WordPress Plugins

Below is a list of Must-Have WordPress plugins:

I will be updating this page with more info, but wanted to get it up and running now, so you can get these plugins up and running now:

Akismet: Spam Filter for your blog comments – here is what they have to say:

Who can? You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again

All-In-One SEO: The ultimate in search engine optimization plugins! Here are their comments about the plugin:

Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your WordPress blog …

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

Google Analyticator Plugin: To me, there is no question, you need Google Analytics for your site stats. It tells you everything other than the visitor's name and what they were wearing. You'll know where in the world they are, what type of computer they are using and…most importantly…which of your pages they perused. This plugin allows you, in a few easy steps, to not only add the powerful Google Analytics script to every single page of your site/blog, but also displays results in your dashboard of WordPress! Now that is power! Not that you need to know what they say about it, but here you go:

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

Broken Link Checker: I love this plugin! It is new to me, but one of my favorites already! Too often links go bad, this plugin checks your complete site and lets you know if there are any links that don't work anymore. Here is what they wrote about it:

Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere.

FYI: This link checker also checks for images that are now missing! Brilliant!

Here are additional plugins, that you may need:

Exclude Page – If you want to hide pages from your navigational bar, this plugin is great. This is one you may or may not need, depending on the theme (template) you choose. Some theme developers are now including this option for you. Here is what they say about it:

This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).

ShareThis: A great social media tool.  It lets you give folks a way to help share your posts with the world.  Here is what they have to share about their plugin:

ShareThis makes a WordPress plugin that provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail & other communication channels (like Facebook and MySpace) to a friend.