Whilst this blog is powered by WordPress, it’s far from being a vanilla version of WordPress. Whilst I’ve not directly amended any WordPress code (nor should you as it makes updates a pain), I have, over the years, come to rely on various plugins to enhance WordPress’ core features. Right now, I have 29 plugins installed, and so here’s a list of them all and what they do:
ActivityPub
ActivityPub makes my blog available in the Fediverse. So, it’s possible to subscribe to it in Mastodon, for example, and have my blog posts appear, in full text, alongside various toots from regular Mastodon users. Though I don’t use Mastodon as much as I used to, it’s another way of making this blog accessible to people.
I reviewed an earlier version of this plugin back in 2022.
Akismet Anti-spam
Comment spam has always been a problem since blog comments became a thing, and Akismet catches almost all of them whilst letting legitimate ones through. This is the only premium plugin that I currently pay for.
Album Photostream Profile For Flickr
This plugin powers my Photography page, by showing photos that I have recently uploaded to Flickr. Whilst I still pay for my Flickr Pro account, I haven’t uploaded any new photos there in a while.
Featured Images in RSS
This plugin ensures that a post’s featured image appears in the RSS feed. Almost every post has a featured image, and the GeneratePress theme that I use on here uses a post’s featured image as its ‘hero image’ at the top. There’s probably a far more simple plugin available than this one, but it does the job.
Fediverse Embeds
Fediverse Embeds allows you to embed people’s posts from Mastodon and other Fediverse services in a nice way. However, as mentioned before, I don’t really use Mastodon now, so this is just here for a few posts from 2023 and 2024.
IndexNow
IndexNow automatically submits your blog’s URLs to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, along with Yandex and some other search engines that I haven’t heard of. That should mean that new blog posts appear in search results more quickly, and don’t need to wait for a manual crawl.
IndieAuth
IndieAuth lets you use your WordPress blog to log into other web sites that support IndieAuth, and vice versa. To date, I have yet to find a web site that supports login with IndieAuth, but it’s there should I need it.
IndieWeb
IndieWeb is something of a framework plugin that needs to be installed to allow other plugins to work, such as the aforementioned IndieAuth, and Webmention, which is, erm, mentioned below.
Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer
This plugin does two key things – it ensures your new blog posts are backed up to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and also does the same for other URLs that you link to. This is a newer plugin that I wrote about in November.
Koko Analytics
I use Koko Analytics for, well, analytics. It tells me how many visits I get, and on which pages and blog posts. It also shows where people have clicked through from. It doesn’t do much more than that, but that’s a deliberate decision as I don’t want or need to capture massive amounts of data from web site visitors. Here’s my review from 2024.
MailPoet
You can, if you wish, get an email with my new blog posts every Monday, by using the email sign-up form below. This is powered by the MailPoet plugin, and I reviewed it in 2024. As an aside, since I wrote that I’ve switched to sending the emails via MailPoet’s servers instead of my own; I found that Microsoft blocks emails from this site.
Modern Image Formats
This plugin used to be known as WebP Uploads, and would convert any images uploaded as PNG or JPEG files to the more efficient WebP format. It’s now called Modern Image Formats, as it supports the AVIF format too. I also reviewed this one in 2024.
Performance Lab
Modern Image Formats is part of a suite of plugins called Performance Lab, which offer various ways to monitor and improve the performance of your WordPress install. In time, these may become part of WordPress core.
Posts On This Day
This is a simple plugin that adds a widget which shows posts that were made on the same day in previous years. You can see it on the sidebar (or below, if you’re reading this on a mobile device). Obviously, it’s only useful if you have been blogging for at least a year.
Pressidium Cookie Consent
This plugin is responsible for the cookie consent pop-up box that all web sites need to have nowadays apparently. Whilst I try to have as few third-party tracking cookies as possible, this should allow you to opt out of those. I installed and reviewed this one as recently as December last year.
Redirection
Redirection allows you to set up redirects from within the WordPress interface. I use this extensively, as lots of URLs on this site have changed in the 24 years I’ve been running it.
Share on Mastodon
Share on Mastodon is another simple plugin that automatically posts a new status message (or ‘toot’) on Mastodon with a link to new blog posts when they go live.
Simple Yearly Archive
Another simple plugin that is responsible for generating the Archives page, which lists every blog post, split by year, going back to 2002.
Two Factor
This plugin enables two-factor authentication for when I log in as an admin user. I, of course, use a strong and unique password for this blog, but should it ever be compromised, this is another layer of security.
UpdraftPlus
I use UpdraftPlus to take weekly backups of this blog, which are then saved into my Dropbox account. I reviewed it back in 2024, and it recently saved my bacon when I botched an upgrade.
VS Link Manager
Older versions of WordPress used to have a Link Manager, where you could add lists of links to create a Blogroll, for example. The code is still there, but it’s disabled. VS Link Manager re-enables it, and adds a newer widget for putting those links in your sidebar. This powers my blogroll.
W3 Total Cache
Whilst caching plugins aren’t always mandatory with WordPress, having one should make it faster. I’ve always used the free version of W3 Total Cache and it works fine.
Webmention
Webmention is part of the IndieWeb, and is designed to allow people to post comments on their own site that then automatically links back to the post they were commenting on. I use it to allow Brid.gy to work; it means that replies to my posts on Mastodon and Bluesky that have a link to a blog post have those replies posted as comments.
WebSub
WebSub is also part of the IndieWeb, and means that, when new blog posts are published, Superfeedr and WebSubHub are notified. I assume that there’s some kind of benefit to doing so.
WP Crontrol
WP Crontrol offers an interface that allows you to manage the various scheduled tasks that WordPress performs, for example making scheduled posts go live at the correct time. I think I installed this as, sometimes, scheduled tasks were missed and it allowed me to see why.
WP to Buffer
This plugin allows you to share new and updated posts via Buffer, which I use for Bluesky and Facebook Page sharing. I used to also share posts with LinkedIn using Buffer, but not everything I post here is fit for LinkedIn.
WP Toolbelt
WP Toolbelt is a multi-tool plugin which is a bit like Automattic’s Jetpack. However, it does more locally, rather than relying on WordPress.com, and it means that I can do several things without having to install lots of smaller plugins. I wrote about it a couple of years ago; it still works even though its development appears to have been abandoned.
WP-Sweep
WP-Sweep lets you clear out data from your WordPress data that you may not need any more. This includes deleted comments, old post drafts, previous revisions of posts and orphaned metadata. As such, it can reduce the size of your WordPress database. It needs to be used carefully; for example, you don’t want to remove drafts if you’re halfway through writing a draft post.
Yoast SEO
Finally, I use Yoast SEO. This gives you suggestions when writing posts, to ensure that you’re using the right key words, have an image and use headings. It also measures the readability of your posts, so that you can avoid over-using passive language and overly-long sentences. There are also some more advanced features that are designed to optimise your WordPress site so that it could, potentially, appear higher in search engine results.
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