Must Have Plugins For A New Wordpress User
Installed wordpress, implemented the new template, imported the posts, customized the permalinks, monetized the categories, pinged Google? Good! But you are not yet done with your new wordpress blog completely until you install the must have plugins.
Plugins are small codes which could be used to customize your wordpress blog as per your needs. But installing too many plugins could very well be the reason of slow down of your blog download speed whereas missing out some important plugin can lead to unsatisfied readers.
For a new wordpress user it is always tough to determine the plugins which are a must for his blog and so here I present the plugins which I think are a must install for your blog. Please update me if I missed any plugin!
Akismet
Akismet is among those few plugins which come pre-installed with your wordpress installation. Just click on the plugins link on the dashboard menu and you will find it. I received my first spam comment on the first day after my blog was launched on wordpress. Spammers will find you and screw your blog badly. So better get this plugin activated. And take that as a warning.
Download Akismet in case it isn’t there in your default wordpress installation
Share This
A very compact way using which your users can bookmark your blog articles on various services.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a XML sitemap for your blog which is automatically updated whenever you update your blog.
WP-Cache
WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.
It helps you avoid the digg effect and the slashdot effect.
Feedburner FeedSmith
Compare “feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedURL” and “www.yourdomain.com/feeds”. Now which of these do you think is easy to remember? Ofcourse the later one.
This plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.
Subscribe To Comments
This plugin is handy to help when you want your readers to know that the post on which they left a comment has a new comment. It helps you start a conversation for your posts in your comments section and is always useful to get good amount of readers.
SRG Clean Archives
Mostly templates have a place to display the archives but as your blog gets older than the archives section approaches to size XXL! So it is always a better option to have a separate page for your archives.
Wordpress Contact Form With Spam Protection
Every blog should have a way for readers to contact them directly. Having a “Contact Me” page is very important and without one you could be missing out on a lot of opportunities that could arise throughout the life of your blog. This contact form is especially nice as it comes with spam protection, which is running rampant through the internet these days.
RSS Feeds Signature
I use the plugin Post Post to deploy signatures in my RSS feeds and it does give my feeds the odd professional look. Use this if you burn feeds for your blog.
Remember that these were the plugins which a new user must use in his wordpress hosted blog. As you start gaining experience with wordpres you will yourself know what else you need and what you don’t.
What plugins are you using?
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
Ellie
I use a lot of different plugins - see my list here - http://www.thepinkc.net/site-design/
Oct 17th, 2007
Alexis Brion
Thank you very much for that list. I was looking for something like wp-cache for my blog!
Oct 19th, 2007
Nathan Thoms
This is a good list; I’d especially stress using Share This rather than many of the other social bookmarking plugins that are around. You can register easily on their associated website and have complete customization over display and function without having to get into the nitty gritty details of the code or leaving out something important.
Far better than All-in-One, Gregarious, etc.
Jan 14th, 2008
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