WordPress has become a leading content management system. Notice that I didn’t say blogging software. I love WordPress so much that I don’t think I will create another website without it, blog or not. And while WordPress is great right out of the box, there are some things you can do to make it even better.

This article will share some plugins, some code adjustments and some tweaks that will make your website more user-friendly, easier on your web server, and possibly increase your traffic.

It should be said that this list is not all encompassing; it doesn’t list every plugin that I use. Rather, it’s a list of some of the more popular amendments to WordPress that should be done immediately following an install.

So if you’re ready to pimp out your site, let’s begin.

1. Fight Spam With Akismet
Always start by activating the Akismet plugin. Akismet will greatly reduce or even completely eliminate the comment and trackback spam you get on your site. Bless you Akismet.

2. Change Your Title Tags
Open header.php and change the title tag code. By Default it reads:

Typically your blog’s name will not help your SEO efforts so using it in one of the most important SEO elements, the title, is not good. Let’s change it to the below:

This allows you to set your home page’s title. After all, the home page is very important. It also checks to see if you are at a category page and if so, it displays the category title. This too is good for SEO because you will likely have keyword rich categories like ‘CSS’ or ‘Internet Marketing’. The default WordPress theme would show the last post title for a category; that’s no good.

3. Insert META Tags
While you have header.php open you will notice that WordPress by default has no meta tags. While meta tags are not overly important these days – why not include them anyway? I add the following code:

This code checks to see if we are at the home page and if so gives it our defined meta tags. If we are at a page other than the home page we just use the title to fill in the meta tags.

I know there are plugins for meta tags out there, but this is good enough.

4. Outsource Your RSS Feeds
Some people estimate that half their bandwidth goes to RSS feeds. That’s staggering! Why not let FeedBurner take the hit for you?

Try the FeedBurner Feed Replacement plugin. This plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

5. Create A Contact Form
I like the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form plugin. Their site will walk you through the install; it’s pretty easy.

Another recommendation for a contact form is WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition

6. Create An Archive Page
The WordPress default archive system will record your Post for historical purposes, but it’s not all that fancy; we can do better.

This is my way of creating an archive page. It takes a little more work, but it’s safer than most because we don’t have to use the ‘PHP Exec’ plugin which allows anyone to drop in PHP code inside a post. That’s not safe and so this is a good work around.

First, copy the page.php page and name it page-archive.php. Next, add this code to the very top of your new page.

Now that you have created your own template, go download an archive plugin like Smart Archives for WordPress and install and activate it.

Next, in page-archive.php locate the line <div class="entry"> and add this code after it:

smartArchives('block','category ID');
smartArchives('list','category ID');


Now save page-archive.php and go create a WordPress Page (not a Post, but a Page). Give it a Title like Archives and in the Page Template section on the right choose page-archive.php, like the picture below.

Finally, just include a link to your new archive page and you’re done!

7. Up Your Feeds
In your WordPress administration panel select Options and then the Reading tab. By default, WordPress has your Syndication Feeds set at 10 – change this to 20 – so it should now read, ‘Show the most recent: 20 posts’.

I would only do this if you followed step 4 above. If FeedBurner is taking care of your feeds you may as well give it more feeds.

8. Modify the .htaccess File
Add the following code to your .htaccess file. It should be located in the root of your domain.

This will trim index.php and or index.html from any links to your site and leave it with just www.search-this.com. This is good for SEO, because it keeps all links to your site the same.

Along those same lines, we also ensure that www is always added to our url. We will never have http://search-this.com, it will always be http://www.search-this.com.

Obviously adding the www to your url is your call; just make sure all links to your site are one way or the other. You don’t want both or you will be splitting up your PageRank.

9. Make Your Blog Printer Friendly
Create a CSS file dedicated just for printing. In other words, strip away everything but the post content.

You can simply copy your CSS file and rename it style-print.css then remove all parts except the content. Then simply add the link below with the media=”print” part. Now when people print it will use this CSS file.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://...style-print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

10. Install iG:Syntax Hiliter Plugin
Have you noticed that all the code in this post is formatted nicely? Thank the iG:Syntax Hiliter Plugin for that. If you don’t want to spend all your time formatting code for each programming language then get this plugin.

11. Join Technorati
Once your blog is live you’ll want to claim it on Technorati. Claiming your blog establishes that you are its owner, and allows you to use Technorati services to increase your blog’s visibility.

12. Update Services
Update Services are tools you can use to let others know you’ve updated your blog. WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post.

In your WordPress administration panel select Options and then the Writing tab. In the “Update Services” section add these links:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

There you have it – a dozen WordPress amendments to pimp out your blog and have it running in tip top shape.

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