Must have top 10 plugins for your WordPress blog

There’s good reason why WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It’s easy to use and has tons of great features. But what’s really made this open source software excel is its passionate community. Yes, WordPress has lots of features built in, but it doesn’t have everything. The WordPress community fills this need. It’s full of talented developers that are constantly creating plugins to extend the features and make it even better.

There are many WordPress plugins out there, but in this article we’re focusing on the most essential. Below is a list of 10 plugins that every WordPress website could use.

[Note: Click to Enlarge Images]

1) All in one SEO Pack
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Features:

• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

2) All in one Webmaster
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-webmaster/

Features:

3) WP Super-Cache

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by PHP. Static files are served to:

• Users who are not logged in.
• Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
• Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

4) Google XML Sitemap
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

5) WP Google-Buzz
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-buzz/

Google Buzz with official Google Buzz Counter. Beautiful Google buzz integration to wordpress + 8 different admin panel options (Settings -> WP Google-buzz) + 14 diff button images + Shows Counter + mouse over effects.

Features

• Shows Google-buzz button before/after post content
• Google Buzz Counter (Using official Google Buzz APIs).
• Manual insertion of code: Use this: <?php if(function_exists(‘add_wp_google_buzz’)) { add_wp_google_buzz(); } ?>.
• 14 different beautiful Google Buzz button images. All images are transparent.
• rel=”nofollow” option for buzz links
• Show/Hide option to show Google Buzz button on page.
• float = left/right option
• Popup window option

6) Akismet
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.  

Want to show off how much spam Akismet has caught for you? Just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template.

7) WP Page-navi

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.

Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

8 ) Broken Link Checker
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

Features:

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
• Also detects redirected links.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Link checking intervals can be configured.
• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.
• Searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text and so on is also possible.
• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

9) Contact Form 7
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Just another contact form plugin. 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.

10) Twitter Goodies
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-goodies/

Twitter style Twitter Goodies Profile Widget + Twitter Goodies Search Widget + Twitter Integration (wp to twitter) plugin. All in One plugin for Twitter Goodies.

Features:

• NEW: Twitter Goodies Search Widget option available (v1.1.9)
• Major Release feature: Twitter Integration (Automatically tweet your post/page immediately to Twitter when you publish/edit it)
• Load all Tweets and Scrollbar option
• Add Twitter Goodies to any Pages, Posts and Widget area.
• Admin Panel options to set widget title, widget width, widget height, twitter username, 5 different set of color combination
• Auto-Refresh Tweets (Continuous flow of Tweets)

I hope you like your post. Please provide your favorite plugins here in comment section to get best out of here.

Thanks,
Arpit Shah