I’ve talked about how much I love Thesis, but here’s a reason that doesn’t usually come up in first conversations: Thesis means I don’t have to use a bunch of plugins. Why does this matter? Because each plugin is one more bit of overhead that runs when your blog serves up content, and it’s one more piece of infrastructure to keep maintained and up to date.
Thesis contains so many great features built into the theme that these plugins aren’t needed:
- All in One SEO Pack – features a wide variety of SEO options, most of which are built into Thesis.
- Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool – this plugin lets you improve your blog’s search rankings by “noindexing” pages of your choice (such as archives, categories, tag pages, and so on). Thesis has all of these options built in.
- Feed Locations – using Feedburner or otherwise want to give your blog visitors an alternate feed URL? You can do it with this plugin, or you can do it with Thesis.
- Google Analytics – this plugin will insert your Google Analytics script (or you could manually edit your theme files), or you can simply paste the script in through Thesis’ admin screen.
- Post Teaser – generates a preview/teaser of a post, with a link to go to the full post. This is a built-in feature of Thesis that can be configured any number of ways.
- Multi-level Navigation Plugin – adds multi-level navigation menus to WordPress. Thesis implements this same functionality using WordPress’ nested pages features.
By not running six separate plugins, my site has a reduced overhead and maintenance load. Couple these with Thesis‘ other killer features (including font face, size, and color formatting without touching any code) and I really do think that Thesis is a great way to make blogging easier.
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