Most Useful Wordpress Plugins

Since I design custom blogs for my clients, I have to keep a lookout for plugins that can achieve any effect under the sun. Following is a list of some of the most used plugins:

1. Akismet: This plug-in helps you in stopping comment spam. It also keeps note of comments you mark as spam for future blocking. This is a part of your Wordpress download. You need to install and set it up, though.
2. Search Everything: This plug-in adds search functionality to include pages, tags, attachments, drafts, comments, excerpts and custom fields. It also lets you exclude categories and posts from search.
3. WP-Contact-Form: Give your visitors the option of contacting you via a simple form. The modified version of this plugin comes with a very useful Spam Protection option. See an example

4. Add This: Social Bookmarks allow your visitors to easily submit your posts to social bookmarking sites. Many plugins are available for this purpose including Social Bookmarks, Gregarious and Sociable. I just recently found Add This and although it adds a link to their site, it is less intrusive and less cluttered than the others. You can see the result at the end of this post.

5. All in One SEO Pack: The name says it all You won’t need another meta title, description or keyword plugin. This finally has it all.
6. Video Plugin: Easily add videos from YouTube and many other websites.
7. Google Sitemap Generator: Generate an xml sitemap for Google. This will help with Google spidering your website.
8. Database Backup: Weekly backup at your server or back up emailed to you.
9. Search Meter: Looking at search logs to find out who’s searching for what can be a valuable tool for figuring out what’s right and what’s wrong with your blog.
10. Permalink Redirect: This plugin ensures that pages and entries are always accessed via the permalink. Otherwise, a 301 redirect will be issued. In other words saves you from the duplicate content penalty in Google.
11. Fuzzy Recent Posts: Displays recent posts
12. Recent Comments: Displays recent comments and/or trackbacks
13. Google Analyticator: No need to dig in the code to add Google Analytics to your blog with this plugin. It does the work for you.
14. Subscribe to Comments: Lets your visitors subscribe to comments for whichever post they want. Try subscribing to the comments for this post to see how it works.
15. Related Posts: Using the Wordpress tags option in Wordpress 2.3.1, this plugin gives a list of related articles/posts next to the currently viewed one.

You can see a lot of these plugins being used at this website alone. I plan on adding more useful plugins as I come accross them so don’t forget to sign up for the RSS feed. There is also an email option once you click the link.

You can also browse thru the Wordpress Plugins Directory. There are loads of great plugins listed there with ratings and other useful info to help you pick the right ones.

Tags: Akismet, Blogging, Bookmarks, Code, Comments, Recent Posts, Related Posts, SEO, Spam Protection, Wordpress Plugins