When I was starting with Wordpress, I was amazed by its great flexibility. Wordpress is a great tool to create your blog site (or any site for that matter) easily. It offers myriads of plugins and themes.
However, I was quickly as a beginner stopped by this sheer flexibility. Beginner has no way to know which plugins to install, and what they do. What is needed in the beginning? And what is an overkill?
What is the list of the best Wordpress plugins for beginners?
Well here is my list. I use and test regularly all plugins here and I like them all.
What is your most useful plugin?
All in One SEO Pack - a must have SEO plugin. Allows you to setup keywords in titles, posts, pages.
Google Analytics for WordPress - makes Google Analytics setup easy - see my post here.
Google XML Sitemaps - generates Sitemap for your blog evey time you add a post or page.
Sociable - automatically adds links to your posts and pages to your favorite social sites, so your readers can give you credit
Twitter Tools - enables easy integration with Twitter. It can automatically post a tweet every time you add a post to your site.
WordPress Database Backup - this is a must. In order to protect your content, I recommend to set up daily backup of your blog. You can even mail the backup to your Gmail account (or any other mail account) and use it as an independent storage.
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - if you use Wordpress v. 2.6 or earlier, this plugin can be very handy. It will effortlesly upgrade Wordpress to the newest version. It doesn’t work with Wordpress 2.7.
Commentluv - shows a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment. This is good for building community - it builds backlinks to commenters sites.
Related Posts - automatically finds (based on keywords) and shows a list of related blog posts under your post.
Comment Email Responder - allows blog administrator to easily respond to the commnet and send is as an email to comentor at the same time.
Do Follow - cleares default NoFollow attribute from Wordpress comments. Why is is good is described here - Increase Your Search Engine Ranking With DoFollow.
