good news is that there are plugins that address this problem and improve the performance and user friendliness of our blogs. Since usability is an essential for maximum profitability these are well worth considering. Here are 10 plugins that will surely improve the usability of your WordPress blog.

1. Lightbox 2: Images can make or break a blog as you well know from your experience with your own blog and from your perusal of other blogosphere stops. This nifty plugin uses Colorbox to overlay images in a lightbox. One advantage is that your users can view larger images without being taken to another page, streamlining their experience which they will most definitely appreciate. With this plugin you also have the option of auto-lightboxing all the images.

2. WP-Print: While going paperless is a great idea, sometimes your visitors will simply want to print something for easier access later. This plugin allows them to hit print and then go on to other parts of your blog, saving them time and perhaps encouraging deeper interaction with your site that may lead to the kind of conversions you want. This plugin is a freebie.



3. Akismet: Spammers are the bane of bloggers. This plugin will banish them and garner greater trust from those who read your blog. It’s good for nothing in terms of cost.

4. Smart 404: When a user gets a 404 error he or she might think your site is old, down or otherwise problematic when all that happened was a URL was miss-typed. Prevent click-aways by nipping in the bud many of these error messages. This plugin uses keywords from the requested URL to automatically redirect visitors to a page that matches most closely. It offers a very high success rate and it is yours for the asking.

5. WordPress Popular Posts: This will increase page reads and put your best stuff before your visitors by featuring it at the side of each page. This free widget offers great customization and usability.

6. W3 Total Cache: W3 Total Cache is the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. This talented plugin creates a static html pages from your dynamic blog and dishes out that page to users. This functionality allows pages to load faster because a static page is much lighter than a dynamic page and less expensive. There’s lots more this plugin will do for you.

7. Post Teaser: Rather than having to scroll below the fold to see a post this plugin allows them to see a preview of the post and provides a link to the full post. It costs nothing but will save your visitors hassle and earn you their appreciation.

8. Search Everything: Keep things smooth and easy for your visitors and they will continue coming back for more. Search Everything delivers additional search capabilities so they can easily find the content they want. The plugin accomplishes this by ramping up the default search on your WordPress blog so users can search every non-password protected page, tag, post, comment, category, taxonomy and much more.

9. Outbound Links: Users won’t leave your site when they click on an outbound link because this plugin will open it in a new window leaving your blog window open and available. Its free and easy.

10. Subscribe to Comments: Build community around your blog by inviting readers to choose to be notified by email when someone adds a comment. It offers your commenters a tailored approach to staying in the discussion. Download it for nothing and gain quite a bit.

If you want to do 10 things today to give your blog visitors a better experience these deserve strong consideration. Each one will contribute to a more usable blog and all else being equal, that is what gives you a competitive edge. The price is right and the performance upgrade is outstanding.

Don’t forget to share your recommendations and check the must use WordPress plugins list to get more recommendation on WordPress plugins.

Related Posts

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  • WordPress Plugin for Simple Google Adsense Insertion/Integration
  • WordPress Video Lightbox Plugin – Display Videos and Images in a Fancy Lightbox Overlay

Blog Setup,  Wordpress Plugin Usability,  Wordpress,  wordpress blog,  Wordpress Plugin

Reader Interactions

Comments (18 responses)

  1. Lokesh Reddy says:
    January 28, 2014 at 11:28 am

    Thanks for the great list…So far I got CPU limit problem for a couple of times
    But with WP Total cache plugin I got rid of this problem.

  2. Brian Bosley says:
    October 7, 2012 at 10:34 pm

    Great post and thanks for the plugins!!

  3. Walt says:
    July 15, 2012 at 7:18 am

    Very nice post. Actually some of the plugins as mentioned in this blog i already installed and some not yet done. I will add those suggested plugins and hoping this will be helpful. God bless you. Wish more unique articles.

  4. Sergey Oganesyan says:
    February 1, 2012 at 5:28 am

    Thanks for the collection of plug-ins and WordPress Popular Posts!

  5. jonathan says:
    December 23, 2010 at 5:35 pm

    Thank !!

  6. Andy says:
    December 9, 2010 at 2:04 pm

    nice info and plugins, will use it!
    thanx for post!
    🙂

  7. alex johnson says:
    November 2, 2010 at 12:31 pm

    My personal favourite is “time release”. It makes it much easier to schedule posts. I can write 5 or 6 posts over a day or 2 and set them to publish over the next couple of weeks without having to manually select the correct date for each.

  8. rizwan says:
    October 24, 2010 at 1:15 am

    good list of plug-in for Word Press. Certainly i would like to try these for my Word press blog.

  9. John says:
    October 2, 2010 at 4:05 am

    Does any one know of a plug in to play mp3 on the word press page instead of bringing up a media player
    Thanks John

  10. John says:
    October 2, 2010 at 4:01 am

    Great post I have installed W3 Total Cache and left it at the default settings. my webpage loading times really fly now. I installed WP Print but could not work out how to make it run so i installed a print friendly button in my side bar and this works a treat . this is very simple to install get it from http://www.printfriendly.com/
    next i will install wordpress estore and lightbox 2
    Cheers John

  11. Lings says:
    September 27, 2010 at 6:21 pm

    Great post ! I use subscribe to comments. Good to know about cache. Thanks for the post.

  12. Buikspier Inge says:
    September 27, 2010 at 9:44 am

    I think ‘Subscribe to Comments’ should be a default feature in the next release of WordPress. This feature is just so important for your blog conversation and keeping readers / blog commenters involved.

  13. Anita Anderson says:
    September 22, 2010 at 11:47 am

    Awesome post. I also use a few of these plug-ins myself. I did however take your advise and install WP-print, Smart 404 & WP Popular Posts.

    There certainly are a number of terrific plugins out there, may hype about the All in one SEO, I’ve been using Platinum SEO, I guess I like the bit off added control, any thoughts on this?

  14. Tony says:
    September 17, 2010 at 8:31 pm

    I’m a big fan of W3 Total Cache as well. This plugin is a beast!

  15. Jasmine says:
    September 15, 2010 at 2:16 am

    Oh, I just love Lightbox 2. It’s the best plugin I suppose!

  16. David Bain says:
    September 6, 2010 at 5:29 am

    That’s the second recommendation of W3 Total cache I’ve read this morning – I think people are trying to tell me something!

  17. Kevin says:
    September 5, 2010 at 9:45 pm

    Yup, those are some great plugins (so great I use most of them ) it’s always a good thing to make your web site more usable

  18. Keely says:
    September 4, 2010 at 4:22 am

    Great post. I use most of these plugins myself. Just installed wp-print last night actually (before I read your post) and had to do a bit of customising to get it to work. But works well now. There are a lot of really useful plugins out there. All in one SEO is a good one to have.

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