WordPress Resources, Hosting, Themes and Plugins

My list of recommended WordPress resources including Themes, Hosting options, Plugins and Links. See also my other recommended Resources.

Self-Hosted WordPress

WordPress – I use WordPress on all of my sites now, including this blog.

Hosting

DreamHost – I use their Virtual Private Servers for many of my sites.
Media Temple – I use their (dv) Dedicated Virtual hosting.
Pingdom - how I monitor uptime and site response times for my sites.

Themes

Elegant Themes – One of my favourite Premium Themes site. Way too cheap at only $19.95 per year.
Thesis Theme – the Theme I use on this blog. Very simple, clean and easy to use. Perhaps a little pricey at $87, but one I haven’t regretted paying the slightest.
Woo Themes – great themes for business sites. For example, I use their Optimize theme on the XEN SEO site.
Theme Forest – tons of beautiful themes for WordPress.

Plugins

All In One SEO – very simple way to manage the title tags and meta data on pages and posts
Platinum SEO – I’ve been playing with this on a few sites – it has a great feature that automatically redirects old URLs to new ones if you change your permalink structure
Google XML Sitemaps – automatically generates an XML sitemap that you can submit to Google and Bing Webmaster tools
WP-Super Cache and W3 Total Cache – I use WP Super Cache on most sites, but it interferes with redirect software on one of the sites, so instead I use W3 Total Cache on that. Both are excellent, but WP Super Cache has been around longer.
Google Analytics for WordPress – makes adding your analytics code simple, but with the added advantage of easily adding tracking of downloads and external link outs.
fbLikeButton – Add the Facebook Like button to your website
WP Security Scan – great for highlighting security weaknesses on your site
Backup WordPress – I use this to back up each of my WordPress sites every day, and automatically email the backup to a separate GMail account I maintain specifically for the backups.
DrainHole – the best download manager plugin I have come across
Redirection – simple way to implement 301 redirects within WordPress
Topsy – ability to show Twitter mentions as trackbacks on your blog posts (I untick all the retweet stuff, and only enable the ‘Enable trackback comments’ option at the bottom of the Topsy settings.)
Wishlist Member – Membership plugin
WP E-commerce – online store plugin (other WordPress ecommerce options include ShopperPress and Shopp)