WordPress is said to be the best tool among other CMS tools (Joomla, Drupal, Blogspot etc) due to its extensive features. The most useful feature of WordPress is its Plugins. You can do almost everything you can imagine with the help of Plugins. Gone are the days when bloggers used to write a code to add some new features to their website/Web Blog. Now they use Plugins as it just takes a few minutes to install and activate Plugin.
Here I am listing the basic Plugins for WordPress that you should you have on your blog.
Akismet
Akismet is the most required Plugin for any website. It is an Anti-spam WordPress plugin that protects your site from spam comments. It automatically deletes many of the spam comments by itself but it moves few of spam comments into the Spam folder. So I would suggest also check your Spam folder daily. This is one must have plugin that you should have from day one to stop spam comments on your blog. To use Akismet, you need API key and it’s free for you.
But Akismet moves spam comments to wp_commentmeta table. You can delete the content of the table from your phpMyAdmin and deleting all the table data.
Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps
The organic traffic is the visitor driven by the major Search Engines. To help Search Engines to index your site, sitemap for your site is mandatory.This plugin generates the XML sitemap that helps the search engines like google, yahoo, bing, and ask.com to index your blog. It also notifies (i.e pings) major search engines every time you make a post in your blog. There is an option in this plugin to change frequencies, priorities, and many other different options.
ShareThis
ShareThis is a social networking Plugin to help you to promote your site on various social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, Pinterest etc. It will be automatically embedded with your post just after the ending of your Post data. It helps visitors to share your Site/Post information with their social followers/ friends on a button click.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. This Plugin compresses the HTML and CSS files result in a better speed of your blog. This free Plugin is like a boon for newbie’s and also be simple to use.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
This is the best SEO Plugin available in the market as per my experience. This is an alternative to All in one SEO and offers way more feature than all in one SEO. Similar to All in SEO Plugin, but also includes Meta robots plugin, RSS footer by Yoast, XML sitemap and so on. This plugin also allows you to noindex your non-useful pages (or articles to make your site rank higher and more valuable. It can also be an alternative to Google XML sitemaps and can create sitemaps too. I am also using WordPress SEO by Yoast, because it shows your keywords details as the density of your keyword, how many outbound links you are using.
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is an extensive WordPress database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to clean and optimize your database tables.
Major Features include :
JetPack By WordPress
JetPack allows you to monitor your site and have access to many more features directly from wordpress.com. The Jetpack plugin brings all the earlier services that you might have enjoyed on wordpress.com blog to your self-hosted blog. It brings you with many functions such as site stats, proofreading, BuddyPress, subscriptions and some other exciting widgets to your wordpress.org blog. Jetpack also gives the feature to make your blog social by adding social share buttons, recent tweets in the sidebar.
If you want to go for the premium version of Jetpack, you can check JetPack pricing plans.
Also Read: Top 10 Unknown Hidden Features Of WordPress
Floating Social Share Bar
Floating social share bar plugin is a free plugin that let you add sharing buttons on your desktop and mobile site both. Having sharing buttons will also encourage your readers to share your article.
Smush.it
Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality. After Smush.it runs on a web page it reports how many bytes would be saved by optimizing the page’s images and provides a downloadable zip file with the minimized image files.
However, using a lot of Plugins is not recommended as it increases the webpage load time. Thus degrading the performance of the website. The number of Plugins is not limited to any extent. You can use as many Plugins if they are properly coded.
Extra Tip: The webpage load time should be <3 seconds for a better result as visitors do not tend to wait for much time. They feel frustrated. You can read below article to speed up your website.
Do let us know which basic plugins you are using on your blog and you will suggest to others.
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You listed various good plugins here.
I want to add one of the best Blog Designer Pro WordPress plugin in your list. It is a step ahead WordPress plugin that allows you to modify blog and single page layouts and design. It has unique 36+ high-impact blog templates are available in it.