Here’s an interesting widget for. The ‘Most Commented Posts’ widget for Wordpress allows you to display a list with your most commented posts. This is good, because it will outline your most popular posts and you want people who come for the first time on your blog to get to see your most popular posts, because, most likely those will be your most valuable posts.

‘Most Downloaded Posts’ plugin features are:

1. Customisable header text

2. You can select how many posts you want to list (1 to 10)

3. You can choose to list most commented posts for:
* The current month
* The current year
* Since your blog started

4. Output can be customised via four key CSS classes

Go to the ‘Most Commented Posts’ page.

Download the ‘Most Commented Posts’ plugin.

Once your traffic level reaches a certain level or when you get large amount of visitors in a short time, your blog will stop working most certain, so you must be prepared for this situation, because nothing leaves you out of visitors like a blog that doesn’t work. Here are some tips that will help you:

* Optimize your blog’s design. Usually I advise you to use a minimalistic design, with as few images as possible. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t use images, becuase hey…what’s a blog without a nice design? But make sure those images are optimized.

* Use a cache utility. For this I recommend using the WP Cache plugin. What does this plugin do? It creates static pages from your generated pages. What does this mean? Usually, everytime a visitors come to your blog and reads a post, to generate each page, Wordpress sends requests to the database. This is ok when you have a tens or even houndreds of visitors. But when you have more than that in a short time, the server will slow down and even crash. This utilities allow visitors to view the static pages, requiring less hits to the database and reducing the load on your server.

* Use less incoming resources like hotlinked images, badges, icons, widgets, gadgets, and other blog accessories. Usually, try to host on your own account this type of resources because usually, when there’s a problem with one of these, you’ll probably also have problems with your blog.

You might also want to check out Lorelle’s “Prepare your blog for traffic” post written for BlogHerald, because it has some more interesting tips.

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Wordpress Download Counter is a plugin that could be very useful for your blog, by giving you an idea of what files are most downloaded. Here are the plugin’s features:

* Keeps track of the amount of downloads of a certain file.
* Keeps track of the last download time
* Allows you to reset the counter
* Allows you to add counters to both internal and external urls
* Can use fancy urls (like /downloads/file.zip)
* Can print the amount of downloads in a post.

Download Wordpress Download Counter

Wordpress Download Counter page

Wordpress Download Counter page on WP-Plugins
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