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I’m so sick of setting up a blog and looking for plugins for WordPress. The lists that are out there are either out of date or mention useless plugins. Two things you should do before you get these great plugins are; one, get a good theme for your WordPress blog. And, two, setup your theme, customize it and make sure it’s working properly before adding any plugins otherwise it could affect the usage of the plugin.

So, onto the Top 10 + 1 Can’t Live Without WordPress Plugins! First of all, you may wonder why the list is 10 + 1? Well the + 1 is an added bonus that I’ve added for you at the bottom of the list, so read on!

What are the plugins?!

1. WP-PostRatings is a plugin that a lot of blogs are using. It’s funny though as no one is crediting Lester Chan with this plugin, not even blogs that have plugin lists that are using the plugin! This plugin really adds some interactivity between a website and it’s users. It also gives you a good idea of what’s popular on your website and what people want to see more of. Also, you should check out Lester Chan’s website because he has a ton more plugins available that are all great and he deserves more credit!
2. AdSense-Deluxe. Now here is a great monetizing plugin for Google’s AdSense. If you don’t know, Google’s monetization tool AdSense allows you to place advertisements on your website that are contextually related to the content (they match your posts). The AdSense-Deluxe plugin basically works in that it creates a shortcut for you to place in your theme files. This shortcut points to your AdSense code which you can edit any time (or change) in your WordPress Admin panel. This plugin will save you a lot of time configuring and trying to monetize your site.
   
3. FeedBurner FeedSmith is a great plugin. Now, this plugin does rely on you having FeedBurner, so sign-up for a account! Once you have an account setup, it’s very easy to setup this plugin. FeedSmith allows you to keep track of subscribers to your RSS feeds. It reroutes your default WordPress feeds to go through FeedBurner so that statistics can be kept on them and you have more control.
4. Full Text Feed. Now that you have your feed optimized, you need to make sure subscribers are getting what they want! A problem introduced in WordPress 2.1 is that if you use the <!–more–> tag on your posts, well when they’re sent out as a feed, they’ll be cut off. For some reason WordPress 2.1+ cuts off posts after the <!–more–> when they’re included in feeds. As a side note, I use the <!–more–> on my index page to keep things short and clean. If you want to know more about the <!–more–> tag, check out this WordPress site.
5. MyAvatars is a really creative plugin that allows commentators of your website to use their MyBlogLog icon pictures when replying or commenting on a post on your site. Don’t worry though, if your commentators don’t have a MyBlogLog account, it’ll just display a basic icon. MyBlogLog is a great blogging community of people. MyAvatars allows a much better interaction between your readers/commentators and you (your site). The new version of MyAvatars (version 0.2b) even has support for gravatar.
6. Similar Posts is sixth on our list. A lot of people have seen “related posts:” on WordPress sites before. I used to run a blog with “related posts:” before but I did notice that once in a while the related posts listed had nothing to do with the post that they were listed under. Similar Posts is much better in that it uses the WordPress MySQL (which is already in use by WordPress) and compares words in posts. It is a very intelligent plugin and it’s written by a priest (Rob Marsh), so how can you not use it?! haha
7. Smart Update Pinger Plugin (say that five times fast!) is no longer supported by it’s author, but that shouldn’t stop you from using it! This plugin is great, it’s saved me from being banned from a lot of pinging services (or so I would imagine). WordPress has this really horrible (or maybe good?) feature built into it, so that every time you edit a post, it pings all of the search engines or sites you have on your ping list. In theory WordPress shouldn’t do this unless a certain amount of time has passed because if you’re like me, once in a while you publish and re-edit a post multiple times before you’re happy with it. This plugin modifies WordPress to only ping services once when you publish an article or whenever you want by going into the plugin’s settings. Also a great feature of this plugin, is the ability for it to log the success (or not) of the pings. Not only that, but you can use my RPC and RPC2 services to ping (The definitive and final guide!) article with it!
8. Ultimate Tag Warrior is a great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool for your WordPress site. Granted, this is a plugin that you need to use from the beginning launch of your site. Actually, that’s not true, it will just be a bit of work for you to go back through your posts and add tags. Ultimate Tag Warrior allows you to add your own tags to all of your posts. These tags really help getting visitors to the right articles on your website. WordPress is already pretty SEO friendly, so this plugin just makes things better!
9. WP-Cache is VERY important! Yes, I said it and you should repeat it! This plugin will (or will definitely help) prevent your site from taking a dive after either being on Digg’s front page or other mass-visitor-linked website. Let’s face it, most servers can’t handle the load of thousands of visitors and hour so WP-cache basically caches static pages on your site so your server doesn’t have to keep compiling and fetching PHP files that aren’t changing.
10. Sociable is a handy plugin that allows you to offer your readers bookmarking/social website icons under each post. This help both you and your users. Your users can bookmark your site so that they can find easier in the future, or maybe they just want to share it with friends. And the benefit for you is increased traffic and exposure. Sociable offers a very clean interface, with small icons. You can also choose which social bookmarking services you want to offer shortcuts to on your website. It’s very easy to implement and mostly automatic!

Ok, so you’re at the end of the list and you’re wondering where number 11 is. Well, 11 isn’t a plugin (yes, shock!), it’s a tip! My tip is, ALWAYS backup your WordPress site! I can’t stress this enough! So many people think about it in the back of their mind but they don’t realize the severity of not backing-up until their site either disappears or gets broken somehow. Most web hosting companies allow for a backup of your account, so I suggest you look into it.

I hope these plugins help you out. I know they’ve all helped me out tremendously already. On my website http://joemidway.com I am using most of these plugins, and the two or three that I’m not is only because I haven’t had the time to rework the site to accommodate them.

If you have any problems with any of them, check out the literature that’s on the respective plugin’s website. If you still can’t figure something out, feel free to post a comment here and I’ll try to help you solve it! Adios for now!

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