As the use of Wordpress continues to grow with bloggers and web designers the number of plugins created is also increasing. Some plugins are superb and can really make a difference between a sub standard Wordpress blog and an excellent one, however this is not the case for all the plugins.

I will be outlining 5 must see plugins which all Wordpress websites should be using. Some of the plugins I will be mentioning are solely there to make life easier whereas others assist you in generating the traffic your blog deserves.

1. All in One SEO Pack

Although a large amount of search engine rankings is done on your content alone there is no harm in giving yourself every chance to get your blog posts to the top of google, yahoo or other search engines. If your blog post ranks well in search engines you will generate a large amount of traffic to your site.

The All in One SEO Pack is an excellent, simple way to add title, descriptions and keywords to your posts and pages therefore giving you the best possible chance of getting yourself near the top of the search engine rankings.

Download the All in One SEO Pack plugin here >>

2. Google XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps are important to search engine spiders as it provides a list of links that your website has. Each link that is picked up by a search engine means another page you have listed in search engines for users to find therefore increasing the traffic to your website.

This excellent tool takes all the effort away from generating sitemaps by automatically generating a new sitemap each time a change is made on your blog. This means that if you blog about the latest news your post is instantly submitted to the search engines and users can begin to find your blog straight away!

Download Google XML Sitemap plugin here >>

3. Search Everything

It has often been noted that Wordpress’ search feature is one which often lets them down due to its inaccuracy. This is no longer a problem thanks to an excellent plugin which increases the ability of the default Wordpress search facility.

Included features in the plugin are: highlighting, search every post, page, comment, tag, category and more! Don’t prevent your users from finding the information they are looking for on your blog, install this plugin straight away.

Download Search Everything plugin here >>

4. TweetMeme Retweet Button

Traffic is a major key to a websites success. You can write the best blog posts and have the flashiest website but this does not drive traffic to your website. Twitter has become a phenomenon every since ‘A’ list celebrities began telling us their life stories and this can be used to your advantage by jumping on the bandwagon.

Simply add ‘Retweet’ buttons to your blog posts using this excellent plugin and any users who use Twitter can easily ‘Retweet’ your blog post to all their followers therefore expanding your potential target audience.

Download TweetMeme Retweet plugin here >>

5. WP Super Cache

There is nothing more frustrating than when your viewing a slow website. If the pages take an age to load you get fed up and often leave in order to find an alternative website to find the information you were looking for. Don’t let this be a problem on your blog by installing this superb cache plugin which increases the speed at which your pages load.

Not only that it also decreases the required CPU processing to load the page as it stores static versions of your site for faster viewing!

Download WP Super Cache plugin here >>

Plugins, Plugins and Plugins

This is just a small number of Wordpress plugins which are freely available on the internet to increase the performance of your blog. This is just a start and as time goes on many more will be made available however make sure you install the 5 mentioned above to give you a head start in generating a fast, effective and traffic driven Wordpress blog.

Wordpress is becoming a more widely used tool by web developers to create websites. Originally Wordpress was seen solely as a tool for blogging, they were easy to setup and you can choose from a selection of free templates to make your blog stand out from the crowd. As developers have learnt more about the capabilities of Wordpress it has become apparent that creating your entire website in Wordpress is advantageous as it makes for an excellent CMS.

How do I get started?

As with any normal website you need the basics before you can start creating your Wordpress website. The basics include purchasing domain name and hosting package. Once you have this setup you can download the latest version of Wordpress here.

Next you need to upload the files you downloaded to your server, the best way to do this is using an FTP program such as FileZilla which you can download here for free, the details you need to connect to your website will be provided by your host.

Once you have uploaded all the files simply go to the domain where you want to set this up to for example: http://www.bytewire.co.uk. You will be taken through the steps to install Wordpress on to your server.

How do I stop Wordpress looking like a blog?

In order to setup Wordpress to function like a “normal” website and not just a blog you need to make some changes to your Wordpress settings. First you need to give your pages a template name, this is so that Wordpress can link a Page created to a file, this will all begin to make sense further down.

Setting up template names:

• Navigate to the files of the theme you are using for example yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/
• Create a new file called homepage.php
• Add the following code to the top of the page: <?php /* Template Name: Home */  ?>

Linking template names to Wordpress Pages:

• Login to the dashboard and navigate to the Pages tab
• Create a new page called Home
• On the right hand side change the template from “Default template” to “Home”
• Create another new page called Blog and leave the template as the “Default template”

Set Wordpress to show the Homepage not the Blog

• Within the dashboard you need to navigate to “Reading” which is in the Settings tab
• Set it so that the “Front Page” shows “a Static page”
• Select Home from the Front page drop down box
• Select Blog from the Posts page drop down box

Turn on Permalinks

• By default Wordpress does not use enable Permalinks, permalinks allows URL’s to be more friendly for example news/20/11/2010/setting-up-wordpress
• To enable permalinks go to “Premalinks” in the Settings menu
• Select “Day and name” option as this gives you the best URL’s.
• Press Save Changes
• Wordpress will now attempt to create a .htaccess file to make the changes to your Wordpress settings, if your files have strict permissions set on them Wordpress will not be able to do this, follow the on screen instructions to complete this manually.

Common Problems

Sometimes when you set a static homepage this page is also shown on your posts page. If this happens to your blog, you need to rename the homepage file on your server to something different. Wordpress uses a template hierarchy in which index.php and home.php are at the top. Your posts page will be named index.php therefore you posts page should not be called home.php to avoid confusion.

Your Wordpress website

You now have a Wordpress website which now has a static homepage whilst still making use of the superb blogging system provided by Wordpress. From here you can add other pages just like the homepage was setup to create your whole website in Wordpress.