Pathik Shah

Well this is a very basic WP tutorial, most of you may know this already. Creating an Archive page is very important as it helps your readers by making all the blog content easily accessible on a  single page. It also helps in indexing.

Check out my Blog’s Archives

There are many plugins / hacks available to create a simple archive on your WordPress blog but none as simple and clean as this one.

To Create an Archives Page for your Blog,

1. Download the Clean Archives Reloaded Plugin

2. Extract the files in the ZIP file using WinZIP or WINRAR and upload them to your wordpress_directory/wp-content/plugins using a FTP client or through the web interface of your hosting provider, just as you would any other plugin.

3. Next, log in to the WordPress Admin Panel (WP-ADMIN) of your blog and go to the Plugins tab.

Activate the Clean Archives Reloaded Plugin.

4. Create a New Page and add the code
[ cleanarchivesreloaded ] (without spaces)
wherever you want the Archive list to appear.

Set the Page Title to Archives and the page slug to /archives.

Publish that page. You should see the Archives page in your blog now.

Whenever you install WordPress for your blog, you get only two plugins – Akismet (Anti Spam) and Hello Dolly. You can however install more plugins to extend functionality, you can find a complete list of plugins here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins

Here is a list of the best WP plugins which I use on my blog. Most of them are very useful and functional and are light- they won’t bog down your WP site / blog.

To install them, just extract the folders to /blog/wp-content/plugins and then log in to your WP Admin Dashboard and select the Plugins tab to select and enable them.

1. All In One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

This is the most popular WP Plugin ever. It is just a simple plugin using which you can optimize your posts for search engines by adding the title, description and keywords etc when drafting the post.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

This plugin creats a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. The sitemap gets updated automatically everytime you create a new post. You can submit this sitemap to Google and other search engines for better SEO.

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