Essential Wordpress Plugins

Posted On: 04/30/09

Posted in: Blogging - Author: Shaun

One of the greatest benefits of wordpress is its plugins system. Users can create extremely power features and offer them to other users for free! These plugins allow you to do and feature things that no other blogging platform can. The following list will be a guide to helping you pick out the essential plugins you need to utilize wordpress to its full potential.

Akismet

This is the most important plugin on your blog. If you and your blog were stranded on a deserted island you could only have one plugin. This would be that plugin. Akismet filters all that nasty spam that plagues the internet and keeps it off of your blog. Other than checking your spam folder now and again. Akismet runs seamlessly in the background never asking anything from you other than a verification code.

Wordpress comes with Akismet all you have to do is activate, but you can support the guys who created it here.

Popularity Contest

When a new reader comes to your blog they are going to be greeted with your most recent posts. Now these posts might not be the cream of the crop and you might lose that reader. Instead, why not show them your most popular posts and have them reading the best of your work? Not only will this help keep readers on your blog it gives more SEO juice to your best posts hopefully pushing them higher in the rankings.

You can see an example of this plugin at the top of this blog. Go here to download it.

All in One SEO

If you are a blogging beginner and don’t know a meta tag from a img tag than this is the plugin for you. Let this plugin take care of all the tagging of your pages. Once you get a better grasp on the situation than you can move forward and create more customized tags for posts. Until then, let this plugin do all the heavy lifting.

Make sure to go the settings page and edit things to your liking. Download it here.

WP PageNavi

This plugin will require a slight bit of modification on your part, but it’s easy and worth the trouble. This will change that boring “Next Page,” “Previous Page” mumbo jumbo on the bottom of the page to nice clean numbered pagination! You want your readers to have as much access to all of the pages of your blog as possible and this plugin accomplishes that for you.

You can also customize the colors with a bit of CSS work! Download it here. The creator of this plugin is probably the best all-around wordpress plugin creator so be sure to check out his other plugins here.

Google Sitemaps

Submitting your sitemap to google is one of the best ways to make sure that the powerhouse of search engines has access to all of your pages. This plugin will submit it initially and keep submitting it whenever you create a new post. This is a great plugin and should be on every blog you hope to see succeed!

Download it here.

Add to Any

If you don’t want to go through the trouble of adding StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, and all of the other crazy social media out there to your posts than let this plugin do it for you. This plugin will add a button to your posts so users can quickly and easily submit it to any of their preferred medias.

Make sure the reader can see it! Download it here.