Posted on October 10, 2006 - by John

Top Wordpress Plugins

Following on from my top 10 series of posts, I decided to look at the most popular plugins for wordpress, and in my opinion (most of them) are essential plugins for wordpress users. So without further ado, I give you the top 10 wordpress plugins.

Akismet: This comes with wordpress, as a standard plugin, it has a connection to a central database which is updated regularly and informs your wordpress installation about the latest spammers, so they are automatically blocked. You still have to option to see what is blocked, so that on the rare occasion that it blocks non spam comments you can move these to approved comments.

Google Sitemaps: After all your hard work posting, its a good idea to make sure Google Search Engine knows about every page/post on your site. Google Sitemaps does just that, simple to install, once you have set it up head over to Google Webmaster site, and you can inform Google of the location of the Sitemap file.

Ultimate tag Warrior: This is the essential Tag Tool for wordpress, there is so much you can do with it, each post can be tagged.

WP Contact Form: A great and easy way to allow your readers to get in contact with you. Upload two files, and a few options later you have a professional contact form on your site.

Related Posts: Related Posts is great for you and your readers, when it comes to reader retention, that is keeping people on your site, its a nice option to let people be able to read posts related to other articles you wrote. Related posts does just that.

WP Backup: I’ve spoken before about backing up your wordpress database. This plugin does just this, you can also set up an additional plugin called WP Cron, which can automate this process for you.

Gravatars: This is just something for fun, its nice to put a face to your readers. This service connects to the Gravatar Service, and places a picture beside the commenter’s!

FlickrRSS: Flickr images on your homepage, a great tool for integrating your photos on your blog.

FeedBurner: The latest version of this plugin has been released. The idea is that you can use this plugin from Ordered List to redirect your feed to FeedBurner.

WP Notable: “Notable displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking and networking sites.”