So you just installed WordPress blog and wondering what you should do next. Well first thing you need to do is change your permalink structure to pretty links. Then play with settings and get to know WordPress little bit. In this post I’m going discus about next step in the process. And that is installing some essential plugins.
Plugins are the once that make WordPress more user friendly and popular. You can do almost everything you want with a WordPress with help of plugins. You cloud run a membership site, online store or ecommerce site with a shopping cart. I’m not planning to go that far with this post. This is of users who are new to WordPress. And advanced users will find this boring.
SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate is a Search Engine Optimization plugin that will help you to optimize your blog for search engines. It has more than 20 modules to help you with various areas for your blog. Each module can be activated and deactivated individually. It’s the best SEO plugin available for WordPress. From my point of view, it does work of 4 or 5 plugins.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin also helps you with your search engine optimization. It’s something that SEO Ultimate doesn’t have. The plugin will automatically generate a sitemap for your site and automatically notify major search engines like Google, Bing and Ask about updates of your blog.
Akismet
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that will block all spam comments and spam trackbacks on your post. There are very large numbers of bots out there to spam your WordPress blog posts with links. These bots will leave some random comments on your blog post along with spam links. Akismet is your best defense against these bots.
WP Super Cache
WordPress is PHP based blogging software. Caching is very important when it comes to executing PHP codes. Rather than executing same code over and over again, WP Super Cache caches executed code and deliver it from memory. This helps your pages to load faster. It’ll also take off some load from the server. The faster your pages load, the more you visitors and search engines going to like it.
Fast Secure Contact Form
It’s important that you give your readers an option to contact you. And by doing that, you can’t afford to lose your email privacy. FSCF is the best way to let them contact you without giving them your email address. With this plugin, you can easily add “Ëœcontact me’ page to your blog with just few clicks.
SexyBookmarks
Social Bookmarking is good method to attract new visitors to your site. Nothing is better than getting a recommendation from someone you now. SexyBookmarks allows your visitors to recommend your posts to their friends and family with a single click. And it does it in style. It also counts and display how many people shared your post on their social networks.
These are the plugins you must have on your WordPress blog before start posting. If you’re not familiar with these plugins, they will keep you busy for some time.
