Wednesday, November 18, 2009

My top 10 essential Wordpress Plug-ins

Here are my top 10 essential Wordpress Plug-ins as I use Wordpress a lot. 
I manage over 100 blogs using this great software but pretty much use similar plugins on each. 
There are many plugins that do the same thing and some times it is a process of trial and error, installing, activating and deactivating until you find one that is right for you.
So I thought I'd share my list to make it easier for everyone:

1.  Wordpress Database Backup - Helps me sleep much easier at night.  Daily backups in my email what more can I say.

2. Platinum SEO Pack - Don't know what I'd do without this great plugin.  My blogs rank so much better with it running.  This plugin is highly customisable and a must have.


3. Google XML Sitemaps - Like #1, this is very handy for getting better results in Google and does all the work for you

4. Share This - Great way to generate some word-of-mouth action

5.  Feedburner Feedsmith - Feedburner helps keep an eye on who is reading your RSS feeds.

6.  Ultimate Google Analytics - Avoids your Analytics codes getting blasted away by updates and your stats stopping running

7.  Get Recent Comments - Indispensible little plugin helps other users to see which posts on your site people are talking about.

8.  Akismet - helps control that annoying comment spam.

9.  Geo Mashup Plugin - a fantastic little plugin that makes it very easy to generate Google Maps.  A little fiddly at first but once you get your head around it and get your API key it is very powerful.

10.  EasyTube or Smart Youtube - six one or half a dozen the other.  Basically easily embed YouTube into posts - only thing I hate about Wordpress is it makes it difficult to do this and Google Maps without plugins ...

Hope this helps !  Interested to hear if I've left some out that others find indispensable.