WordPress has taken the blogosphere by storm. Anyone who is familiar with blogging probably has heard of WordPress. One of the greatest features of WordPress is the ability to customize it to your own tastes and liking. One of the easiest ways to personalize your blog is with plugins. With a million choices of WordPress plugins out there, here is a short list of the best plugins that every blogger should have.
Akismet Spam Catcher
This is the number one plugin tool out there that most bloggers are using. If you have a popular blog with lots of readers and comments, you’ve probably received some comment spams. Spammers are a widely faced problem by bloggers no matter what blogging platform they use. Due to its popularity, WordPress is the most attacked blog platform by manual and auto-spammers. To resolve this problem, the default Wordpress installation file is bundled up with the Akismet Spam Catcher. When enabled, Akismet checks the comments you receive against their database of common spam and blocks it from reaching your Web site. It stores it for a certain amount of time so you can double check and make sure you’re readers comments aren’t getting blocked. You can maintain the professional look of your blog without spending hours wading through the comments for spam.
Google Sitemap Generator Plugin
This tool creates an XML sitemap file that is good for Google, Yahoo and MSN search. Providing the search engine bots with a sitemap of your blog will get more of your web pages indexed in the search engines. The more web pages you have indexed in the search engines, the more likely your Web site is to get found from searches. This is another free tool available for your WordPress blog. If you are trying to generate extra income from Google AdSense or just trying to gain readers for your blog, this sitemap generator plugin will help you in your attempt.
Gravatars
This is a fun plugin that will spruce up your comment section and invite readers to personalize their involvement with your blog. The Gravatar plugin lets your users upload a picture or image that will show up next to their name when they comment on your blog. Any time you can involve your readers in your blog, it will make them want to come back and keep reading. People are always looking for interesting blogs to follow.
WP-Cache
This may not be the most exciting plugin available for your Wordpress blog but it may be one of the most important ones you use. If you’ve been keeping a blog for a long time, you know how the blog posts can add up. WP-Cache is a very efficient WordPress caching system that will make your site a lot faster and more responsive. It caches your WordPress pages and stores them in a static file for requests in the future. WP-Cache is another free WordPress plugin that is a must have. If you have hundreds of blog posts, it may take a while to gather that data when someone searches for information on your Web site. With this free caching utility tool, you won’t loser visitors with slow response time.
WordPress Database Backup
Like the Akismet plugin, this plugin is also bundled up with any WordPress installation and can be easily activated like the Akismet plugin. Database backup is a very useful tool for protecting a blog’s database from file corruption. It is advisable to backup Wordpress databases on a regular basis, and most especially when doing a WordPress version upgrade. This plugin allows saving of the backup file on the hard disk or can be sent as a file on a specified email.
Related Post
This WordPress plugin is very useful when highlighting previously posted articles which have related topics to the currently posted post. This plugin enables blogger to display other related posts via a title list, other previous posts. It is a good way to highlight previous posts as well as increase search engine hits.
Ultimate Tag Warrior
The UTW plugin as it is commonly called is the best way of tagging individual posts of weblogs. The tags generated by UTW provide a useful navigation for other related contents on the blog. The UTW also provides a way for the blog to be indexed by Technorati and other tag-enabled blog directories.
Recent Comment
Like the Related Post plugin, the recent comment plugin is a useful utility for displaying the most recent comments made by blog readers. This is good way of encouraging users to participate on the discussion on the different posts in the blog. First time commenter will be encourage to come back again in the future and comment on future blog posts. The more commenter in a blog, the more successful that blog is.
There are other useful plugins that can be installed on WordPress powered blogs and each has its own functionality and purpose. Installing most of them is very useful and yet should be done conservatively so as not to slow down the performance of the blog. Install only those plugins which are useful depending on the niche of your blog.
