Top 10 Must-Have Plugins for Wordpress

Posted on October 30th, 2007 .

I just can’t get enough of Wordpress anymore, its simplicity and flexibility makes it my tool of choice to power most of my blogs and even use it as CMS in small websites. There are loads of plugins you can download to make just about any kind of website. Nevertheless there are some plugins which, in my opinion any Wordpress powered website should have.

Must Have SEO Wordpress Plugins

Unfortunately when you’re new to Wordpress, the vast number of plugins can make it impossible to know which ones to start with.

Akismet - This one comes with the default Wordpress installation. Just register for an api key, activate it, and you can forget about spam.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - This html sitemap generator is another great ’set and forget’ plugin. You just need to configure a few options and let this script do all the work for you.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator - By far the best XML Sitemap plugin that I’ve ever tried. It features multi-language support, calculates the priority for each post and pings the major 3 search engines automatically, and has a nice XSL stylesheet making the XML sitemap readable to humans.

Head META Description - Inserts the meta description tag dynamically based on the page or blog post text.

Search-Hilite - “Highlihts Search-Words, from external Searches over Yahoo,Google, Lycos and Baidu, as well as WordPress internal Searches, on the Search Results-Pages.”

Search Pages - By default wordpress internal search only searches for blog posts, this plugins extends the search functionality to pages too.

SEO Title Tags - Title tags are the most important on-page tags for search engines these days. This plugin lets you control the title tags individually (rather than having the post title by default). There’s also an option to batch edit the title tags for the entire site.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Probably the most useful plugin I have ever seen. Automatically upgrades your wordpress version to the latest files provided by wordpress.org in five simple 5 steps and without having to manually download or update any files. WPAU even remembers all your activated plugins deactivate them and re-activate the compatible ones in the end.

Wordpress DB Backup - Creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as additional tables of your choice. You can make backups on demand or scheduled ones. I normally set up a scheduled backup to send to my email address. You’ll never have to worry about backing up your database again.

WP-Cache - Great page caching system to make your site much faster. It caches Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file. WP-Cache speeds up your wordpress installation serving pages much quicker

These plugins go on all the wordpress installs I do, adding extra plugins according to the type of website I’m working on.

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