A list of 10 Must Have Plugins for your WordPress Blog

There are plugins – and then there are plugins. During the whole of my blogging career I’ve customized a fair amount of plugins, I’ve also cultivated a fair amount of fine head aches that are only found while reading those fine prints of HTML. The core of what I’m trying to say is I did not have that extra £ £ £  to hire a coder. I spent a large part of the day after sundown and before sunrise, impartially trying to figure out why things are not working the way you want them to.

It’s safe to say I had a can of worms in my hand, but I always tried to give it my old college try. I told my father, “I’m now an entrepreneur.” Because I hear that’s what you’re called when don’t have an actual job. I’ve commit oneself to open my own domain where I will tell you exactly why you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing on your site. I will go into detail and illustrate what you’re ought to do. I made this short list of the must-have WordPress plugins for every WordPress site. These are the plugins I apply even before setting up a FeedBurner.

Choose the right WP theme.

If I had someone teaching me why it was better to use Flash then HTML when I first started.. I would have rescued approximately a year that’s gone to waste, let’s not even mention the stress and effort spent. There are certain things you must know about choosing the theme. Use organic, anatomical, basic and most of all natural theme. Not the ones that look cool, and slide up and down when you move your scroll bar.

Get these WP plugins.

Sitemap Generator by Dagon Design – Everyone should have this plugin. A site map is a list of pages of web sites accessible to crawlers, spiders, monkeys, or whatever you want to call them. Think about it as your Family Tree. But in this case, it’s your “Family Forest”. (Double click to view image)

Smart 404 – Michael Tyson – You never ever wish to hand your readers a nice 404. Instead of quickly giving up and moving to the next site, this plugin redirects them to the homepage. No matter how cool your 404 image is, or if you think to yourself “Hey, this is will go so viral on SU !!” <- That’s a bold No.
Theme Test Drive – by Vladimir Prelovac – Do you really need a reason why? Here’s a reason: I don’t want to see you test how your new theme might look. (Only logged admins will be able to see the new look, this way, you could tweak and code what ever you want and only when you’re ready – Activate!)

SEO Friendly Images – yet another fabulous plugin by Vladimir Prelovac. If you’re looking to have an entertainment blog, or a fashion blog or actually, any blog with images this will draw you a lot of traffic on the long run. You need to make sure that you do add a description to your images, and do title them for what they are. For example let’s say you’re about to upload a this image below – but it’s titled: n1507600716_8844.jpg don’t leave it like that, that’s just wrong! What you want to do is just the title to “Fat cat” and add a description again, “White cat, fat cat”.

User Locker – Daniel FrużyÅ„ski – Not much into it. This is a brutal way of dealing with site hackers. Simple, 5 times wrong pw and you’re account gets locked.

FeedBurner – You must feed your readers. Must.

Blogroll NoFollow – James Morris – This plugin will help you maintain your Page rank. It adds the nofollow value to the rel attribute of a all blogroll links. If you’re not sure what “nofollow” is, read article here.

Platinum SEO Pack by Rajesh – Certain themes are not fully supported by this plugin which is why I chose to list it last. This plugin is to create homepage title, description, title tags and so on. I’ve had a few issues using this plugin. It resulted by me re-coding it and making it better so if you’re interested let me know and I will instruct you. Make sure that ONLY your header gets the title you chose and not every article you’ve posted.

SEO Title Tag – You don’t really need a plugin for this, you can manual it by choosing custom structure and type %postname% this way, you will get a permalink with the post names, and that will help search engines find your posts as well as title tags.

There are more plugins that I can recommend using like Link Juice Keeper, User Photo. If you’ve got any issues installing any of the plugins, or questions regarding custom coding feel free to shoot me an eMail! and please don’t forget to burn my Feed :)