Ten MUST have WordPress plugins
WordPress is the best platform for Blogging and a constantly developing too. Plugins add extra fnctions or features making your site more productive. I am providing the list of top 10 wordpress plugins that every blogger must have.
Many of you may be using most of them but it will serve as good one for newbies and startup wordpress bloggers.
1. All in One SEO Pack
Some features:
- Canonical URLs
- Fine tune Page Navigational Links
- Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
- Provides SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
- Nonce Security
- Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
- For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
- For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
- Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
2. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
4. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
The E-mail tab makes it easy to share via Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL, and any other web-based e-mailer or desktop program. The Add to Favorites button (or Bookmark tab) helps users bookmark using any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.).
5. Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
6. WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by PHP. Static files are served to:
- Users who are not logged in.
- Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
- Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.
7. Google Analytics for WordPress
The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.
8. Popularity Contest
Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. There are numerical values assigned to each type of view and feedback; these are used to create a ‘popularity score’ for each post.
The values assigned to each view and feedback type are editable and can be changed at any time. When you change any of these values, the ‘popularity score’ for all posts are updated immediately to reflect the new values.
9. WP-PageNavi
All the information (general, changelog, installation, upgrade, usage) you need about this plugin can be found here: WP-PageNavi Readme. It is the exact same readme.html is included in the zip package
10. GD Star Rating
GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and also add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings along with thumbs based ratings
This is not all, there may be some more important than these according to your type of site or specific use. But, the mentioned here can be used as primary functionality and for enhancement purpose.
