WordPress is the best blogging platform and millions of blogs use WordPress. For those who don’t know what WordPress is, basically its just a software which we install on our server, and yes its the best blogging platform ever available.
There are many plugins of WordPress, which help us to extend the functionality of WordPress. Currently there are 18,018 plugins on the official site of WordPress. You can also see a list of all plugins from wordpress.org
Top 10 Best and Popular WordPress Plugins For Your Site
1) All in One SEO Pack:
I fully agree to the fact that content is the king, but a good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a also a must. Many people sometimes spend 1 Hour or more than that writing blog posts, but still they complain that they are not getting good amount of visitors. Therefore I would advise to install this plugin for good SEO. After installing this plugin, you’ll need to write the Title, Description and keywords of each of your posts. These fields will appear below your post in the admin panel.
Download All in One SEO plugin
2) Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin helps search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to understand the structure of your blog. It will create a sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog. So I think this is a must for all wordpress blogs. It will also automatically notify each search engines about the new content published.
3) WP Super Cache
You already know about cached files which your browser stores, so that your webpage loads faster the next time you open it. This plugin also works somewhat like that. This plugin will generate static files from your dynamic page.Instead of processing the PHP script everytime, visitors will be shown the cached page, which will reduce the load on the server and also the page will load faster, benefiting you. If you have a large amount of audience from Digg, delicious, or other social bookmarking site, then this plugin is definitely for you.
4) WP-PageNavi
Some blogs don’t have this page navigation bar and only have “Older posts” and “Newer Posts” link. But mostly people have mindset to find something to navigate between posts. Therefore I would recommend to install this plugin, so that your visitors can navigate through the pages. They can click on numbers like 1, 2, 3, Next, Last, etc, and believe me this really makes surfing easy for your visitor. It will look like:
Page 1 of 1212345Next »…Last »
Install this navigation bar if your blog doesn’t have this.
5) Contact Form 7
As the name suggests, its a simple plugin for making a Contact Form. The plus point of Contact forms is that your Email remains safe, and spammers don’t send spam Emails to your ID. So instead of directly giving your Email ID, I would recommend to use this plugin. No one will know your Email ID and the message will still be received by you. Just install this plugin and insert the code to your “Contact” page, as simple as this. And yes, a page like Contact Us is very important for any blog. The readers need a medium to contact you (as the admin).And yes this plugin also supports CAPTCHA and Spam filtering.
6) Akismet
Who doesn’t get SPAM comments? That’s where this Akismet plugin comes to rescue. Akismet checks your comments and verifies if it is spam or not. And if it detects a comment as spam, then it will store those comments separately, so that you can later check those comments and delete it or approve it. This plugin really works very well and has protected me from some 2000 spam comments. So if you are getting too many spam comments, then all you need is “Akismet”.
7) SocioFluid
We all love Social Bookmarking sites. Whenever I feel that it’s very informative article or website, I bookmark it. So for doing this sites like Delecious, Digg, stumble upon, etc comes to the rescue. Because you can’t always keep on pressing Ctrl – D all the times. If you are in office or using a public computer then you should use these bookmarking sites. So this “SocioFluid” plugin helps you to install the icons and links so that your visitor can directly bookmark your blog post. This plugin also has a glow effect and can also be inserted in the template, if you don’t want to use it directly. There are many plugins to add social bookmarking buttons, but i would recommend SocioFluid for this task.
8) Post Layout
Post Layout give you an incredible flexibility to insert whatever you want in posts and pages body. Adding HTML or JavaScript created by Google AdSense, Amazon, BidVertiser, Chitika and other advertising networks is a matter of copy and paste. Its not just about advertisement code, but you can insert any code, for e.g. you want to place a “Facebook like box” after your post. This plugin can help you do this also. No programming skills needed. No more WordPress themes modification. If you’re not a programmer, then this plugin is for you.
9) WP-DB Manager
Now comes the backup part. You love blogging and keep your blog fresh by publishing new content regularly. But have you made any backup plans. Let me tell you my story. I was previously very careless. I never took backup of my WordPress files and the result is a disaster. yes, I lost my all posts for the month of “may 2009”. After this disaster, I started to take backup. I hope you all learn something from this. So for taking backup, I use WP-DB Manager plugin, its very easy to use. You can take backup, or even restore backup and can also select not to take backup of unused tables. After the backup is complete, you can select the files to be Emailed to you.
10) WP-Security Scan
Security comes first, right ? So for that I recommend to use this plugin. Again, this is very easy to setup. Just install this plugin, and then you will be able to see this “Security” in the Admin panel. Just follow the advice of this plugin, e.g. it will tell you to change file permissions of some folders. So do change those file permissions. Afterall, we are spending hours for writing and we want our WordPress to be secure. So just install this plugin and feel safe.
Some questions which may come to your mind:
Question: So that’s it, what about other thousands of plugins ?
My answer would be that I just wanted to show the best plugins, which I think are. Ofcourse there are many plugins, do browse the database of wordpress.org and select the plugin which you think is the best according to your needs. But I tried to suggest the best plugin for each purpose, e.g. for Security I suggested WP-Security Scan, for backup, I suggested WP-DB Manager, for blocking spams, I suggested Akismet, etc. So you see these are some of the most common plugins which I think every blog should have.
Question: The list is great, but how do I install these plugins in WordPress ?
Its very simple, just click on download link for the plugin which you want to install. Download it and then just upload it to this location:
public_html/wp-content/plugins (Upload the downloaded plugins folder to this directory, also don’t rename the folder)
So do you have any more questions? How do you like this long post tell me, I am ready to read some comments. Also if you like this post than you may follow this blog on Twitter or Facebook.
çeviri says
good plugin collection, i have tried some