There are literally thousands of wordpress plugins out there, with developers the world over coming up with ideas for plugins to fill another tiny gap in functionality in wordpress, or improve different aspects such as SEO or ease of use.
However 99% of the time many of these plugins don’t really add much value to your wordpress blog. After years of developing sites with wordpress, and downloading and using countless plugins, I’ve put together a list of the top 10 plugins that I swear by, the ones that I’ll always install on any new wordpress site to maximise its potential.
Please let me know through comments of your experiences, good OR bad with these plugins.
One word of warning – make sure you don’t go crazy and add tonnes of plugins – they may clash, and end up not working or breaking your site. If you want to understand this further, or have me look at a problem you currently have, please get in touch.
I present to you:
Top 10 crucial wordpress plugins
1 All in one SEO pack: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
As the title suggests, and my number one plugin. Highly capable and essential plugin for enhancing your blogs presence in the search engines. Very easy to use, but with plenty of options to eliminate duplicate content, customise titles on pages, posts, even 404 page, manage your meta tags and more.
2 Google XML Sitemaps: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
This is an excellent plugin to help your SEO. It will generate an XML site map of your blog automatically, and despite the name the result can be read be Bing, Yahoo and Ask as well.
3 Ultimate Google Analytics:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics
4 Popularity contest
5 Akismet
6 cforms
7 Permalink Redirect
8 Related Posts
9 DBC Backup
10 Duplicator