Ten Wordpress Plugins You Must Have
Wordpress Plugins are small applications or programs that are designed to extend the functionality of your Wordpress blog. Currently there are more than 8,900 plugins available online at Wordpress.org. Best part is that they are all free for you to download and use on your blog. Installing plugins is very easy, just log in to your admin panel, click on plugins, click add new, then click upload, click browse and select the plugin you downlaoded in zip format and then click install. Once installation is completed make sure you activate the plugin by clicking activate link. Now here are the Ten Plugins you must have:
Sitemap: In simple words, sitemap is a list of all the pages or links on your blog or website. Google and other major search engines use this file to crawl your website, in other words sitemap is the most important file to have on your server in the same directory of your blog. I recommend Wordpress plugin Google XML Sitemap, which will generate a special XML sitemap for you automatically. Click here to visit the plugin page and download Google XML Sitemap.
Spam Filter: If you already have a blog you probably know how many spam comments you get on your blog, fortunately Wordpress comes with a Plugin called Akismat by default, which filters every comment for spam. If you don’t have one you can install Akismat by Clicking Here. If you already have Akismat installed on your blog by default you still need to activate it.
Twitter Post: This plugin posts portion of your blog post on twitter with a link to your blog every time you publish a blog post. Twitter is a good way to bring some readers to your blog, so go signup for a twitter account and link your blog to twitter with this plugin. To download Twitter Post Plugin please click here.
Sociable: This plugin automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. There are about 99 different social bookmarking sites that you can choose from such as Digg, Facebook, Mixx, Tublr, LinkedIn, Technorati and more for your visitors to bookmark your blog post or page. To get this plugin please click here.
Contact Form: I think every blog should have a contact page for the visitor to contact the blogger. Contact Form 7 is the plugin that can manage multiple contact forms, and is very customizable. To download Contact Form 7 please click here.
Custom Page Extension: Wordpress by default comes with parmalink plugin and you can customize post extension through this, but parmalink does not give you an option to have custom page extension. In order to get custom page extensions to match post extensions such as html, htm etc, you need this plugin. Please click here to download Custom Page Extension Plugin.
WP-Shortstats: In order to track your visitors you need this plugin. Click here to download WP-Shortstats plugin.
Follow Me: This plugin allows you to post a widget on the side of your blog which will allow visitors to click and follow you on twitter. Please click here to download this plugin.
Publish To Facebook: If you have a facebook account you can publish your posts to your facebook directly from your blog. Please click here to download this plugin.
Remote Database Backup: This plugin creates SQL dumps of your wordpress database. You can set this up to email you backup of your blog every day or every week or month. This is a great way to make sure you don’t lose your hard work due to some technical issue. Please click here to download this plugin.
These are the 10 most important plugins that I personally use on my blog. There are lots of other plugins listed on wordpress.org under extend link. If you think you know any plugin that might help the readers of this blog please post it in comment section below. Thank you for visiting this blog and have fun blogging.