These days, a good many of the new sites I create use the Thesis theme for WordPress. It’s so easy to install and use that even WordPress newbies swiftly learn to manage their own sites. But there are a few simple, free, essential plugins that make Thesis (affiliate link) work even better. Here they are.
Help Google Crawl Your Site
Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin automatically creates a continuously updated XML sitemap that helps searchbots crawl your site and gives you better search results. Every time you add a page to your blog or site, it’s automatically added to the XML sitemap. If you want, you can also register the sitemap’s URL with Google at Google’s Webmaster Central and with Yahoo to get tons of helpful information about how your site is crawled.
Keep the Hits from Your Old URLs
Redirection. Unless you’re starting a brand-new site totally from scratch, you had an old site before your WordPress Thesis site. That old site was probably around for awhile and garnered at least a little bit of SEO mojo. But now all your URLs are different because you’ve deleted all your old pages in favor of your brand-new spiffy Thesis pages. Ever wonder what happens to all the old links—including search engine links—that went to those old pages? Without some kind of redirection, they’re all lost. And anyone who finds a link and clicks through gets nothing but a “page not found” error. Which is not exactly the ideal welcome.
With Redirection, you don’t have to lose all the clicks and search results that your old pages may still be generating. Just paste all your old URLs into the windows the plugin provides. Then, for each URL, paste in the new URL that you want to send your visitor to instead. Now, visitors are seamlessly and invisibly directed from your old URLs to your new ones, without your losing any rankings. It’s quick, simple, easy, and solves a real problem without any hassle.
Choose What Pages Sidebar Content Shows Up On
Widget Logic. My fave. With old html sites, it could be a challenge to get every page to look uniformly the same. Some table or div tag would always act up just when you least wanted it to. With WordPress and other CMS sites, the challenge is the opposite: how to get pages to look different from each other; how to relieve the terrible monotony of a site-wide template and put relevant content just where it needs to be, rather than all over.
Here’s the answer. With Widget Logic, you can control which pages any given widget will appear on. Want your article list on your blog post pages, but not on your “Services” page? Simple. Want an ad to appear on certain posts or pages, and not on others? Simple. In the interests of full disclosure, I do have to say that you need to look up, and paste in, the appropriate WordPress conditional tag. But the intimidation factor is way bigger than the reality of doing it. In about 20 seconds you can impress yourself by using PHP tags… and you don’t have to actually know any PHP. Awesome! (There’s also a YouTube video tutorial.)
WordPress Database Backup
WordPress Database Backup. Would you like a daily or weekly backup of your WordPress database (that’s where all your content is stored) delivered automatically to your email inbox? Trust me, you would. Well, you should. This plugin does it.
Best of luck, and happy Thesis-ing!
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Great tips! I really like the Widget Logic, very handy.