garykamen / blog

11-02-08

Essential WordPress Plugins for Every Blogger

WordPress is a great application by itself, but there are still a number of useful features that it does not natively support. Below is a list of essential tools to help you get the most out of your WordPress blog.

FeedBurner
An analytics tool for your RSS feed that tells you how many subscribers you have, and where they’re coming from.  If you don’t mind a few ads within your feed, the optional FeedBurner Ad Network helps you monetize your blog.
http://www.feedburner.com

Sociable
Automatically adds links to common social bookmarking websites like Digg.com below every post so that your readers can easily promote your content for you. 
http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/

RECAPTCHA 
Requires readers to type a jumbled word before commenting, preventing bots from spamming your blog. One of the best, and most popular CAPTCHA tools out there.
http://recaptcha.net/plugins/wordpress/ 

Akismet
CAPTCHA can prevent bots from spamming your blog, but if people are doing it, Akismet adds a second layer of protection by automatically screening each comment, and letting you review the ones that look fishy. 
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/

WP Google Analytics
Google’s completely free analytics program keeps getting better. This simple extension helps you to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your blog so you can track anything from page views, referring urls, downloads, etc… 
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-analytics/

Google XML Sitemaps
Creates a sitemap of your blog, making it easier for the most popular search engines (not just Google) to index it. Additionally, whenever you create or edit a post, your sitemap updates itself and notifies the search engines.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

All in One SEO Pack
When submitting a sitemap is not enough to get your blog noticed by the search engines, this extension helps you optimize your page titles and meta tags, making it easy for search engines recognize your content as being the most relevant for a given term. 
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

WP Super Cache
Each time a visitor loads a page of your blog, a call is made to the database. When multiplied many times, it can be very burdensome on the server and significantly increase page loadtime. WP Super Cache converts your pages to simple html, making them lightweight and fast. 
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Get Recent Comments
This simple extension displays your most recent comments within the blog’s sidebar.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/