Guest blogged by Nick Harrison
Below are 10 must have WordPress plugins for your blog. There are so many others that I am turning this into a two part series, but I want your ideas, too. So review the list below and then let me know which plugins you think should make the second part!
Akismet This baby is such a life and headache saver. Bots are rampant and this little baby stops most spam comments before they ever make it to the site. A must have install.
Subscribe2 This is such a cool plugin. Most people use Feedburner, however I use this on a few of the sites I have created and this plug-in rocks. It works like Feedburner in regards to you being able to have people subscribe to your blog. This is the cool part though. You can actually create custom HTML emails or use templates for your blog that will automatically send the following day you have a new post to your subscribers. You can also send an HTML newsletter or email to all your subscribers as well. Constant Contact + Feedburner = Super Cool!
WP-PageNavi This plugin lets you customize your page nav links. In English? Okay fine. Instead of just having “older entries” and “new entries” you can stylize your pages with actual page numbers etc.
NextGEN Gallery If you are going to be displaying images on your blog and several in a post, there isn’t a plugin that compares. You can display several images as thumbnails and can even view them in a lightbox so that your viewers can see a larger image while on the same page and toggle between all of the images.
WP Super Cache If you haven’t heard of this sucker, let me show you to the promised land! Do you think the file size of your template is all of WordPress? Not even close. WordPress is filled with PHP functions that go on for miles. What this plugin does is act like a super caching system (hence the name) that once a page is loaded for the first time, it will actually create an HTML file of that page. What this means is that viewers can bypass all of the WordPress diesel fuel and be morphed to its location.
WP-Cumulus This is a very aesthetically cool plugin. It can take your tags and categories and create a Flash tag cloud that you can rotate and move with your mouse. Little tricky to get it just right, but worth the patience.
All in One SEO Pack This is incredibly important. Every blog should have an SEO plugin. This one happens to be the one I use most. It will allow you to create META tags, as well as not allow any duplicate content to be searched (big in SEO land).
WordPress Related Posts This is a neat little tool that will keep people searching through your site by letting them see related articles. Very helpful with the “fight against high bounce rates.”
WPtouch iPhone Theme This puppy automatically creates an iPhone site for your existing blog. The mobile web browsing community has been growing like crazy, yet all websites and blogs are conformed to laptops and desktops. At times I will create an iPhone theme from scratch, but in most cases this works just fine.
TweetMemeThis is a must have. This plugin is not only a must have, but more of a how on earth could you not have this? In the near future, if you don’t have social media activity on your posts, good luck getting any kind of SEO or blog traffic