How to migrate Blogger to WordPress Part 3 – List of essential plugins
In the previous two part i wrote how to import content from Blogger into WordPress, how to set up URL structure at WordPress to be just like in Blogger (so your site won’t lose any ratings) and how to fix Featured images in WordPress (“fix” in a sense that they do not exist at all after the import). This post is a list of useful plugins you might need to get working before actually launching you WordPress blog. I did not include SEO plugins because, you know, I’m not talking about setting up some money-making niche blog here, i’m talking about setting up a blog that works and has all the essential functions. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
The plugins are listed alphabetically for simplicity’s sake.
Simple social plugin that loads popular social sharing widgets asynchronously after the page loads for optimal site performance. Includes Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn and HackerNews (whatever that is).
Adds real-time blog stats to your dashboard including visitor activity, top posts, top referrers, searches and locations of your visitors. There’s a paid version with more options, but i’m pretty fine with the free one.
Displays a tag cloud customised with your preferences in a sidebar. I use it on several WordPress blogs i’ve been working with, really a nice plugin.
The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. Let’s face it, default WordPress comments suck big time, i was using Disqus back on Blogger for years, it’s on all my WordPress blogs, and it’s very easy to migrate comments between places with Disqus.
Allows you to regenerate your thumbnails after changing the thumbnail sizes. Really handy for its purpose.
Very simple plugin for reliably inserting your Google Analytics tracking code on every page. Nothing to add to that, chose it from a bunch of plugins doing that.
A must-have plugin to beef up the default WordPress’ visual post editor to bring it on level with your usual text editors. By default, WordPress post editor doesn’t even allows you to choose font size or align text without going into HTML – Ultimate TinyMCE does the job.
UpdraftPlus simplifies backups (and restoration). Backup into the cloud (Amazon S3, DropBox, Google Drive, FTP, and email) and restore with a single click. Backups of files and database can have separate schedules. I use it to backup to Google Drive.
This is the second must-have plugin. Remember, EVERY site has to be backed up. Because sooner or later something fails, and it’s not you host’s duty to make sure there’s a copy of your site stored somewhere – it’s yours alone.
My third choice for a must-have plugin.
Improve site performance and user experience via caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support. It’s better to have this on from the very start, because it makes a WordPress blog run about 10 times faster if fully configured.
WordPress Related Posts generates a list of related posts with thumbnails and gives you click-through statistics. You’ll see how this plugin works at the bottom of this post.
There are other plugins i use, but these are barebones that should start you running the business.
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