‘Must Have’ WordPress Plug-ins

(The plug-ins listed here are all available through your WordPress dashboard. Just follow the installation instructions included.)

All in One SEO Pack

The best and most popular plugin for search engine optimization. It helps you optimize the most imporant parts of your blog according to what the search engines best respond to – titles, descriptions and targeted keywords. You can do this site-wide as well as in each post and page.

For Search Engine Optimization: In addition to this plugin, you need to set your ‘permalinks’ to automatically generate your post name rather than just a number (which is the wordpress default). Go to “Settings”, “Permalinks” and choose “day and name”.

Akismet

Comments and trackbacks on blogs are notoriously abused by spammers – people just looking to get their links out there and who don’t do it in an ethical way. This plugin will save you lots of time and embarrassment!

It will automatically stop any post from any site on their blacklist.

DBC Backup

DBC Backup is a simple way to schedule daily database backups using the server system. You can select when and where your backup will be generated. Having backups is essential…

Recommended WordPress Plug-ins

Google XML Sitemaps

A Google Sitemap is a file which contains URLs and other relevant information for all public pages or documents of your website. It assists Google as well as other search engines like Yahoo and MSN Search. This plugin generates them automatically for you and notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and YAHOO about changes via a service called ping.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics is a free service from Google that helps you track online interaction with your site. This plugin helps you manage that. Go here to learn more.


TinyMCE Advanced

Enables advanced features and plugins in TinyMCE, the default visual editor in WordPress. Without this add-on the edit window is underpowered.

More Recommended WordPress Plug-ins – Special Purpose

Creative Clans Slide Show WordPress Widget

A widget to use the Creative Clans SlideShow in WordPress.

Quick Page/Post Redirect

Redirect Pages or Posts to another location quickly. Adds a redirect box to the page or post edit page where you can specify the redirect Location and type which can be to another WordPress page/post or an external URL


Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

    Sociable

    Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

    Share and Follow

    A simple plugin to manage sharing and following.

    Contact Form 7

    A contact form – simple but flexible. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

    Note: Contact Form 7′s CAPTCHA module has been separated as Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin. Now you need to install it if you use CAPTCHA. If you don’t, you can use it by itself.

    Since being published in August 2007, Contact Form 7 has been translated into a number of languages.