6 Essential WordPress Plugins for Every WordPress Blog

Jan 17, 2010 by Shivendu Madhava

Here is a quick guide to 6 essential plugins for every wordpress blog These plugins greatly increase the power of WordPress in several important areas.

• Akismet – Provides superior anti-spam protection with customizable moderation functionality. Akismet is included with all selfhosted installations of Word-  Press, but you need to sign up for a free account at WordPress.com to obtain the activation key. Learn more about Akismet here.

• Database Manager - Robust database management from within the Word-Press Admin area. Database Manager makes it easy to backup, optimize, repair, and perform many other administrative tasks with your database. More info here.

• All-in-One SEO Pack or Headspace2 - Either of these plugins equips Word- Press with much-needed SEO functionality, including everything from advanced meta configuration and canonical URLs to custom descriptions, keywords, and page titles. More info about All-in-One-SEO Pack here and More info about Headspace2 SEO here.

• WP Super Cache - Boosts the performance of your site with powerful caching functionality. Works by generating static HTML files from your dynamic Word-Press blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. More info here.

• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps-compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. 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. More info here.

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