Start a Movie Website WordPress

Starting a Movie Website: WordPress Plugins

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Which WordPress Plugins to utilize while starting a movie website – assuming you are using WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS) – can be one of the hardest things to figure out. If you have been reading this series, you are most-likely a neophyte to movie website ownership. At some point you may have asked yourself: How do I know which WordPress plugin to use on my movie website, where do I read about them, and where can I obtain them? Where to obtain them is the easy part. Just travel to WordPress.org and go to its Plugin Directory. The arduous part still remains as does the most salient question: Which do I chose for my movie website? Here is a list of the WordPress plugins you should have installed when starting a movie website (or if you are a veteran of the game).

*Updated on 10/11/11

All in one SEO

Official Shpiel: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

My Take: You see at the top of the home page of ProMovieBlogger where it says “Create a Movie Website, How to Write a Movie Review – ProMovieBlogger”. This plugin allows you to create and manipulate that message with ease. That message is important because you can load it with keywords. Search for ProMovieBlogger on Google. What tagline do you see for it in the results?

Or

W3 Total Cache Plugin

Official Shpiel: The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

My Take: I was using the WP Super Cache plugin but when I started using this plugin, my sites noticeably sped up and loaded faster. Be sure to use Google’s Page Speed add-on for Mozilla Firefox to find out what CSS and JavaScripts to add into the plugin to condense them into one file so that your site loading is even faster.

Robot Meta

Official Shpiel: Add meta robots tags to WordPress pages.

My Take: By using this plugin, you can tell search engines what to spider on your website and what not to. The best part is that it allows you to setup your own Robot.txt file with whatever Allows and Disallows you want. A good tutorial on the program can be found here.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Official Shpiel: Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.

My Take: This plugin lets you see what your post will look like in a Google SERP while writing the post, shows you your posts’ keywords, and has a gaggle of meta information options. I wrote about this plugin extensively here: 4 WordPress Plugins: SEO, Google Analytics, Image Resize, Contact Form.

Akismet

Official Shpiel: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

My Take: Less spam on your website. Nuff said.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Official Shpiel: Automatically redirect your feed into FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

My Take: It collects all your feeds and automatically redirects so that you do not even have to think about it afterword. Every RSS access point you have is redirected to the same place.

Google XML Sitemaps

Official Shpiel: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

My Take: This plugin helps your movie website get indexed by search engines.

No Self Pings

Official Shpiel: This plugin disables intra-blog pinging.

My Take: When you are linking in your posts to another post on your site, this plugin stops WordPress from pinging and displaying the linking post in your comments.

Optimal Title

Official Shpiel: Optimal Title mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first.

My Take: It makes your post titles look more professional, e.g. How to Start a Movie Website | ProMovieBlogger.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Official Shpiel: a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com, including the now defunct  WordPress.com Stats. On its stats function: Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server.

My Take: This plugin comes with a slew of other options but I only use it for its Stats function. I use this more than Google Analytics to track website traffic and what search engine terms are bringing people to my websites. Actionable info on one page.

WordPress Related Posts

Official Shpiel: The WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate related posts via your WordPress tags and add the related posts to the bottom of your posts.

My Take: A must for showing other posts at the bottom of an article you have written. Another option is the LinkWithin script for your single post php file.

Digg Digg (the plugin)

Official Shpiel: All-in-One social vote buttons – Digg, Reddit, dDone, Yahoo Buzz, TweetMeme(twitter), facebook share, facebook like, Polladium, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Post comments, Google Buzz, Designbump, Designfloat, WebBlend and BlogEngage.

My Take: A very good plugin for adding social buttons anywhere in your post or having them float along side it as you scroll down. Adjustable button sizes as well.

WPtouch

Official Shpiel: WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

My Take: A mobile presence is essential (written about here: How a Smart Phone improved a Website’s Mobile Presentation and Ad Revenue) these days and WPtouch solves that problem. I use WPtouch Pro as it comes with the ability to brand your mobile site with a logo and grants you the ability to use advertising on it  like Google AdSense. The regular version has neither of these options.

Well there you have it, a starter WordPress Plugin pack for your movie website. Did you find this section of Starting a Movie Website series helpful?

About the author

Rollo Tomasi

Rollo Tomasi is a Connecticut-based film critic, TV show critic, news, and editorial writer. He will have a MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in 2025. Rollo has written over 700 film, TV show, short film, Blu-ray, and 4K-Ultra reviews. His reviews are published in IMDb's External Reviews and in Google News. Previously you could find his work at Empire Movies, Blogcritics, and AltFilmGuide. Now you can find his work at FilmBook, ProMovieBlogger, and TrendingAwards.

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