7 WordPress Plugins You Shouldn’t Be Without

As bloggers we know that anything that can potentially make our lives a little bit easier or less hectic are definitely worth using or at least trying out. While WordPress was popular because of it’s features and abilities I believe that the plugins that were developed for it is what really increased it’s popularity. Being able to add extra functionality and options to our blogs to get them just how we want is a big plus. Below is a list of 7 plugins I believe that every WordPress blog shouldn’t be without.

• Akismet
• All In One SEO
• cForms Contact Forms
• Google Sitemap Generator
• Simple Tags
• Subscribe To Comments
• WordPress Database Backup

Akismet – We all hate spam and Akismet does an insanely good job at filtering out unwanted comments. It comes installed with WordPress by default so you don’t even have to worry about whether or not you have it installed. Akismet requires the use of a WordPress.com API key to use which you can get here and read up more about why you should have an API key.

All In One SEO – Not everybody has time to learn how to customize WordPress to make it compliant with search engines. While out of the box it does amazingly well compared to other similar platforms and software it still lacks in features. All In One SEO allows customization of the title tags (very important), along with a description for each post that will be used when displayed in the search engines. While the plugin has other features that help, these 2 are the most important.

cForms Contact Forms – Every blog should have a contact form or some way to get in touch with the blogger. A contact form is a great idea because it allows your readers or potential advertisers along with anybody else a way to contact you without you having to give out your email address or list it on your site having to worry about spammers finding it. cForms makes it extremely easy to setup and customize a form to fit in with your blog and provides error handling and captcha features as well.

Google Sitemap Generator – Having a sitemap of your entire site can help with the search engine robots being able to find and possibly index your posts and pages. Although having a sitemap won’t guarantee that your site or any post does get indexed having a map that the robots can follow can make it easier for them to find your content. The only way that a search engine robot can find your content is either links to that post or through a sitemap.

Simple Tags – This plugin is chock full of features and there are way too many to list here, I could dedicate an entire post to just this plugin. The default WordPress installation allows for the input of tags but it isn’t very efficient. Simple Tags adds a box that allows you to display tags that you have previously used on your blog so that you don’t have to remember which ones you had used in the past. They also allow you to find suggested tags through Yahoo and Tag The Net, however I never use those features. You can also Mass Edit tags which shows you a list of your posts and the tags that are used for each one. I find this feature very useful because you don’t have to go through each post to modify the tags. You can also add a Related Tags and Related Posts section to the end of your posts to engage your readers to further explore your blog.

Subscribe To Comments – To be honest, I am not quite sure why I installed this plugin at first. Other than the fact that I thought it sounded cool. If you notice that when you comment on the blog you have the option to be emailed when new comments are made on the post. This options allows your readers to stay updated on the discussion for that post and gives them a chance to interact with other readers of your blog. The only thing I would like to see with this plugin is an option to limit the number of emails sent out or send them out in a batch. Currently every time that there is a new comment an email is sent and if your post ends up getting a lot of comments, whoever subscribes is going to end up with a lot of emails. I am surprised at just how many people are actually using this feature.

WordPress Database Backup – I would rank this plugin as the most important but it may be one that a lot of bloggers don’t even have! Your database is the most important thing when it comes to your blog and WordPress. All of your posts and comments along with WordPress settings are saved inside of your database and if you don’t have backups you are kicking yourself in the ass. Shit can and does go wrong without any reason so having a backup of your database is an essential key to blogging. This plugin allows you to backup the default wordpress database tables along with any other tables that other plugins may be using.

There is an option to have the backup file saved to your server, downloaded to your computer or emailed to your inbox. There is also a scheduler which allows for once hourly, twice daily, once daily and once weekly backups and the file will be sent to your preferred email address. I use the scheduled backup and have the file sent daily. Depending upon how much traffic you get and how much changes will depend on which setting will best suit you.

So there you have it, 7 wordpress plugins that you shouldn’t be without that I personally use. I realize that there are other plugins out there that add some other great features to WordPress and make things a lot easier but these are ones that I consider should be with every WordPress install. I’d be interested in hearing what you all think are some important plugins that you find useful that I may have not mentioned here.