1. Feedburner Feedsmith – Easy way to burn your WordPress feed in Feedburner.
2. Subscribe to comments – Gives an option in each post for your readers to subscribe to comment notification by email.
3. ScribeSEO – Premium plugin that gives search engine optimised copywriting advice.
4. Yoast SEO plugin – Best and exhaustive WordPress SEO plugin. Better than All in one SEO plugin.
5. Contact form 7 – To place a contact form.
6. NextGEN gallery – Best WordPress gallery plugin.
7. Simplepress – Inbuilt forum.
8. Akismet – To block spam. Must have.
9. Google Analytics for WordPress – To insert Google Analytics code.
10. Backupbuddy – Premium plugin that does shceduled backups for whole website including wp-content folder. Delivering to Dropbox is a great addition.
11. qTraslate – For offering manual translation.
12. Broken link checker – To find and fix broken links. Having live links is good for SEO and user experience.
13 . WPtouch Pro – Premium plugin for displaying mobile and iPad friendly themes.
14. Social profiles widget – To show good sized social profile icons in your sidebar.
15. WP Touch Pro – For mobile friendly display.
16. Scribe SEO – For optimising your content for search engines.
17. W3 Total Cache – For speeding up your websites.
WordPress plugin usage best practices:
* Try not to use more than 10 plugins.
* Deactivate and delete unused plugins.
* Use only the plugins from trusted sources. It is good to test them in a beta site first.
* Do not use more than one plugin to have same functionality. For example, do not have two plugins to track stats or backup.
* Always keep your plugins updated.
I’m surprised I didn’t see any caching plugins listed…like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.
Hi Susan, I have listed plugins based on my requirements and experience. Caching plugins are useful, ofcourse.
Thank you for this list! I am already using most of these but it was great to see a recommendation on a few others I should be adding. What do you think about gTranslate for automatic translations and Relevanssi for searching?
Helle Ravi,
Thank you for sharing this list.
I didn’t know Backupbuddy plugin.
I think a good complement of wp-dbmanager.
What do you think about that?
Fred
Hi Fred, yes it will be a good complement. Besides backing up wp-content, it also does malware scan and makes it easy to migrate or restore.
Hi Karena, sorry for the delayed reply. gTranslate is the obvious choice for automatic translations. I haven’t tried relevanssi but I have used “search everything” plugin before. I think the default WordPress search is good enough now.
Thanks for this post, I followed your link from sitesketch where I was doing some plugin research for my new blog. I am going to go and get the broken link checker plugin now on your recommendation.