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14 Fantastic WordPress Plugins That I Use

October 5, 2009, in Blogging,WordPress, by Eric Bannatyne.

Probably my favourite thing about WordPress is how easy it is to customize your blog. I'm sure you already know this, but there are tons of WordPress plugins out there to add new features to your site. In fact, the main WordPress plugin directory has over 6,800 plugins!

Of course, you probably shouldn't go and install every single one of them, because that would slow down your blog. Instead, I've picked out some of the most useful ones that I use to improve my blog.

1. Askimet — This really is a plugin that every WordPress blog should use. What it does is it blocks spam from your blog by running some tests on comments that you get and sorts out the legitimate comments from the spam. And best of all, it comes pre-installed on every new WordPress installation! Just get a WordPress.com API Key, activate the plugin, and Askimet will do the rest for you.
2. All in One SEO Pack — This plugin handles the search engine optimization of your blog. It is easy to setup, and it allows you to spend less time working on SEO, and more time working on great content.
3. BackType Tweetcount — This plugin is quite simple. It adds a button to every post to retweet it. It even automatically shortens URLs for you, so that it will fit in 140 characters.
4. Contact Form 7 — This is a plugin that you can use to easily add a 'Contact' page to your blog.
5. Dofollow — As some of you may know, I have switched this blog to Dofollow. This plugin pretty much removes the 'nofollow' value from the 'rel' attribute of comment author website links.
6. FD Feedburner Plugin — Feedburner is an excellent service that you can use to track the number of RSS feed subscribers. This plugin redirects default WordPress feed links to Feedburner links.
7. Get Recent Comments — What this plugin does is it gets your blog's latest comments and allows you to use a widget to show them in the sidebar. It is easy to customize, with Gravatars, comment excerpts and much more.
8. Google Analyticator — This plugin adds the Google Analytics code into any WordPress theme, without having to edit template files directly. This plugin can help to save a lot of time.
9. Google XML Sitemaps — Everyone knows that a sitemap can be very helpful for SEO. However, with a blog, it can take quite a bit of time to manage and update a sitemp frequently. This plugin helps by automatically generating a sitemap with all of your blog posts and pages designed to be easy for search engines to crawl through.
10. Post Ideas — This plugin simply adds a small area to the WordPress admin for managin post ideas. I always store my ideas for posts with this plugin so that I don't forget them! It says this plugin is compatible up to WordPress 2.5, but it seems to work fine for me on WordPress 2.8.4.
11. WordPress Download Monitor — I use this plugin to track download stats for certain files, to see how many people are downloading which files.
12. WP-PageNavi — I've always hated the default WordPress 'Next page', 'Previous page' buttons. This plugin changes it to use page number for navigation, making site usability much easier.
13. WP-Syntax — This is a code box plugin for WordPress, with syntax highlighting. This plugin supports syntax highlighting for many different programming languages.
14. WP Super Cache — This is really an amazing plugin. Normally, WordPress pages are generated on-the-fly, with information being pulled from the database every time a page is requested. This plugin generates cached HTML files of pages that are simply sent to the user, instead of everything being generated individually.

So, do you use any of these plugins? Would you recommend any other plugins? Be sure to leave a comment.