Blog Creator

WordPress is one of the most powerful blog publishing and content management application with over 25 million users across the globe. WordPress Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. Plugins offer custom functions and features so that each user can tailor their site to their specific needs. In this article we are mentioning the highly preferred plugins for every WordPress users. We personally recommend each of them to you.

Akismet – Comes installed with WordPress by default. All you have to do is get an API Key to activate it. Akismet is quite possibly the best way to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep.

After activating this plugin, you simply have to provide WordPress.com API key to kick start it. You can optionally choose to automatically discard spam on posts more than 1 month old.

All-in-One SEO – This is an ultimate necessity for your blog if you want to have any chance of ranking high in search engines. All in One SEO Pack allows you to add unique titles, meta description and keywords to each page of your blog and blog posts. (Read: Step by Step Guide to Configure All in one SEO Pack Plugin)

W3 Total Cache – The fastest and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress. It increases site performance and reduces the resource consumption.

Google XML Sitemap – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Google XML Sitemap for Images – The Image Sitemap plugin will generate a sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the image URLs that are used in your posts and pages. Sitemaps are a way to tell Google, Bing and other search engines about web pages, images and video content on your site that they may otherwise not discover.

SEO Friendly Images – SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well. Improves traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com

Fast Secure Contact Form – When running a blog you need to allow your users to contact you. This contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Blocks all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. Includes a CAPTCHA and Akismet support. This is the best free contact form plugin to this date.

GTranslate – Get translations with a single click between 58 languages (more than 98% of internet users) on your website! This module uses Google Translate automatic translation service to translate your web page with Google power.

WordPress Database Backup – WordPress Database Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

WordPress Mobile Edition – WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Mobile browsers are automatically detected, the list of mobile browsers can be customized on the settings page. Show your mobile visitors a site presentation designed just for them. Rich experience for iPhone, Android, etc. and clean simple formatting for less capable mobile browsers. Cache-friendly with a Carrington-based theme, and progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers.

SexyBookmarks – Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three. Extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

Breadcrumb NavXT – This plugin generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress powered blog or website. These breadcrumb trails are highly customizable to suit the needs of just about any website running WordPress.

Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

Comment Redirect – This plugin lets you redirect the attention of your new users to a specific page. So you can actually substitute the email sent out by Comment Relish plugin by a page on your site. Sometimes users might prefer this over the email. Check out our Thank You Page.

Broken Link Checker – This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.

We recommend these plugins for any new blog or existing blog. There are more plugins that would need to be added based on the niche and your needs. But for any generic blog, this should be a good list to start with.