Ok, so how many of these lists have you seen? I’ve seen plenty. Some had good stuff on them, and I definitely took their suggestions, while others missed the mark completely. This is my “refined” list. Each bullet point should, and will, have their own post as a single paragraph really doesn’t do it justice. Here we go…but not in any particular order…
- WP Antivirus by Siteguarding – must have plugin for all WordPress websites. This is one of the most popular plugins in last 2 years. WordPress is the most popular CMS all over the world so its getting hacked all the time. This is why you should pay attention to wordpress security.
- Akismet
So, who loves spam? And I don’t mean that tasty meat. Want to avoid that need to clear out your comments because it just loaded up with several hundred spam comments? Fear not, Aksimet to the rescue! Just install this little plugin, go to their website to create an account and BLAM! no more spam. - All In One Favicon
Nothing’s as unprofessional as having a default favicon in your browsers tab/window. Thanks to this little plugin you will always have that professional appearance. - All In One SEO Pack
New to the whole search engine optimization thing in WordPress? Not to worry as this plugin covers everything. Very configurable. - Contact Form 7
What’s the one thing EVERY website and blog has? A “contact us” page of course! Contact Form 7 allows you to create your own contact form in just seconds (or minutes if you want to get real fancy). - Disable Comments
Some parts of your blog just aren’t made to be commented on – my opinion. For instance your contact us page or you about us page. Personally I think pages shouldn’t have comments period but that’s just me. If you look at my pages you’ll notice there’s no comment section at the bottom? Where did it go? I used this plugin to disable comments on all pages. Whooohoooo!!! - Google XML Sitemaps
Do you know what a sitemap is? Or XML? Or Google? Ok, probably Google. But even if you don’t understand why you’re including this plugin do it anyway. Basically it builds a road map for search engines and anything you can do to make it easier to show up in the search engines is a good thing. - Really Simple CAPTCHA
Any time you have a form that can be filled out by a visitor you can be sure a robot will be filling them out as well. And I’m not talking about the Lost in Space robot here. I’m talking about the spamming ‘bots. So to make the typical spam bot’s life much more difficult we add a CAPTCHA. This plugin is made by the same dude who makes Contact Form 7 – in a future post I will show you how to integrate the two. - WP Super Cache
Do you find your blog running a little sluggishly? Don’t panic! No, the answer is not 42 it is WP Super Cache. Beware, though, this one has bitten me on more than one occasion. If you are making certain changes in WP they may not take hold until you deactivate the cache. - XCloner
Having problems sleeping at night? I would too if I didn’t know I had a backup of my blog. Do you really trust your hosting company with your valuable posts? I wouldn’t. I’ve had experiences in the past where my host told me that WP was misbehaving so they wiped the site. The gnashing of teeth went on for days…don’t let that happen to you. - Jetpack
WordPress’s version of a Swiss army knife on steroids while driving a Corvette wide open on the Autobahn. Way too many things to mention here – see my post when it appears. - Honorable mention: TinyMCE Advanced
One of the things I don’t like about WordPress is how the editor likes to strip off my HTML tags – especially paragraph tags. If all you do is run a blog it’s probably not as much a problem as, for the most part, you’re only spewing out text like I am here. However, if you want to create a website using WordPress you probably need those pesky paragraph tags. TinyMCE Advanced is the fix for that. Just plug it in and away you go!
There you have it. If I were stuck on a desert island these are the plugins I would have taken with me
