What’s in a name?
Aug 18th, 2009 by Scott Hebert
Last week, I changed the name of one of my WordPress plugins. The plugin adds a new column to the Pages and Posts panels of the WordPress administration pages. The new column displays the Google PageRanktm for the page or post in question. Additionally, the plugin adds a global Google PageRank indicator to the top of all administration pages.
Initially I gave the plugin a cutesy name: SlaptiGooglePR. This was somewhat informative and tied into the title of my high tech site, Slaptijack. I felt the name was clever, but still indicated what the plugin did. After nearly two years of service, I decided that it might be helpful to rename the plugin to something more descriptive. I noticed that the plugin did not rank very high in the WordPress Plugin Directory’s search results for common terms like “pagerank” or “google pagerank.” In the end, I decided to simply call the plugin the Google PageRank Tool.
Honestly, the tool hasn’t been a huge hit over the last two years. There have been over 2,000 downloads, but nothing to write home about. What I have noticed, though, is that the act of changing the name tripled the average daily downloads!
So, what’s in a name? Maybe more than you thought.