Must Have WordPress Plugins

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One of my favorite bloggers wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about the WordPress plugins he is using. I decided to share the plugins I’m using myself. Some of these plugins are must have WordPress plugins you should use to get the best out of your blog.  I’m always testing different plugins, the same way I always look for ideas to develop plugins for my own use.

Here’s the list of must have WordPress plugins:

Akismet

A must have. Like everybody else, since I started my blog I receive tons of spam. Akismet has been my spam fighter. It does the job and I haven’t received any complaints so far.

All in One SEO Pack

This is a must have plugin for SEO. All the blogs and websites that I create have this plugin. It’s easy to use, allows me to change SEO settings for all the pages and post individually.

Contact Form 7

I like this contact form, it’s simple to use and other people have added extra functionality with other plugins. I was getting some spam messages, but it was easy to solve that issue by using a captcha.

Disqus Comment System

The famous comment system. I’ve been thinking in adding comment luv because it adds the most recent post of the commentator to my comment section, but I don’t know if or when I ‘m going to make the switch.

FD Feedburner Plugin

This plugin redirects all the subscriber to a feedburner feed. I do this to have more precise stats of my subscribers. Redirect http://ricnunez.com/feed/ to http://feeds.feedburner.com/RicardoNunez

Google Analyticator

I used to use Ultimate Google Analytics but that plugin doesn’t get the support from the developer anymore and Analyticator also has some options that allow me to add functionality without it being necessary to edit the source.

Google XML Sitemap

Another must have for SEO. A sitemap is a list of all the pages of the website available for bots like Google to crawl. XML is the file format that is used to create the sitemap.

Pretty Link Lite

This is a very handy plugin to shorten affiliate links. For example, I use it for Amazon by only using http://ricnunez.com/amazonlink . It works quite well.

Really Simple Captcha

After getting so much spam, I added this plugin that works together with Contact Form 7. It’s simple and effective.

Sharebar

This plugin adds the Social media links in the left side of the page and it moves while the reader is scrolling down. I was looking to build a similar plugin but why reinvent the wheel?

Tweetmeme

This is a very well known plugin in the blogosphere with its green retweet box. This is the first retweet box I started to use. I’m still using it at the bottom of each post, but now I’m also using the official tweet button in the sharebar plugin. I removed the official retweet button, I’m sticking with tweetmeme for now.

W3 Total Cache

I’m only using this plugin for a week now and itpromises to easily optimize website speed and user experience. I only saved half a second on the loading time which is not amazing, but I’m sure for a large website that can be a lot.

WP greet BOX

This plugin is used to greet new readers of the website and asks them to subscribe. There are several alternatives to this plugin, but I choose this one because it has the ability to recognize if the reader comes from a search engines, the rss or from the social networking websites ( I think this is cool).

WP-paginate

This plugin is used to create numbers for the pagination of the page. Instead of using “older and newer post” in the homepage; I add numbers at the bottom of the pages.

I’m always trying out new plugins, some of them don’t do exactly what I’m looking for, but that’s nothing what a few tweaks in the code cannot solve.

What must have WordPress plugins are you using? Which ones do you recommend?