Just Enough Plugins For Your WordPress Blog

WordPress is a very popular Content Management System (CMS) for blogger. It gives blogger many flexibility to add additional functionality to the blogs & one of the is its plugin. Currently, there are more than 10,000 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Nevertherless, some basic plugins are usually required for a WordPress blog to function properly & more effectively. Here is a list of them which I believe is just more than enough for your blog.

1 Akismet

Akismet comes together with your WordPress installation. It checks the comments of your blog against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. If it is, it will throws the comment into your spam box automatically. This plugin is essential for a WordPress blog, otherwise you will be busy checking the comments for spam. In order for this plugin to work properly, you need to get a free API Key from WordPress.com.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/

2 Google XML Sitemaps

If you want your blog to appear in search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com (I believe every blogger does), this plugin will generate a special XML sitemap for better search engine indexing. Basically with this generated sitemap, it’s much easier for the search engine to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

3 All in One SEO Pack

This search engine optimization plugin optimizes your WordPress blog simply for Search Engines. Without it, your meta description, keywords tag will be missing. This means Google or Yahoo don’t like it.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

4 WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Instead of processing the complicated & heavier WordPress php & MySQL scripts, the generated static html file is used which require much lesser server cpu resources. However, this plugin is only useful when your blog has grown bigger & has many visitors. I would say very useful for blog that has >1,000 visitor per day.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

5 Quick Adsense

Quick Adsense offers a quicker & flexible way to insert Google Adsense or any Ads code into a blog post. This is the plugin develop by me, use it only if you want your blog to generate money. Check out the details in my previous post: Quick Adsense.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-adsense/

6 WP-Paginate

WP-Paginate is a simple & flexible pagination plugin which provides users with better navigation on your WordPress site. You may prefer another popular plugin WP-PageNavi, however WP-Paginate can also be used to paginate on comments which currently WP-PageNavi don’t have.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-paginate/

7 WordPress Popular Posts

You may want to try WordPress Popular Posts showing your most popular blog posts to your visitors. I quite like this plugin especially it use “WP template tags” to control the setting. It allows me to integrate it’s functions into my theme template easily.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts/

8 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

It is always a challenge for bloggers to make their visitors staying longer & make them come back later. This plugin returns a list of related post links based on a unique algorithm. The links which are relevant to current post can be displayed on your blog and RSS feeds. It therefore keeps your visitors engaged & increasing your traffic.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/

9 Get Recent Comments

I thought it is a need for a blog to display the most recent comments. Although it has not been updated since Mar 2009, this plugin display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. Give it a try, perhaps use this plugin to encourage readers make comments on your blog posts.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/

10 Subscribe to Comments

When your reader comments on your post, he/she may want to see your reply or read the subsequent comment from others. Subscribe to Comments allows the commenter to subscribe to e-mail notifications for subsequent comments.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/

11 FD Feedburner Plugin

If you are using FeedBurner, this plugin is a must. This plugin redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed seamlessly and transparently to Feedburner.com. Feedburner.com is a website owned by Google, it allows you to create, publish & distribute your blog feeds.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-widget/

12 WordPress.com Stats

This plugin uses WordPress.com’s stat system to records your blog statistic with no additional load on your server. Similar to Akismet, all you need is to get a free API Key from WordPress.com & the rest is automated.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

13 Contact Form 7

You can simply place a contact form in one of your page if you don’t want to disclose your email address to your reader. Contact Form 7 can helps you to do that, it can manages multiple contact forms, you may also customize the form & the mail contents as you like.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

14 Social Media Widget

There are many social media plugin available at WordPress.org. I select one of them here which I believe is more than enough for a blog to run. About social media, the most important aspect of getting success in social media is to get involve.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/