Your 5 Most Essential WordPress Plugins?
Ajith | Nov 2008 | Blogging Tips, Your Opinion
WordPress is an amazing blog platform! Hardly 9 months after I started using it, I must say that I am in love with it and even started exploring with its core codebase as well as experimenting with my own little plugins. The amount of extensibility built into this blogging platform – or Content Management System (CMS) – is just incredible.
Though I am using a number of plugins and keep on experimenting with more, I am not fully aware of all the newer plugins that are coming in. The aim of this little survey post is to ask you all WordPress lovers, which are your Top 5 WordPress Plugins that are most essential to and powering your blog as of today.
My Top 5 Essential Plugins
The following are what I consider as my Top 5 out of the 21 installed on this blog (listed in the order of priority).
#1 WordPress Database Backup Plugin: I am not sure how life will be without this plugin just in case of something really bad happens to my WordPress data. The very reason that it is a Database based CMS, made me install this plugin first before even rolling out the blog to public.
#2 Executable PHP widget: This plugin helps me to add PHP widget code to my WordPress blog with the same ease of adding a text widget. Many of my widgets are now hugely dependant on this little plugin.
#3 Akismet Spam Protection: I can’t imagine the scenario of retrieving 10 valuable comments out of the 50 or 60 spam comments received daily if this plugin was not there. Truly it saves your time and energy as a blogger and also saves you literally from nervous breakdowns 
#4 Google XML Sitemaps: One the top three essentials are met, we need to think about publicizing the blog and the first plugin I would need is the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin. Compared to the other plugins, perhaps this one is a little bit difficult to set up for beginners but it’s worth that effort! Kudos to its developers! You guys made my blog content visible to the bots and hence to the humans as well!
#5 Feedburner FeedSmith: Steve Smith’s brain child is now with Google after the latter acquired FeedBurner. This plugin makes sure that all feed formats syndicated from your blog are redirected to ONE single feed access point. I did not understand the importance of this plugin initially and hence I still have six or seven RSS subscribers sitting on the default WordPress RSS 2.0 feed and not via FeedBurner.
Of course there are close contenders like All In One SEO Pack etc but they were not as important as the five explained above – at least for me!
Over to you…
Now let me ask you the following questions:
- Which are your 5 most essential plugins (not nice to have ones)?
- Did you have all of them when you rolled out your blog?
- Which is the latest plugin that you have added to your WordPress blog? (Does not need to be the most essential but just to make our readers aware of what is cool and new!)
Happy Blogging!
You forgot All in One SEO Pack……..
@Samrat, you did not read carefully… I did mention it
In fact, I had it in the fifth place, but then gave priority to FeedSmith…
Ajith – I think I would have to agree with your list of top 5. If I had made the list I probably would have listed All in One Seo rather that Sitemaps but you’re right – Sitemaps is more valuable. The things you do with All in One Seo can easily be done manually.
The last plugin I added was Robots Meta. The description of it says “This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.”
I installed it after a discussion with you about page rank and link love
I am not using all of the features but it has cut down on the amount of work that I need to do.
All in one SEO pack is i think one of the most important plug-in for bloggers.
Chetan’s last blog post… Got my Creative Commons stickers set
The 5 mostly important plugins I use everyday are :
Akismet
All in one SEO Pack
ZdMultilang (made by myself)
ZdStatistics (made by myself)
WP-PageNavi
WP-Postratings
Anthony’s last blog post… ZdMultilang version v1.2.0 is out
@Ajith Prasad – I mean it has to be in the top of the list.. thats what I mean by it.. I would definitely give it a Rank #1…
TechnoSamrat’s last blog post… Install a Fresh Copy of Ubuntu without Losing your Current Program Settings
Some other good ones I use are -
Permalink Redirect so that only the www. of my site gets indexed
Popularity Contest
Subscribe To Comments
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
Brian’s Threaded Comments
Lee’s last blog post… 5 Types Of Social Networking Scam – #5 Spam
@Kim, thanks for letting us know about the Robots Meta plugin. I need to take a look at it. So far, I used to manually change the meta tags in the theme header. And I hope, the page rank woes will soon cease.
@Chetan,Anthony,Samrat – All of you (even I was) have voted for All-In-One SEO plugin. Even I like it a lot but the idea was to talk about the most essential ones
As Kim said, without this pluggin you can still survive peacefully. But I agree that it’s an exceptionally good plugin for your SEO needs
@Anthony, thanks for letting us know about your own new plugins. I will certainly take a look at them.
@Lee, I haven’t used Permalink Redirect yet… Will check it out. I used the other things you mentioned and still have a couple of them enabled. I stopped using Brian’s threaded comments due to some bugs and styling.
I think commentators here are not aware of platinum seo plugin. It is much better than all in one seo…
Pavan Kumar’s last blog post… Sunday Pastime #24: Musical Day with Toss The Feathers
@Pavan, In fact, I read about the Platinum SEO plugin sometime ago but did not find a compelling reason to go for it. At the end, both plugins generate simiar meta information. The other things that it does such as robots follow, noindex, tags etc are already in place for me due to the changes done for my theme.
Does it have any other feature than modifying the meta tags and title?
I use all those plugins but I think the All in one SEO plugin would be one of my top 5 plugins.
I use almost all of those plugins
My top 5:
1. Akismet
2. All in one seo pack
3. Comment luv
4. WordPress Database Backup
5 Feedsmith
@Bruno, TheArdit, thanks for your views… All-In-One-SEO seems to be the common thing with everyone
@TheArdit, not sure why CommentLuv has to be an essential plugin? Especially, with the latest version, I am finding it less useful…
All in one SEO plugin is great value for any blog
My fav is All in One SEO. WordPress Database Backup. Google Sitemap generator, Akismet, cforms
Madhur Kapoor’s last blog post… GetDiz – Free Viewer for .Diz and .Nfo files
@ZK, @Madhur, Cut n paste one of the answers above
Why is everyone after All-In-One-SEO plugin?
I think the contemporary blogging is all about SEO first…
Now you can add few more SECURITY related plug-ins that i posted today
.
They should come under Most Essential category
Chetan’s last blog post… How to hide or protect folders in Ubuntu linux
@Chetan, yep, I read your post… Nice security tips and I will surely check out those plugins.
Security is indeed of prime importance to all of us
@Ajith Prasad
Yep, security is one of the most important fact, atleast when you are famous amongst tech bloggers, tech bloggers know many aspects of hacking
Chetan’s last blog post… Make your WordPress blog secure [Prevent hacking attacks]
Hi Ajith,
This post is very helpful for someone like me who is just starting with WordPress. You were right with the Google XML plugin. Its been the hardest for me to set up so far.
Thanks!
Jim
@Jo, you bet… it takes some time to set it up. I faced similar set up issues with All-in-one SEO plugin as well
Here are the 5 plugins I can’t do without
1. Platinum SEO
2. WP Database Backup
3. Google XML Sitemap
4. Akismet
5. Feedburner Feedsmith
Yan
Blog for Beginners’s last blog post… 20 Reasons Why I Choose WordPress
@Yan, I can see that SEO is on top of the list for most
Btw, how’s everyone extending the blog with widgets? Don’t you all use the Exec PHP or similar widgets?? I thought, this is one of the most essential widgets to plug PHP code in…
Exec PHP? m not aware of it.. can u tell more abt it?
Harsh Agrawal’s last blog post… Gmail labs new feature : Senders time zone
@Harsh, Exec PHP can be used to execute php scripts within your posts or text widgets. It’s extremely handy
Nice topic! I reckon you could use Exec PHP to add a tad of dynamic programmatic functionality to your WP blog and pipe the output as text for a post or a page.
still cant understand the use of feedburner smith
@Deepanshu, feedsmith helps you redirect all your feed URLs to one feedburner URL. This is kind of useful when it’s accessed from multiple directories/sources/readers and projects one feed access count as well.
For example, http://www.dollarshower.com/feed, http://www.dollarshower.com/feed/rss2, http://www.dollarshower.com/feed/atom, etc. converges into http://feeds2.feedburner.com/dollarshower
[Btw, this is a 2.5 year old post and my current list of essential plugin may not include some of these]