The Most Usefull Worpress Plugins for New Blogs

Over the past several years I have come across many different WordPress plugins, but have only found a handful that are vital for every single site I build. Today, I am providing you with my top list of plugins along with reasons why the plugin is essential for new WordPress blogs. I hope you benefit from these plugins as much as I have! By the end, you should learn how to do such things as putting social buttons at the end of your blog posts as you see in the picture to the right. If you have any questions about any of the plugins or would like to tell me what your favorite WordPress plugin is, just leave a comment at the bottom of the page.

My Top 12 WordPress Plugins

1. Akismet – This plugin has saved me tons of time when it comes to comment spam. It is created by Automattic (the people who created WordPress) and tracks what other people consider spam on their blogs to determine if any of these same spammers are commenting on your blog. They automatically take off these comments. Most of my comment spam instantly disappeared when I installed this plugin.
2. All in One SEO Pack – This is the all around best SEO plugin for WordPress. It basically does all the basics for SEO including titles, descriptions, keywords, and more. It is directly added to the proper place in your code. Many other people like to use other SEO plugins for purposes of auto-generating their SEO information. Let me just warn you ahead of time that is a bad idea. It is much better to do it on your own to make sure you target all the keywords you are specifically aiming for.
3. Broken Link Checker – This is a great plugin for finding links on your site that are broken. You don’t have the to manually click each and every link on your site to see if they work. You should just use this plugin instead. Much better solution in my opinion.
4. Fast Secure Contact Form – This has proven to be the best contact forum for WordPress. There are a lot of other contact forum plugins out there, but this one is best at keeping spam out of my mailbox. At the end of the each contact forum you make, you can create a spam filter to stop most of your contact spam.
5. Google XML Sitemaps – This has been essential for me for creating Sitemaps. What is so great about this plugin in particular? First, it updates automatically as you add new pages making sure you are never out of date. Second, it is set up to be read by Google easily. This allows Google to know much more quickly if you have added a new page. I also suggest you submit your sitemap to Google though Google Webmaster Tools.
6. Jetpack by WordPress.com – Jetpack connects with a wordpress.com blog to give you a lot of extra features for WordPress. This plugin was also made by Automattic. Some of the advanced features are having site statistics, spelling and Grammar proofreading, and extra sharing options.
7. Redirection – This is a great plugin for permanently redirecting a page on your site. For instance, lets say you want to move your website to another domain. You could set up redirects on your old site to send people to your new one automatically. This can also prove to be useful for changing a url for a page in order to send people who still click on old links to the proper page.
8. Robots Meta – This plugin is super powerful when it comes to stopping Google from looking on pages you don’t want it to see. For instance, you don’t want Google to see your author or admin pages. So, you can simply check a box that prevents Google from indexing those pages. There are a lot of other options, so you can set it up so that Google only sees what you want it to see.
9. ShareThis – While this plugin is not essential, I still felt like I should put it on because it is defiantly my favorite social sharing button plugin. There are a lot of other button plugins, but ShareThis by far has the most options. They have seven different button types along with the ability to add a facebook like and +1 button.
10. Similar Posts – This is useful to use at the end of each of your posts. Basically, you can suggest other similar articles to your user at the end of each of your posts. This does two things: keeps the reader on the site a little longer as well as helps you link similar pages together. This means that if one post for a particular subject succeeds, it helps all the other pages that are similar to it rank higher as well.
11. WordPress Database Backup – This is a powerful way to backup your site. You can download a backup of your site or just have the plugin send you a backup automatically every week to your email. This way, even if your server provider fails, you will still have your blog.
12. WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache – This is a simple Cache plugin. For those who are not sure what that is… Simply stated, it makes an html version of each page so that it will load quicker for the common user who visits the page. This make all your pages load quicker as well as boost your rankings in Google now that page speed is not considered a ranking factor.