WordPress Plugins I use

I love WordPress. This blog has been using WordPress, the “open source” software for many years, which I have self-hosted in an Azure VM.

The power of WordPress as a content management platform comes from its open architecture – which extends the core capabilities through thousands of plugins and themes made by third-parties. The ecosystem is simply amazing. As on date, 28% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online.

Following are some of the many themes and plugins, that I have been using to run this blog. The below list is not exhaustive.

Themes:

Voice – Magazine WordPress Theme – This is a paid theme costing $69, and it works brilliantly. Clean layouts, good amount of customization features. It is worth every cent.

Plugins:

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin – The most important plugin, in my opinion, this “free” plugin automatically does schedule backup of your WordPress database, files, plugins & themes to Dropbox/Google Drive/Amazon S3 or other locations. The paid version has even more capabilities. This plugin has been a life-saver whenever I experimented with changes to this blog. This plugin has over a million currently-active installs.

All In One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert – Optimise your WordPress site for SEO, sitemaps for Google & Bing, Google AMP support, Google Analytics support, generates meta tags automatically and more.

Akismet by Automattic – From the makers of WordPress, this plugin checks your comments against spam. Keys are free for personal blogs.

Auto Post Thumbnail by Aditya Mooley, Tarique Sani – Generate featured image from the first available image in a post automatically.

Better Search Replace by Delicious Brains – Allows you to quickly find and replace a string of text across many tables used by WordPress. Recently I used it to find all instances of “http://www.venkatarangan.com/blog” to “https://venkatarangan.com/blog”, when I installed SSL certificate for this blog. What would’ve taken me months to change the 1000+ posts that were affected, got done in 5 seconds.

Medium – Publishes every post automatically to a Medium.com page.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved by Alex Mills –  Provides syntax-highlighting to the source code you publish in your blog posts, without losing its formatting or making any manual changes.

JetPack by Automattic – From the makers of WordPress, this plugin adds several handy features including SPAM protection, Blocking of any suspicious-looking sign-in activity, Analytics and more.

Export to Excel by Kapil Chugh, Triptee Gupta – Export posts, pages, comments to Excel file.