9 WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have

Plugins are a very important part of WordPress, and should be a major part of your blog. Here are some of the best WordPress plugins for new or existing blogs.

When starting a new blog these are some of the best plugins for the foundation of your site. I wouldn’t leave home without them!

All in One SEO Pack

Search engine optimization is important for any site, and the All in One SEO Pack takes care of a lot of those needs, plus it lets you customize!

FD Feedburner Plugin

The amount of people viewing your RSS feed is always nice to know, and with this plugin you can easily replace all your RSS links to your Feedburner‘s Address. If you don’t use Feedburner, then I would suggest checking it out.

Google XML Sitemaps

Obviously having the worlds largest search engine indexing your site is important, the Google XML Sitemaps can help Google do so. Once you generate a sitemap with this plugin be sure to link it to your site on Google’s webmaster page.

Search Meter

When a user searches your blog and doesn’t find what they are looking for, they most likely will leave your blog. Search Meter is a great tool to see what people search on your site, but most importantly if they find their results. Maybe you have an article people are looking for but it’s just mis-titled, renaming your post could help a lot.

SexyBookmarks

This plugin took me some time to find, but it’s one of the better social bookmarking plugins out there. Sharing is caring, and SexyBookmarks helps with getting users to share your posts. (see example at the bottom of the post :P)

Smart 404

A 404 is annoying for anyone, and Smart 404 helps with the issue somewhat. Lets say someone goes to this url on your blog mysite.com/iphone-story/ but you renamed it, Smart 404 will search your posts and forward the url to the right post (such as mysite.com/correct-iphone-post).

WP-PageNavi

The standard “older posts” and “newer posts” on the bottom of WordPress pages can be annoying and slow to use. WP-PageNavi speeds up the process for visitors though, by allowing them to click the page number they want to go to. You might want to theme this before adding it to your site.

WP Super Cache

Speed is one of the most important factors for a website, WP Super Cache helps with this greatly by caching pages rather then pulling from the database each time a page is requested.

WPtouch iPhone Theme

It’s always nice to have a mobile version of your site, and WPtouch will take care of everything, making your blog feel like home on any smartphone.

Bonus! (Kinda): Akismet

WordPress is easily prone to comment spam, and Akismet takes care of all the spam. This plugin is defaultly installed but you have to get an API key from WordPress to enable it. If you aren’t using this plugin, enable it RIGHT NOW!
What are some plugins that you can’t live without… let us know in the comments!

Written by Andy Feliciotti

Andy Feliciotti is a UI Designer in College Park, Maryland. He diggs web design and social media, if it's on the internet he has probably seen it. You can stay up to date with what Andy does on twitter.