WordPress (as many of you already know) is the most popular and one of the most powerful blogging systems available. The great thing about WordPress is the ability to enhance your site’s look, features, and search engine ranking by adding free or low cost plugins.
There are literally thousands of WordPress plugins avaliable. Here I list the top 6 essential free plugins every WordPress blog should have.
1. Akismet
Akismet is the greatest anti-spam plugin for WordPress, period. Akismet checks comments against their online database to see if a user’s comment is spam or not, and auto-magically moves spam comments to the appropriate spam folder. Like any anti-spam system, it will not catch 100% of spam comments, but it has always worked pretty well for me and has about a 99% success rate.
This plugin is SEO in a can. Simply install and activate this plugin, edit a few variables and BLAM! You now have a search engine friendly website. This wonderful plugin controls the title tags on your webpage, meta tags and more. You can have your post tags automatically be used as your meta keywords, and there are plenty of other options to easily make your site search engine friendly. This plugin is a real time saver.
Share and Follow is the ultimate social bookmarking plugin. This plugin automatically inserts the social bookmarking sites of your choice. You can also set up follow buttons for Twitter, Digg, Facebook and all the other social networking sites. With Share and Follow you can easily integrate you social networking into your site with just a few clicks of the mouse! Works great with all popular themes!
Creating an iPhone theme has never been easier than with WPTouch. You simply install this free plugin, configure a few simple variables and in a few minutes you will have your own mobile website. This plugin works with iPhone, Droid, and select other smartphones. Bloggers can easily configure the look of this theme with a few clicks of the mouse. Highly recommended and easy to use plugin.
5. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
A large majority of small and large blogs alike have related article lists with each posting. This is a great way to get more page views on your site with little effort. This simple plugin automatically inserts related article links at the end of each blog post. YARPP allows you to control how strict its filtering system is.
Contact Form 7 is a simple to use contact form plugin. The plugin’s built in editor allows you to easily create your contact form and will output a short code to place on your desired page.
While I often use other plugins to expand the capabilities of WordPress, the six listed above are my top essentials that almost every blogger and webmaster can benefit from.
What are your essential WordPress plugins?