Must Have WordPress Plugins for All

Must Have WordPress Plugins for All

As you all know, WordPress is one of the most easiest and powerful way to blog or maintain a full featured dynamic website. Many use wordpress as their Content Management System (CMS). The fast and active development of wordpress and ever growing userbase is very encouraging. The wordpress also has a very helpful user forum and there are numerous websites that offers tips and tricks for your blogs.  

Must Have WordPress Plugins for All

Must Have WordPress Plugins for All

The wordpress comes with a lot of core features and with almost every release they incorporate some of the features that used to be a part of some plugin before. Still, there are literally numerous plugins available to meet your need and most of them are also free of cost. Once you have installed a wordpress blog there are certain things that you always do like chainging the theme and adding plugins to enhance the functionality of your wordpress enabled website.

The question is which plgins to use?
It is recommended that you use more plugins than you really need. Try to maximize the use of the core features of wordpress installation. However, some plugins are really really helpful and you may consider installing. Here are plugins that I personally use in most of my websites.

SEO Plugins: 

SEO in important. I use Alll in One SEO for most of the sites however many perfers Headspace also. Both of the plugins are under active development and they update frequently with every major wordpress release. The Headspace offers a lot more features than the ALL in ONE SEO. There are many other SEO plugins for wordpress too but why waste time when you know about the best two?  

1. All in One SEO: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization)
2. Headspace2: HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site.

Cache Plugins:

Cache plugins are great. However, I do not like them always. Many wordpress plugins are not compatible if you have a cache plugin installed in your blog. But if you have too much of traffic and you are on a shared hosting, you may consider using the cache plugins which will reduce the server load and page loading time greatly. I do use WP Super Cache and WP Widget Cache for some of my popular websites.  

1. WP Super Cache: A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.
2. Hyper Cache: Hyper Cache is a new cache system for WordPress, specifically written for people which have their blogs on low resources hosting provider (cpu and mysql).
3. WP Widget Cache: A high-performance caching plugin for WordPress, and a plus for WP-Cache or WP Super Cache!

Adversiment Managements:  

With wordpress you can easily insert codes to sitewide advertisements and there are numerous plugins available to display various types of ads including “Google Adsense”, “Chitika”, “Yahoo Publishers Network”, “Bidvertiser” and more. A complele list is provided in my another atricle “Monetize your WordPress Blog with Money Making Plugins“. I will only hi-light two from the list as I am writhng this article targetted for the beginners with wordpress.
1. Easy Adsensor: Easy AdSenser provides a very easy way to insert Google AdSense code into your existing blog posts. It gives you a widget to display ads in your sidebar, and another to show a Google Search box. It also gives you an option to apply Google’s policy (not more than three ad blocks per page) Thus, Easy AdSenser is perhaps the first plugin that gives you a complete solution for everything AdSense-relate.
2. Adman: Lets you insert your ad-code (like AdSense) directly before or in the middle of your post content or wherever you want without having to edit your template.

Photo Gallery Plugins

There are again numerous Gallery plugins for the wordpress. You don’t have to choose the one I am recommending, but choose the one which has been under strong development. I use NextGen gallery because it is simple and goes with any of the wordpress themes I use in my various sites.  

NextGen Gallery: NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Before I start writing the plugin I study all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums.

Spam Guard Plugins

It is really important to keep you blog free from spams. Akismet comes with the default installation of wordpress. Remember to activate the plugin as soon as you can.  

More Plugins to Make your Blog Sweet

Well these are the most basic plugins to get you started with your blog. None of the plugins mentioned avove needs and modifications on the theme codes. So you are good to go after 1 click installations. There are some other plugins I use in my blogs. Some of them needs simple edits of your theme files however. They are: