WordPress is the top most blogging platform right now, and you are here, reading this because you are obsessed with it. Even if you are not that much into wordpress at this point, you are bound to at certain point of time, in very near future. At that point you will become addicted, you will install wordpress on every domain, you will recommend wordpress to everyone around and try to learn and develop new tips and tricks with it. Yep, you might have already identified what I am doing right now, I have to admit it, The Code is Poetry
.
Alright, alright enough of my blah blah.., If you are using wordpress, you might have already noticed the extendability of it with plugins, the most beautiful feature of this powerful blogging platform. If you want to add certain functionality to your blog, you will certainly have plugin for it, just download, install and voila!! you have got what you want. There are thousand of plugins each for specific requirements, but there are few plugins which you must have if you are serious about blogging with wordpress.
The first plugin you will need as soon as your blog is up and running and when you need to submit a sitemap to bing or google webmaster. Its is simple to use, lot of options, but don’t worry if you are a beginner, just install and hit generate sitemap button and you will be ready with an xml sitemap.
2. itemprop WP
This plugin is a very recent addition to my “must have” list. This is a necessity as more and more search engines stress on the usage of microdata formats in your pages. For more detail on microdata you can refer schema.org. Right now WordPress do not generate microdata attributes and tags, which is used by search engines to slice data and organize them. This plugin will do the job neatly.
Writing an excellent and unique article requires a lot of dedication, but with out proper set of tools to write your article is a tough one. This plugin will supercharge your editor with array of tools that you will almost feel like working on a Microsoft word document. This plugin will make it easier for you in formatting, arranging and presenting the content.
Now you have written an article and published it and you want to let your friends on social sharing sites know about it. This plugin will insert facebook, google+ and twitter buttons to share your article from your blog. Though there are lot of plugins for social sharing, I recommend this because it is light-weight and pages load faster.
If you plan to provide downloads from your blog, this plugin will be useful. You can count the number of downloads for each download and logs in ip and time of download. Also provides option to upload from within wordpress or using ftp.
6. XCloner
Creating periodical backups of your wordpress blog is always a good practice, which will help in case if you face a situation of data loss due to some unnatural cause or reason. Xcloner will not only generate backup of your files and database, but also helps in moving your blog from one domain to another.
Though SEO is considered to be murdered and buried by Google, some of you may still hold onto the old practices of using meta description and meta keywords. This plugin is the best, when the concept of SEO was given much emphasis. But at present none of the webmasters know what to do with those meta tags.
If you are not comfortable like me in dealing with mysql database, then this will make your day easier. This plugin will do search and replace on your database from within wordpress.
This plugin will be helpful while you are upgrading or doing some modifications to your blog, so the visitors will not see some ugly php errors on your page. You can put your blog into maintenance mode so that only you (admin) can see the blog. Once you are done with your job you can put your blog into live mode.
10. WP-Optimize
Optimizing your database periodically is necessary for the best performance of wordpress blogs. This plugin will remove post revisions, saved drafts and optimizes DB tables in an instant, so you no need to do it manually.
11. WP Super Cache
This is one powerful plugin to speed up your blog loading time. This will generate html version of your pages and cache them minimizing the db calls and loading pages faster. Though I put it down the list, this should be the first preference for any wordpress blog.