If we talk about speed, uptime and other issues on the minds of wordpress bloggers, here are some tips and plugins to keep your website optimized all the time.

Caching

wp-cache – WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

wp-super-cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by caching frequent operations, reducing the weight of various theme files and providing transparent content delivery network integration. The goal is to improve the user experience for the readers of your blog without having to change WordPress, your theme, your plugins or how you produce your content. When fully utilized, your blog will be able to sustain extremely high traffic spikes without requiring hardware upgrades or removing features or functionality from your theme.

Performance

HyperDB – HyperDB is a very advanced database class that replaces WP’s built-in DB functions.

wp Tuner – The (mu-compatible) WP Tuner plugin for WordPress is a powerful and easy to use way to answer many hard questions about why your blog is slow or cranky. What’s causing the slowdown? Is it a plugin? Is it your host?

Database

DB Cache – This plugin caches every database query with given lifetime. It is much faster than other html caching plugins and uses less disk space for caching.

Optimize DB – MySQL is a great database, but it doesn’t clean itself up the way it should sometimes. This plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively defragmenting it. This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated.

Other Online Tips:

http://yoast.com/40-wordpress-optimisation-tips/

http://www.noupe.com/wordpress/13-great-wordpress-speed-tips-tricks-for-max-performance.html

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website-and-optimize-your-code/

Popularity: 18% [?]

Every blogger and developers should know that immediately after installing wordpress activating some SEO plugins is necessary.

WordPress by itself already doing 50% of the SEO work a website should have or do, most of the themes are very well coded, the system is very popular for its tags and categories and google tend to really like it.  the rest is on you.  Here’s a list of the top SEO plugins for WordPress:

SEO Slugs

The SEO Slugs WordPress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this:

“What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”,

WordPress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug:

/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings

DOWNLOAD | URL

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

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SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

DOWNLOAD | URL

Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress

This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel.

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Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

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And of course:

** All in One SEO Pack **

The most popular plugin every blog should have. Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines

DOWNLOAD | URL

Popularity: 12% [?]

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as is now used on thousands of websites. It is a simple open source blogging tool which is offered in two ways, either the hosted option or the free software download option.

WordPress offers many additional features which are otherwise know as WordPress plugins. These WordPress plugins allow you to customise your blog to suit both the audience and the genre of your website.

There are so many WordPress plugins to choose from, if you are new to blogging you may not know which ones will work best for you. Here is a list and explanation on just some of the most popular WordPress plugins available.

Top WordPress Plugins:

• All in one SEO pack – this WordPress plug in helps optimize your titles for search engines as well as generating automatic META tags. It gives you the opportunity to override titles and set any META keywords and description you want. Depending on the version of WordPress you are currently using ie 2.3 you can simply install this WordPress plugin and it will work straight away.

• Akismet - this is a fantastic tool which helps sort out the clutter of spam. Once installed, this WordPress plugin will check all of your comments against the Akismet web service to analyze if they look like spam or something genuine, it then allows you to review what has been found in the ‘comments’ section of your WordPress blog so that you can decide if you want to delete it or not.

• WordPress Stats – although there are many ways to capture data and stats regarding your website, most offer too much information especially if you are new to blogging. The WordPress stats system has been specially designed to focus on the most popular information a blogger needs.

• Twitter Tools – this plugin integrates your Twitter account with your WordPress blog. Twitter is a free micro-blogging and social networking service.

• Get Recent Comments – This plugin gives you full control over the appearance of excerpts of comments that are shown in your sidebar. You can determine the order, the number of excerpts and the length.

• DMSGuestbook – This guestbook can be easily customized allowing you to change not only the color but allows you to set mandatory fields where a user must fill out certain information. You can fully manage the user entries and edit/remove posts before they are shown.

• All In One Video Pack – This WordPress plugin offers every functionality you need for video and rich-media. It allows you to record/upload and import videos straight to your chosen post.

Each WordPress plugin has its own unique advantages and can really help to turn your blog into something user friendly. With so many plugins to choose from it is worth spending a bit of time searching through what is on offer and selecting the plugins that will benefit both you, your site and your readers.

New additions are constantly being added and developed so be sure to keep checking so that you do not miss out on something that could be of benefit.

Allen Jesson can provide you will detailed information about WordPress plugins, plus free access to Fruity Plugins, a WordPress plugin that gives you sticky zest & Link Love for your WordPress blog.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Allen_Jesson

Popularity: 8% [?]