WordPress Plugins are an easy and efficient way for enhancing the capabilities of WordPress weblog or website. The plugins (or extensions) come in handy for implementing & introducing a variety of features & functionality to the weblogs. Plugins are readymade scripts which helps web-designers and developers to speed up the development process. Here are 10 plugins which every beginner must install after getting started with WordPress.
- All In One SEO: SEO plays an important role in improving the website’s page rank and thus increasing the search engine traffic to the blog. All in One SEO Pack is a plugin which automatically optimizes the WordPress blog for search engines, thereby relieving the blog owner from the pains of implementing the SEO techniques manually.
- Insights: Insights brings in a new and powerful way of writing the posts. Insights enables the blog author to quickly access and insert information (links, images, videos, maps..) into the blog posts. It comes in handy for interlinking the posts, performing the Google search (for blog, books and news as well) and for searching Flickr images & Youtube videos (right from the editor interface).
- WP Super Cache: The users and the search engines favor the websites which load at the wink of an eye. WP Super Cache comes in handy for speeding up the loading time of any weblog. WP Super Cache is a very fast caching engine which generates static html files from the dynamic WordPress blog and serves the cached version of the web pages to users (which ultimately reduces the page loading time).
- Google XML Sitemaps: Google XML Sitemaps solves a dual purpose for your newly created blog. Firstly, it generates a special XML sitemap which helps the search engines to better index the blog and notifies the search engines as and when new content or post is published . Secondly, it provides an additional navigation aid to the visitors.
- Google Integration Toolkit: Google provides a lot of useful services, which can be integrated with your blog. With the services offered by Google, you can check how the website / weblog is indexed in Google (using Google Webmaster Tools), get detailed statistics (through Google Analytics), earn money (with Google AdSense) and more. This plugin allows you to easily integrate the above mentioned Google services with your blog.
- Auto AdSense Section: The major portion of the revenue for the weblogs is generated from the advertisements. Section targeting thus plays an important role in getting the most from the ads published on the content pages. Auto AdSense Section automatically implements AdSense section targeting to improve the relevancy of AdSense ads and therefore boost the earnings with more relevant ads.
- Maintenance Mode: Building a website or a weblog is not a day’s activity. It requires quite some time to re-evaluate and refurbish the website from time to time. Maintenance mode comes in handy for occasions when the site is temporarily down for maintenance. This plugin adds a splash page to the blog which lets the visitors know that the blog is down for maintenance.
- Contextual Related Posts: Enlisting the related posts at the end of each post is a good strategy for increasing the page views and engaging the visitors in the weblog’s content. Contextual Related Posts effectively displays the list of contextually related posts at the end of the current post.
- Social Media Widget: Social media networking is the best medium of internet marketing. Instantly connect to the social media sites and be in touch with your valuable social assets through Social Media Widget. The Social Media Widget is a simple sidebar widget that allows users to input their social media website profile URLs and other subscription options to show an icon on the sidebar to that social media site and more that open up in a separate browser window.
- Akismet: Akismet safeguards the blog from the spammers. The plugin checks the comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. The caught spams are then listed under “Comments” admin screen for review by the blog owner.
