12 Essential WordPress Plugins And Why They’re Useful

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

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Description:This plugin gives you a list of posts and/or pages that are related to the current post/page. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog.

Why it’s useful: This plugin basically keeps your visitors longer on your website. It allows them to discover new articles on your blog that are related to the one they are reading at that moment.

2. Statpress

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Description: this great plugin collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar.

Why it’s useful: this plugin makes it so much easier to get to know your visitors. Find out where your visitors come from, how long they stay on your blog, your most popular articles… You can use this information to improve your website’s promotion and articles.

3. Google Analytics

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Description: This plugin actually does the same as the previous one, but via Google Analytics. It automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.

Why it’s useful: This plugin has the same benefits as the previous one: it allows you to learn more about your visitors and traffic sources.

4. All In One SEO

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Description: this is one of my favourite WordPress plugins. This plugin optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines, better known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Why it’s useful: this plugin automates a lot of the SEO functions. That’s why it’s a real time saver. This plugin could also bring more visitors to your blog.

5. Contact Form 7

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Description: Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Why it’s useful: I love the simplicity of this plugin. With a few simple clicks you can create a professional looking contact form. It has plenty of customization possibilities too.

6. Tweetmeme button

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Description: The TweetMeme button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.

Why it’s useful: Don’t underestimate the power of twitter: it can be a powerful marketing tool. With this tweetmeme button, you can easily post your content on twitter.

7. WordPress Popular Posts

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Description: This plugin displays the most popular posts on your blog with your own formatting.

Why it’s useful: When you know what articles are the most popular among your visitors, you can use this information to write similar articles.

8. WP-Postratings

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Description: this plugin adds a ratings system to your posts or pages. You can choose your own rating image, add your own rating text and much, much more.

Why it’s useful: Just as the previous plugin, this one allows you to learn more about the kind of articles that are popular amongst your visitors.

9. Sociable

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Description: This plugins add social media buttons to your post (Stumble, Digg, Del.icio.us…)

Why it’s useful: This plugin allows your visitors to share you blog’s content with their friends and the rest of the world.

Similar plugins: Share This / AddToAny / I Love Social Bookmarking / SocioFluid

10. CommentLuv

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Description: With this plugin, you can give something back to your community by including a titled link for their last blog post on the end of their comment. When a reader submits his/her comment, the last blog post link gets added on the end of their comment for all to see!

Why it’s useful: this plugin makes it beneficial for visitors to post comments on your blog. This means you can get more (hopefully useful) comments.

11. Google XML Sitemap Generator

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Description: This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Why it’s useful: this plugin really speeds the sitemap process up, and hopefully provides you with some extra visitors.

12. Akismet

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Description: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Why it’s useful: this plugin filters out spam with a great accuracy. This means you have more time to write kick-ass articles.

26 thoughts on “12 Essential WordPress Plugins And Why They’re Useful

  1. Steven on said:

    I also like MM Forms this is the most simple Forms plugin on WordPress and allows you to save the submissions to a table for exporting and editing.
    Very usefull in my opinion.

    Nice list though!

  2. BunnygotBlog on said:

    Thanks for the information.I really appreciate the updates.

  3. James McWhorter on said:

    Yep. I’m using almost all of these. I’d also recommend WP-super cache but sometimes it has some strange effects.

  4. Michael on said:

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  5. Jason on said:

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  7. öykü on said:

    Good solution, thanks

  8. Roul-Roulett on said:

    Great idea, but will this work over the long run?

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