My 5 Favorite Wordpress Plugins
May 27th by Andrew Houle  |  stashed in Tools & Resources
5

You can inexhaustibly extend the features of your wordpress blog with over 2,200 plugins. But, that is only if you are using a wordpress.org site; and not the more limited, but free (no hosting costs) wordpress.com site. The differences are not in the scope of this article, but you can learn more here.

Depending on your blog you may find many of these plugins are very useful and others serve little purpose for you. Below are my top five (which are liable to change tomorrow, when I find something else I love!):

My Fav Five

  1. All in One SEO Pack
    Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important things you can do for your blog. By optimizing title tags, meta tags, sticking to web standards and other small details you can increase the probability that your site will be found on important search engines like Google and Yahoo. Web Designer Wall has a great article on SEO this week. This plug-n helps you optimize all your tags.
  2. Google Sitemaps – Append UTW Tags
    This is another plug-in built with the idea of SEO in mind. After activating this plug-in it will produce Google XML Sitemaps after every post is published. SEO Zeal Group provides a nice explanation of the importance of sitemaps.
  3. Bookmarkify
    A good way to increase your blog’s traffic is to get involved in social media websites like del.icio.us and digg. This simple widget places all the social media bookmarks you want after each post.
  4. Wordpress.com Stats
    If you want a simple, consise stats about visitors and what posts are successful, then I would suggest this plug-in. This plug-in focuses on the stats most bloggers care the most about. For more in-depth statistics check out Google Analytics or read my article on how to set that up.
  5. cformsII – Contact Form
    This is a very useful plug-in to help you set up a flexible, customizable contact form. Complete with AJAX capabilities.

Did I miss one of your favorites? Post a comment about what your blog couldn’t do without.

Related Article

How to Start a Wordpress Blog

About the Author

Andrew is the founder and primary contributer for MyInkBlog. He is a full time web developer for Niagara University. When he's not working there, he's a blogger, twitter'er, wordpress'er, silverstripe advocate, blessed father and husband.

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5 responses thus far

  1. Gilberto Galea

    May 28, 2008

    One of my favorites is, “All in One SEO Pack”, the others I haven’t used yet, but I will really keep attention to, they may be useful for my blog.

  2. Lisa Bennett

    August 27, 2008

    We just released a new plugin that allows you to add interactive video capabilities to your blog! Enhance your blog with both basic and advanced video capabilities. Upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix video content, enable video responses, manage and track your video content and much more…
    Check it out and download it here: http://corp.kaltura.com/wordpress_video_plugin?campaign=wp-comments
    Examples and pictures are on the plugin forum: http://community.kaltura.org/viewforum.php?f=4

  3. StumbleUpon

    August 31, 2008

    Great information! Thanks for writing this. It is an honor to participate in the discussion.

  4. Company Logos

    April 25, 2009

    Hey thanks for sharing this but i was actually planning to build up a free one through WP. I didn’t knew much about WP as to what coding editing and all. But if i ask you about the freebie stuffs then what are they???

  5. Designer Forum

    June 21, 2009

    Well thank you sharing it but do you have any idea about friendster plugins, they also uses WP but i cant use it there, so i will try to use this ones in my other WP blog.