WordPress is a powerful CMS (content management system) and blogging software, and believe it or not, you can make it even more powerful with plugins. I’m going to share a few of my favorite plugins that I believe every WordPress installation should have:
1. Akismet:
Akismet is perhaps the best way to protect your blog from comment spam–it is surely the best I have found and is highly recommended by many WordPress users. In other words, it’s a must have.
2. Maintenance Mode:
Maintenance Mode lets you make your site accessible to only you while you’re updating your theme or revising your site. For everyone besides you, it displays a splash page that you can customize.
3. WP-PageNavi
Wordpress’s default “previous” and “next” links are a bit hard to navigate if you have more than a few posts. WP-PageNavi lets you use numbers to navigate through your posts, which is a lot easier.
4. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack optimizes your web site for search engines, making it much more “search engine friendly.”
5. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache creates static pages of your old wordpress (dynamic) pages and feeds those static pages to most of your users. It speeds up your site tremendously, especially if you have a lot of posts or pages.
6. Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps generates an XML sitemap which helps search engines such as Google, Bing, Ask, etc. to better index your blog.
7. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is by far my favorite contact form for wordpress. It’s simple, yet has enough features to satisfy almost anyone. It supports AJAX submission, Akisment spam filtering, CAPTCHA, and more.
8. Broken Link Checker
This plugin checks your site for links that are…broken. Sites link hundreds of places (especially blogs), and if that place shuts down, it can hurt your SEO (and your visitors can get confused). This plugin fixes that!
9. WP-DB-Backup
WP-DB-Backup backs up your wordpress databases without any effort from your end, which helps a lot. You can schedule automatic backups (which is recommended). But be warned, it only backs up your databases and not your entire site.
10. SexyBookmarks
What’s a blog without being able to share the content? That’s exactly what SexyBookmarks does: enable you to share your posts with almost any social media outlet out there. You pick which social sites you want to enable your visitors to share on as well.
Now, of course I didn’t name all of the great plugins out there (because there are a ton of them out there that help you and your site tremendously), but these are the ten I would recommend any blog use on their WordPress-enabled site, believe me, it will save you a lot of future headaches.
