10 Must-Have Wordpress Plugins for Site Flippers

Posted: December 27th, 2009 | Author: Flippa Chick | Cool Comments: 13 Comments »

When flipping websites, there are just “those” plugins that I absolutely cannot run Wordpress without. My obsession has become so out of control that I fear that one day they may suddenly disappear into thin air, so I keep up-to-date backup copies of these plugins on my computer so that I can easily upload them via FTP in the case of their sudden extinction.

Each one of these plugins serves a vital role in how I’m able to efficiently design a niche website, as well as help make the new owner’s role much easier.

In no particular order, those plugins include:

pageMash

If you’ve ever created pages (not posts) for your website but never understood how to rearrange their order in the navigation bar without configuring each individual page, this is a plugin you need. PageMash is designed to help you rearrange the order of your pages in just a few clicks. Simply drag and drop the pages in the order you want them to appear and then click on “Update.” Instantly, your pages have now been rearranged and you didn’t have to do it manually.

Another feature I enjoy is that you can also set pages as “child” pages, as well as hide pages that you’ve created, but don’t want to appear in your navigation area.

Download the pageMash plugin.

Category Order

Category Order works similar to pageMash, the only difference being that Category Order only allows you to rearrange categories in the order you wish for them to appear. You cannot set parent and child categories, and you cannot hide specific categories with this plugin.

This plugin works best for website flippers who want to make sure that a certain category appears before another when visitors land on your website. If you hate that fact that Wordpress automatically lists categories alphabetically, this is just the plugin you need to help you order categories in the order that you feel is most important.

Download the Category Order plugin.

All-in-One SEO Pack

As a web designer, or blog owner, you know — or at least have heard search engine optimization  (SEO) being preached left and right. Without a doubt, this is one plugin that should be installed on every Wordpress website/blog you own. All-in-One SEO, as the name suggests, is a plugin that not only lets you handle the optimization of your website’s description, title tag, and meta description, but it also allows you to override these features across all of your pages and posts. Additionally, you can tell search engine robots which pages and posts to index or simply leave alone.

Download the All-in-One SEO plugin.

StatPress Reloaded

I’m not a fan of Google Analytics…period. In my experience, it has never provided me up to the minute statistics on my traffic. Instead, I’ve moved to building 95% of my niche websites on the Wordpress platform just so that I can take advantage of the StatPress plugin due to it’s up to the minute statistics and a host of other really nifty features.

StatPress allows you to quantify just about every aspect of the traffic that lands on your website. From the search terms that your traffic uses to land on your website to the browser, country, and IP address of your traffic, you can pretty much analyze a complete profile of your traffic. Additionally, StatPress provides your website’s top referring links, days of your highest pageviews, most visited pages and and most searched phrases so that you can make the most of your traffic by optimizing these very pages.

Download the StatPress plugin.

TinyMCE Advanced

This handy plugin is a must-have for bloggers or site flippers looking to further customize the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress. You can go beyond customizing fonts and colors with TinyMCE Advanced which allows you to add quotations, insert and customize data tables, and even add anchor links on the fly.

This plugin is extremely useful if you don’t have knowledge of HTML or would rather avoid dealing with messy HTML.

Download the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.

Tubepress

Tubepress is one of those cool plugins that I love to add to websites I flip that could profit from increased visual aids for viewers. You can take advantage of this plugin by entering in specific keywords for video pages or creating a custom playlist of hand selected videos.

Tubepress also allows you to customize many other features such as adding video descriptions, showcasing video ratings, and even customizing the colors of your videos to match your website’s color scheme.

Download the Tubepress plugin.

WP-SpamFree

Anyone who uses Wordpress cannot do without this plugin. This is by far one the best comment SPAM blockers I’ve used to date. In fact, its even installed on this blog to help keep those annoying Viagra and “This is a cool post” comments from being splattered across my blog.

Simply put, if you’re building a website on Wordpress and have intentions of flipping it, you’ll want to ensure that this plugin is installed so that the new owner won’t have to deal with the complicated and annoying task of deleting junk comment after junk comment.

WP-SpamFree also allows you log all of your SPAM comments so that you can see who is leaving you junk and decide if you’d like to permanently block their IP address. (This is another feature that comes bundled with this plugin too.)

Download the WP-SpamFree plugin.

Easy Privacy Policy

If you’re flipping a website that contains any Google Adsense link units, you’ll want to make sure that this handy plugin is installed on your website. Because Google Adsense now requires publishers to provide web traffic with information on what statistics/personal browsing information is being gathered from their visit, having a plugin that automatically creates this page for you on the fly is a great time saver. Additionally, it will keep you in good standing /compliance with Google Adsenses’ policies.

Download the Easy Privacy Policy.

WP Page Numbers

Most site flippers don’t want a website built on Wordpress to look like any ‘ole blog. For that reason, a lot of customization is performed to make websites look less like a Wordpress blog as much as possible. However, there are certain remanants left behind that ‘reek’ of Worpress and that includes those annoying “Next Page” and “Previous Page” links contained at the bottom of homepages that are set to display a certain number of posts. You can easily get rid of these using the WP Page Numbers plugin which allows you to display neatly designed page numbers instead of text.

It is important to note that this particular plugin will require you to get your hands messy since you will need to manually locate the line of code that calls the “Next Page” and “Previous Page” and replace it with a specific line of code that calls on the WP Page Numbers plugin. These instructions can be found on the plugin website and inside the plugin settings on Wordpress.

Download the WP Page Numbers plugin.

Ad-Minister

Rounding out my list of “must-have” plugins is Ad-Minister. Ad-Minister is a great plugin for site flippers who want to provide an area specifically for advertisements. While you could easily do this without the use of a plugin, Ad-Minister allows you to track impressions and clicks on your advertisements. Using this plugin, you can see which advertisements are out performing others, and which ones you can simply do away with.

The only catch to such a nifty plugin is the fact that, once again, you’ll need to get hands on with code by either inserting it into your sidebar, or calling it via the “sidebar.php” page.

To download and learn more about how to use the Ad-Minister plugin, click here.

…and there you have it. Those are the top 10 plugins that I cannot live without when building a Wordpress website that I intend to flip. While this only just the tip of the iceberg of plugins you can utilize, I’m sure that are more plugins that I’ve yet to experiment with.

If you have plugins that you cannot live…or build without, please share them below.

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