There are literally thousands of blog plugins available for WordPress and the temptation is often there to install one because it is ‘nice’. However every blog plugin you install adds just a little more to the load time of your blog.
For efficiency, you should only the plugins that you really need. That then raises the question, which blog plugins do you really need?
Talk to 100 bloggers and you will get 100 different answers. Blog plugins should be installed based on your needs. Their are two considerations – what is good for your reader and what is good for your blog. My top blog plugins include:
Akismet - Spam is always a problem. At least with Akismet you have some help
All In One SEO Pack – Almost every thing you need to help with your blogs SEO
Google XML Sitemaps – Create a sitemap and submit to the search engines
Related Posts - Help your readers find previous posts related to the current one
WP Super Cache – Creates a cached version of your blogs pages for faster loading.
There are many others that could be considered essential, some like the automatic upgrade blog plugin are useful for upgrades but otherwise take up unnecessary space.
What blog plugins would you include in your ‘must have’ list and why?
The Akismet plug-in is worth its weight in gold, I installed it around a week ago and already it has stopped over 400 spam comments. Saves me a lot of time manually deleting / unapproving spam, it’s a lifesaver!
All the best!
John.
A plugin i love that controls the amount of pings being sent to the search engines is called “maxblogpress ping optimizer”.
Pinging services may ban your blog if you over ping. Better be safe than sorry. I post multiple times a day but only ping the engines once a day, that is all that is necessary.