There are thousands and thousands of Wordpress plugins out there trying to get your attention. But do you really need that many? To be honest, an average blog only needs a few plugins to get it really running. If you have too many plugins, you’ll end up having a blog that’s slow to load and will end up having too many complications with newer Wordpress updates. So knowing that you should only have enough plugins to make your blog functional (and visitors happy), take a look at the top 10 most useful Wordpress plugins.
10. Simple Post Template
There used to be a really good plugin called Post Templates that allowed you create separate post/page templates to save you the time of rewriting everything for posts that use the same format. They unfortunately went commercial and no longer provide the free plugin version. Anyways, I found a very similar free plugin, Simple Post Template, that only supports one kind of template for all of your posts. This is great for review blogs or blogs that feature similar weekly/daily posts (e.g. Video of the Week, Blog of the Day, etc).
9. Redirection
Managing 301 redirects and 404s can get a little messy if you don’t know what you’re doing. This free plugin helps you with that with a simple user interface and also keeps a log of any 404 errors. This plugin is especially good if you’re moving or changing blogs, but remains just as useful for blog maintenance.
8. Social Bookmarks
There are a lot of social bookmark plugins out there, but a lot of them require you to sign up and use codes that are at the mercy of their servers. Social Bookmarks creates small, unobtrusive buttons (with AJAX) to popular social bookmarking websites at the bottom of every post. You can also customize what social websites you want shown.
7. WP-PageNavi
WP-PageNavi is a easy, customizable plugin that enhances the page navigation. Instead of Wordpress’ default “Newer / Older Posts”, this plugin lets you customize it by adding page numbers and such. Great for bigger blogs with older posts that retain value.
6. Datafeedr Rotating Ads
Show random ads where ever you want on your blog with this incredibly simple and easy-to-use free plugin. You basically create ad groups with as many ads as you want, then insert the ad group codes into your template or as a widget. This plugin works great with the simple hack to show ads after the first post.
5. All-in-One SEO Pack
If you don’t know anything about SEO or you do and don’t have the time to manually implement tags on all your pages, use this plugin. Everything is automated for you – including title tags, meta keywords, meta descriptions and more. Great for beginners, but the stiff flexibility of this plugin will leave experts messing with the code.
4. Google XML Sitemaps
On the same note of SEO, this is a must-have. This automatically creates XML sitemaps every time you write a new post – saving you tremendous time and effort. This highly-customizable plugin also pings all the major search engines once the XML sitemap is updated.
3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
Keeping your readers on your blog should be one of your main goals and this plugin adds another feature to your blog that should help you achieve that. YARPP is a plugin that inserts related posts at the bottom of each post, giving your readers a list of posts that hopefully interests them. This free plugin comes loaded with features.
2. WP Super Cache
What a brilliant idea! Blogs are usually burdened by heavy PHP and JS scripts, but this plugin relieves that problem. Instead of having your users load every page/post with all the scripts, the WP Super Cache creates static html files to effectively ease the load times. This is great for users and search engine crawlers as well.
1. WordPress.com Stats
While on topic of page load time, this one is a powerful tracking system that actually doesn’t slow your page down. You won’t get the full features of Google Analytics, but unless you need that kind of in-depth data for whatever reasons (business, clients, etc), this WP plugin definitely takes the stage as the most useful plugin.
How many of these plugins do you use? Do you think a plugin should’ve or shouldn’t have been mentioned here?
