30 WordPress Plugins To Help You Improve Your Sidebar
Cosmin Lupsan
Nowadays almost everyone has a WordPress powered website, but not everyone has a professional build blog. To build a professional blog you have to concentrate on few aspects. One of the most important aspects is of course the design. The design of your blog is without a dub the one who decides if your blog is going to be a successful one or not.
The design of your blog is based on the way you structure everything and the actual look. In this post I will talk only about the ways to improve your sidebar structure and make your blog more accessible to your visitors.
I will list here the most recommended WordPress plugins for your blog sidebar. You don’t have to use all of them, using all of them will create chaos in your blog and people will be annoyed. You should choose the ones you think that fits your needs and try to avoid the situation described bellow.
1. Subscription Options
Is a simple yet very useful plugin for beginner bloggers. This plugin will allow you to add the classical icons for subscription: twitter, rss feed and email of course effortless.
2. Alexa Ranking Plugin
The earnings from your website are pretty important, the most effective way of getting high profits from your website is of course by selling ad space. In order for advertisers to buy ad space, they need to see what’s your alexa rank and if they like it, they will buy ad space from your blog.
3. Twitter Blender
Is a wordpress plugin that displays twitter updates in a simple widget box in your sidebar. The Twitter blender also has an updates archive.
4.WordPress Newsletter Widget
WordPress double option widget bulk email plugin for newsletter subscription will allow users to subscribe to your newsletter and also you will be able to manage the subscriptions.
5. Recent Comments by Entry
As I believe you figured out, the Recent Comments by Entry plugin will display the latest comments and also the entry where they were posted.
6. Post videos and photo galleries
Helps you to easily maintain your media works and place them into your blog sidebar.
7. WP Carousel
WP Carousel is a plugin that create a carousel with a category’s posts, and you can put it anywhere on the sidebar or blog.
8.Ad Code Widget Plugin
This plugin helps you to easily maintain the ads you display in your sidebar and in your blog. It was created by Primo Themes and it supports any image format and also any size and also you can add HTML/JavaScript/IFrame/etc codes.
9. Login With Ajax
This is a pretty cool widget plugin that allows your blog members to login. Using the ajax technologies, “Login with Ajax” will improve the aspect of your login page and also will impress all of your members.
10. Visitors Map and Who’s Online Widget
This will display a cool who’s online widget and also you will be able to see where the user comes from by using this great geographical positioning system.
11. Twitter Bubble
Will display your twitter updates in a simple widget who has the shape and the design of a twitter page included in a cool twitter bubble.
12. Post Google Map
If the blog you own is a business one and you have to show people where they can find you, Google Map is always the best solution. Post Google Map will help you to do that effortless.
13. Simple Flickr Photos
Nowadays everyone has a Flickr account and everyone wants to share their photos with friends and why not will all internet users. Simple Flikr Photos allows you to add a Flickr widget with your latest added photos.
14. PayPal Donations Plugin
This is definitely a must have plugin for developers and people who are offering services for free. Paypal was always the best friend of this kind of people and it helps them everyday.
15. Collapsing Archive
Being able to collapse your archive will save you some useful space in your sidebar. Collapsing archive is the plugin you want for this, and it is based on javascript.
16. General Stats
General stats counts almost everything from users, number of posts, days, and adds a simple widget to display this stats.
17. Tag For Me
If you own multiple blogs or websites, Tag for me will help you to display your stats using their widget.
18. Flash Tag Cloud
Displays the tags into a very interesting and cool way. The tags you write more are of course bigger and the ones that you don’t are smaller. The plugin is using the action script programming and is very stable.
19. Page Spot
This actually lets you to configure multiple types of sidebar and choose which one to display.
20. WP FlashTime
Adds cool and flash clock. This will help you to improve the design and it will make your site more dynamic. The plugin also contains over 25 different clocks.
21. Quick Adsense
It is a flexible and easy to use Adsense management plugin. With quick adsense you will add and maintain your adsense ads in no-time.
22. Sidebar Tabs
Includes a widget which adds multiple functions displayed in other tabs.
23. iContact Widget
Add the iContact ‘Automatic Sign-up Form’ to your sidebar with this widget. Simply paste the code from the form you created in iContact into this widget. Your form will be converted into HTML (instead of Javascript, which takes more time to load).
24. Display Widget
Choose which widgets to display and which widgets to hide. You can also choose to do this on which page of your blog you want.
25. Visual Categories
This plugin enables you to build “category entries” which contain a link to the category and which may contain a link to the category’s feed, an image, the time stamp of when the category was last updated, and the current count of posts in the category.
26. TinyFeed
A simple ajax plugin that loads a micro feed on your sidebar.
27. Flash Mp3 Player
It displays a cool flash player in your blog sidebar. You will be able to choose which MP3 file to listen and is more like the youtube player.
28. Category and Page Icons
This obviously adds icons to your categories and pages links.
29. ThemeSwitch
Using this plugin will allow you to easily change the current theme of your blog.
30. Gallery Widget
Gallery Widget is a simple plugin that let you show the latest/random images of the wordpress media gallery inside a widget, directly in your templates (it is possible to choose some categories to be included/excluded) or in posts/pages using a shortcode (see faq on how to use them).
If you liked this list of plugins just share it with your friend, and don’t forget to let us know what you think by commenting. Thank you!
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Abhay Singh
Posted 426 days ago 51Nice list ! I was actually looking for some Plugin for Collapsing Blogroll !
I liked that Sidebar Tabs, will be using on my blog.
SmashDeveloper
Posted 455 days ago 50Great selection of plugins ! I use some of them but AJAX Login really made my day ! This is going into my Bookmarks :)
Donna
Posted 474 days ago 49Awesome list of plug-ins, that improves the look and feel of your wordpress website or blog. thanks for sharing with us.
Rengøring
Posted 508 days ago 48Nice useful list. Would be cool with an updated version on this post. There are a lot of new great plugins out there.
Mike
Posted 526 days ago 47Here’s a wordpress plugin that can help you customize your sidebar for each post or page… http://www.mlynn.org/graceful-sidebar-plugin
Kavita
Posted 563 days ago 46I like the theme switch plugin. I hope it will really relieve the pains of adding your blog content to a new theme
Brett Widmann
Posted 573 days ago 45Great list of plugins. Thanks for sharing.
Mehedi
Posted 638 days ago 44thanks for sharing :)
Webdesign Roosendaal
Posted 824 days ago 43Great article! I was looking for a Twitter Bubble plugin for WordPress. Couldn’t find any decent examples. I stumbled across this page via Google and there are more useful plugins on this page. I think Im gonna use the Tiny Feed plugin as well!
.-= Webdesign Roosendaal´s last blog ..Professionele presentatie bouwbureau Holm de Jong =-.
Duvvar Design
Posted 836 days ago 42this is thank you.. :)
Adal Design
Posted 840 days ago 41Beautiful selection. You linked to some widgets I’ve been searching for all day!
herupermana
Posted 848 days ago 40Amazing Post, Thanks for sharring
Arfandia
Posted 854 days ago 39Nice article, I love all the plugins that you mentioned.
André Loibl
Posted 856 days ago 38wow… what an awesome collection of useful plugins! :-) Thank you very much for putting this together! Sidebar tabs is beautiful – I’ll have to find a way to put that into my theme! :-)
Many grretings and thanks again! :-)
André
.-= André Loibl´s last blog ..Will Smith über Erfolg und Träume – Video =-.
shoaib
Posted 861 days ago 36man u r rocking ,you are gonna blow of my head with these huge list of wp plugins.
think m gonna visit this blog more often
thnx again.
.-= shoaib´s last blog ..Windows 7 Tip-Make System Restore Image =-.
Shon*Starr
Posted 865 days ago 35this was very helpful thanks a lot…
Muhammad Jamshed
Posted 865 days ago 34Nice article, I love all the plugins that you mentioned.
.-= Muhammad Jamshed´s last blog ..How to Check Which Web Pages Are Indexed by Search Engines =-.
rainer
Posted 909 days ago 33Great ! That was very useful, thanks.
Matty
Posted 934 days ago 32That was very useful, thanks. Some plugins I never new were possible, that were exactly what I didn’t know I needed, but do now.
Dzinepress
Posted 935 days ago 31most of listed plugins are really helpful for WP blogers and even for personal WP websites. thanks
.-= Dzinepress´s last blog ..60+ Creative Ideas about Kitchen Decorations =-.
baagdi
Posted 938 days ago 30really this is very useful. we are web designer we know.
Freelance Web Designer
Posted 942 days ago 29great article. Those list help me to develop blogs
tim
Posted 943 days ago 28This was a strange thing to say…
“Nowadays almost everyone has a WordPress powered website…”
There are millions and millions of people that do not have WordPress powered websites.
Kenneth
Posted 943 days ago 27Thanks for the blog post…I use a company online for NICE cheap traffic:http://www.eAdvertisingCompany.com
kat
Posted 945 days ago 26Thanks for this! I just opened my website and this really helps me to develop my blog.
.-= kat´s last blog ..Hello world! =-.