WordPress is a phenomenon.  Since it’s inception in May 2003 it has revolutionized the way people generate websites and allowed ordinary folk to create their own personalized websites and blogs using very little effort.  Case and point; this website.  The whole thing is a product of WordPress’s highly customizable and easy to manage system.

For those unfamiliar, WordPress is an architecture of sorts that allows those with a reasonable grasp of IT to create and publish websites that are as individual as they are.  Almost no practical understanding of websites or databases is required, and WordPress provide walkthroughs to help you through the tricky setting up process.  It’s so successful that any web hosting company worth it’s salt will have packages specifically designed for WordPress blogs and be able to accommodate a site written using WordPress with ease.

The secret to WordPress’s success is it’s customization; the look and feel of your site can be completely changed using a whole host of download-able themes, or you can even create your own!  As well as this there are literally thousands of plugins available which allow you to add new features to your site that aren’t found in WordPress by default.  In this article I’ll take you through my top 5 plugins, as tried and tested on Tech Made Easy.

1. Akismet

The problem with creating a site, especially one that becomes popular, is that other people will want to take advantage of your success.  The easiest way for them to do this is to advertise their own websites on yours, and the easiest way for them to do that is to leave comments on your articles.  Akismet checks the Email and IP addresses of your commenter’s and adds any suspect ones to a spam cue, much in the same way as with Email.  The advantage of this is that you don’t have to sieve through all the comments left on your site looking for legitimate ones.  It’s a pretty good system, in all my time using it it has only classified one legitimate comment as spam, while blocking over 400 spam comments from appearing on my site.

2. WPTouch

More and more people are accessing the web from their smart phones these days.  The problem is that, unless they’re using a WiFi network, they’re doomed to slower speeds than in the home and large websites can take a good long while to load.  WPTouch detects when your visitors are using a smart phone such as the iPhone and automatically sends an optimized version of the site to the users device.  That way, they still get all the great content but without all the annoying delays while waiting for your site to load.  The cut down site is quite customizable in itself, and you can choose which aspects of your site are viewable to mobile viewers as well as modifying the colour scheme to match your normal site.

3. W3 Total Cache

Whether you’re hosting your website at home or with a web host you’re going to be interested in how much bandwidth your site uses.  If it’s big and bloated then uses are likely to get fed up waiting for it to download and go elsewhere for their information, but you don’t want to sacrifice the look and feel of your site in order to get the size down.  The solution is Total Cache.  This plugin caches your website on your visitors PC’s, meaning that once they’ve visited once they should notice a much improved load time on subsequent visits.  Not only that, but Total Cache will also reduce the amount of bandwidth that each user chews through while viewing your site, which is excellent news if you have a bandwidth cap with your hosting company.

I’ve noticed about a 20% reduction in bandwidth-per-user since installing this plugin.

4. Tweet Old Post

This plugin is a great way to bring older content on your website into the searchlight of your regular readers.  Most people will only read the most recent entries on your site, but if they’ve only just found you then they might miss some great content that you published six months ago.  This plugin will Tweet at intervals that you determine so that your Twitter friends can pick up on your older articles.  You can choose the frequency at which this occurs and set an offset so that it doesn’t occur at the same time everyday.  You can also choose to exclude certain categories from the plugin (such as news articles or things that are likely to change with time) so that you don’t confuse your readers with older information.

This is also great news if you need to take a break from your site for a few days or if you can’t churn out content at the same rate as the larger websites.  Just bare in mind that it will only regurgitate what you have already written, so if you only have one post on your site it will constantly tweet that post to your faithful followers.

5. Share And Follow

Share and Follow is an excellent way to integrate your website with the majority of social networks.  Using this plugin you can add links for pretty much any social network to pretty much any aspect of your website.  I use it give readers access to some of Tech Made Easy’s social networking pages using a widget in the sidebar (look to the right of the page).  But you can add this information to pretty much any part of the site, and it doesn’t just stop with the four aspects that I utilize, there are a total of 52 different networks that you can integrate with, all you have to do is provide your account information for each of the ones that you use.  Icon size and descriptive text is also changeable so you can tailor it to your particular site.

Well, that’s my top five.  There are a lot more out there for you to play around with, let me know what your favorites are in the comments field below.