The 8 Basic Must-Have Plugins In Your WordPress Blog

In this post, I have gathered these 8 very basic yet important WordPress plugins that you will never want to miss out if you were to build an awesome blog. Big thank you goes to the developers!

Akismet

Description:
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches.

I have no idea how Akismet works but it really filter out spam comments effectively! This is perhaps the very first and the most important plugin of your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps

Description:
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated, and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search, and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

A complete blog should always have a sitemap. It tells visitors and search engines how your blog is structured and the location of each post and page (URL).

All in One SEO Pack

Description:
Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

“But I don’t mean to optimize for a Search Engine”. Come on, you need this plugin not because you want to optimize for a search engine, but you want to make your blog sensible! A general mistake most bloggers have in common is not having the right title and description for their post. Most of the time, the whole blog is tagged with the same title which is a deadly mistake. Imagine your blog as a magazine. Will you use the same title over all pages with different topics? With this plugin you are able to customize the title and description for each post.

Contact Form 7

Description:
This is a contact form plugin, which is simple yet flexible. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with a simple markup.

People hate email spams! Hate them so much! However, we still love to hear from our readers. This plugin enables your reader to reach you without you revealing your email address. Even if the spammers try to spam the form, Akismet will be in place to filter them out. Thus this contact Form 7 is best coupled with Akismet.

Subscribe to Comments

Description:
Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for the e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

This plugin gives conveniences to your readers to track the ongoing discussions in your blog. It is a must-have plugin to build relationship with your readers.

Sociable

Description:
Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages, and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! WordPress 2.6 or above is required for this plugin.

Blog is meant for people to read. There will be no point if others do not know about your blog. With Sociable plugin, readers and you, can easily submit your writing to a social bookmark for sharing.

WP-PageNavi

Description:
This plugin allows a better navigation by assigning pagination to your post. You can choose how many post to be displayed in one page and navigate directly to a certain page.

This plugin is meant for better organization. With this plugin your blog will look neater.

Advertising Manager

Description:
This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.

Only if you are doing advertising. By using this plugin, you can easily embed whatever advertising codes in you post as well as a page.

Only with these 8 essential plugins, your blog is complete. Besides, additional plugins like WP-Polls and WP-PostRatings are great for additional function to collect feedback from your user. Perhaps, I shall talk about it in another article.