test.ical.ly | getting the web by the balls

Jun/12

22

6 WordPress plugins I’m currently testing to boost traffic

2 Comments · Posted by Christian in Miscellaneous

During the last couple of days I installed some more WordPress plugins to see if they would have any positive effect on the traffic. I was mainly focussing on social media integration and cross linking.

Here’s the list of plugins I tested.

DiggDigg (homepage)

DiggDigg is the floating/fixed position box on the left of this page that allows you to tweet, like, +1, share, flattr or pin a post.

I have chosen these six networks from 24 available so there should be everything you need.

So far I like it. Traffic on this site is not that big that I could tell an impact at this point but it feels good.

Disqus Commenting System (homepage)

I was thinking about replacing the WordPress own commenting system with something else for a long time now. First I thought about Facebook comments but then I found Disqus and it sounded nice.

So far I am quite happy with it when it comes to the commenting experience itself. I get a lot more information about commenters, Akismet integration is the same as in WP and notification on comment replies is included so people can react again.

But I miss an integration in the backend concerning moderation of comments. So far I have to do it in the disqus backend but that’s not too bad as I get notified of every comment via mail.

Tweet Old Post (homepage)

This is the experiment I am most unsure about. It randomly retweets old posts from this blog.

The first tweet of this kind got a nice feedback though.

Facebook (homepage)

The Facebook plugin is probably the winner of the stupidest name as it makes it hard to google. On the other hand it’s also the most complex of this list as it comes with many functionalities as well as a nice insights integration.

I use it to integrate some like buttons as well as a subscription button underneath the post and the recommendation box that floats in from the left when you scroll down this post.

upPrev Previous Post Animated Notification (homepage)

Similar to the recommendation box is this little plugin that floats in from the right at about the same height.

It also gives you a reading recommendation from this blog. I feel that one of the two will be deactivated soon as two floats are just annoying but I will give it some more time first.

WP Greet Box (homepage)

Depending from where you entered this site you will get a little greeting box on top of a post that reminds you to subscribe to the RSS feed or tweet or like and share and so on.

I guess in a few weeks I will summarize this again and draw some conclusions.

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  • Hannes

    I’m looking forward to your findings!

    But for something slightly different. The Collusion ( http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/ ) graph resulting from visiting one post on testically looks like this http://i.pictr.com/8mub2rbaon.png

    I wonder if you ever looked at this graph and considered reducing it to one vertex in the graph? (Or two as you’re obviously relying on google analytics.)

  • caefer

    @Hannes actually I think the graph is pretty decent given that the sites I work for have way more connections. Also I don’t see a lot of awareness that would lead to a drop of visitors so the benefit I get from these services outweighs the drawbacks by far at the moment.

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