25 Essential Plugins for WordPress 2010 Edition

by Roman on May 3, 2010

You should use at little plugins as possible for your WordPress installation. However, the beauty of WordPress is that if you don’t know how to code something there is probably a plugin out there that does just what you need without coding. That is why have decided to create a list of essential plugins to run your website on WordPress and divided them into groups: Comments, Design, Grammar,Mobile, SEO, Security, Social.  We do not suggest installing all of them, just most of them.

Comments Plugins:

DISQUS: One of the most advanced commenting systems that allows your visitors to sign in with different social media accounts. Free version is loaded with features. Visit their website for a demo.

CommentLuv: This plugin entices people to leave more comments on your website. It pulls up your visitors latest blog posts and includes them in their comments. This plugin can increase the community feel of your blog and the number of comments.

WordPress Thread Comment:This plugin enables visitors to reply to each others’ comments. The discussion then can be displayer threaded or nested.

TwitterLink Comments: This plugin adds an extra field to your comment form, so your visitor can add their Twitter name. “Follow Me” link is then displayed along with their details on all their comments. Again this plugin encourages to leave more comments on your blog.

Design Plugins:

NextGen Gallery: This plugin helps you manage images on your blog. It has tons of options available that help both your SEO and the look of your blog. It also includes Flash slideshow options and CSS tweaking capability.

Shockingly Simple Favicon: This plugin does just what the name says. Easily adds a favicon to your blog or website.

TinyMCE Advanced: This plugin includes 15 different plugins inside it. It allows your to be format text in your blogs. It imports all the CSS classes into a drop down menu for you to use while styling your blog post. It also supports making and editing of the tables.

Grammar Plugins:

After the deadline: This plugin makes you write better it provides you with contextual Spell Checking, Advanced Style Checking and Intelligent Grammar Checking. Very useful for people whose English is a second language – like myself.

Mobile Plugins:

WordPress Mobile Edition: This plugin identifies when your visitors view your website from a mobile phone and displays a custom mobile theme to them. Having a mobile version of your website is a must for 2010.

WPtouch Iphone Theme: This plugin creates a special Iphone theme for those visitors who browse your website or blog from an Iphone. It is designed after Apple’s app store design specs.

SEO Plugins:

All in One SEO Pack: This plugin helps to improve your SEO, but providing advanced controls over every area of your website: Meta Tags management, Duplicate Content Issues it even works with WP e-commerce websites.

WP Super Cache: This plugin speeds up you page load time by converting php into html. Google identifies page load time as one of the SEO factors and this is where this plugin can help you.

Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google and Bing webmaster tools. Sitemaps help search engines to crawl your website deeper and index more of your content. Plugin has tons of options for priority and updates.

Broken Link Checker: Plugin monitors your blog or website for broken links and lets you know when they are found. Broken links make search engine not crawl your website, that is why fixing them is an essential SEO technique.

Simple 301 Redirects: Plugin provides an easy method of creating 301 redirects for the broken links you found with the previous plugin. It is especially useful when you move websites and you can’t preserve URL structure. 301 redirects allow search engine to understand where pages are and most of the link juice flows through them.

WP-PageNavi: Plugin adds a more advance paging navigation for your website or blog. You have a better control of how you want search engines to crawl your website.

Security Plugins:

WP Database Backup: Allows you to easily backup core WordPress database files. This is essential precaution against hacker attacks, malware and server crashes.

Limit Login Attempts: Limits the number of login attempts both through normal login as well as using auth cookies. Essential in preventing hackers attacking your WordPress website through a brute force attack.

WordPress Exploit Scanner: Plugin searches posts, comments, plugins for any exploit pages or links. A user then can check the files brought for attention and decide if they need to be removed.

Antivirus for WordPress: Checks your WordPress installation for exploits and spam injections. It is updated frequently and even protects from WordPress permalink back door attack.

Social Media Plugins:

Add Twitter @Anywhere: Allows you to add Twitter’s @anywhere functionality on your blog or website easily. For example hover over @romanz and follow me :)

WP Facebook Like Button: The Like button enables users to “Like” any page of your website and link it back to their Facebook profile. Plugin allows you to easily implement Like button on any page of your website and has lot of options.

Sexy Bookmarks: There are tons of sharing plugins for WordPress, but this is one is probably the slickest one and it was the first one to use Google Buzz.

Twitter Publisher: Automatically shares your new blog post on Twitter using awe.zm or bit.ly shortener.  You can even include your own Google Analytics tracking code in order to monitor clicks.

Tweetmeme: Integrates one of the most famous retweet buttons used on blogs. With this plugin you have lots of control of where and how the button is displayed.

There many plugins out there, we selected these ones because we either use it on our website or our clients website. If you have your favorite plugin why not leave in the comment section?


{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

alex legakov May 3, 2010 at 9:04 pm

great article,realy enjoyed to read, professional.
waiting for more.

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: