Top 10 Must Have Wordpress Plugins For Your Blog

Written by: Daniel Richard

Presenting to you… the top 10 must have Wordpress plugins for your blog!

There’s a whole lot of plugins developed for Wordpress in the web today. Here’s a compilation of the Top 10 must have plugins for your blog – they are the “new essentials”, the ones that would turn an ordinary blog into becoming a professional web publication site.

I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that.

The following are the ones that will help your blog more user-friendly while not being a hassle to implement on your part.

With no more delays, I present to you the “Top 10 Must Have Plugins For Your Blog” (in no particular order).

1. CommentLuv

1. CommentLuv

Spread the love. Created by Andy Bailey, this outrageously popular new plugin had been installed onto many new and awesome blogs over on the web.

This plugin fetches the feed of the commenter and links the latest feed (or any selected article of his / her choice) at the end of the comment which will appear after the comment form. Once submitted, the title of their own latest blog entry will be displayed after the content of their comments.

It’s the coolest way for blog owners to contribute back to the community by spreading some link love, while allowing the commenter to get more exposure via the link to the latest entry.

http://www.commentluv.com/download/ajax-commentluv-installation/

2. Cforms II

2. Cforms II

Cforms II is like one of the best developed contact form plugin system that does more than just typing and sending out direct messages to the blog authors. This plugin allows blog owners to let it replace the original comment form with it’s own customizable form, or have a direct send page to a friend feature, to even allowing it to create any type of forms that would be needed for the site.

You can even set your own styling for the forms, AJAX’ify it, or even come up with your own usage for this monster of a plugin.

This is a must have even if you are looking for a plugin to solve the contact details page where you want your readers to reach you in a more easier and service friendly way through the website.

http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

3. Comment Relish

3. Comment Relish

A friend once asked how do I get to send out emails back to all those who commented in my blog and complimented me for being hard working. Well, here’s my super secret for achieving that.

Comment Relish is the plugin that will help you send out a canned response to every single person who left a comment in any of your entries automatically. All you have to do is to enter in a desired reply that you want to send to your readers and then you are done! The plugin will then send out the stored message after every comment was made.

The trick is to keep updating the responses after a given time, to keep giving the readers a fresh new thing to read and get them coming back to comment more than usual.

http://www.justinshattuck.com/comment-relish/

4. Counterize II

4. Counterize II

Among all the statistics and web counter for blogs, I find Counterize II the most reliable one that serves it’s core purpose well. In it’s very essence, it is meant to capture data of both the view count for both the total page views and also for the unique views in your blog.

Your statistics will appear in text form in your dashboard. You are then given the option to see the full stats in a dedicated page within your dashboard – where more details like where the last ten or hundreds of readers came from, what words were searched upon reaching your blog, and what are the popular entries in your site.

It’s that simple, and even easier to use. You’ll love this counter tool.

http://www.navision-blog.de/counterize

5. Gravatar

5. Gravatar

Gravatar was made to be the universal blog avatar plugin where users can just store a profile image to be displayed on all the comment section that runs this neat add-on.

All it takes is a few steps (not more than 5 steps – if I could even remember) and lesser than a couple of minutes, to get the entire thing set up for the registration part.

By installing the plugin, your site will enable other Gravatar users to have their avatars displayed on your blog as they leave their comments.

http://www.gravatar.com/

6. SRG Clean Archives

6. SRG Clean Archives

Here’s a cool archives plugin that you will like. It will arrange your archives into a neat list where every article will be displayed under it’s designated months. You too can set the AJAX mode on where the eye-candy effects will take this into a whole new level of coolness.

However, this plugin will have a conflict with any other jQuery effects that you have on your website as SRG Clean Archives run using a totally different javascript library.

The most basic features should be a good enough reason for you to have this plugin running in your blog just as how I’ve used it for mine.

http://www.idunzo.com/projects/clean-archives/

7. Subscribe to Comments

7. Subscribe to Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin you should have installed the first thing you get your Wordpress blog running. It appears in a tiny spot almost at the bottom end of the page (right after your comment form), allowing readers to have an option whether they would like to subscribe and get notified of any new responses in the conversation that your article is generating.

Readers who have the option turned on will receive an email when any new comment is left in the blog entry that he / she have subscribed to.

This helps your community to keep track of any new updates in the comments area which is also a source for valuable information that users have contributed.

http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

8. WP-PageNavi

8. WP-PageNavi

Developed to turn the usual “next” and “previous” links into a better page system where readers will be able to browse through your blog.

Highly customizable and easy to implement, you will find this a very useful plugin that is essential to increasing page views while making your blog more user friendly.

http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

9. Wordpress Related Posts

9. Wordpress Related Posts

This plugin will automatically add any related articles from your blog at the end of every entry. You can actually see a live demo right at the end of every post in my blog.

The good part is that if there are no related entries for the post, you can set it to display the most commented articles, which too will add value to your readers in showing them the other most popular stuff that people are talking about in your site.

http://fairyfish.net/2007/09/12/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/

10. Tell-a-Friend

10. Tell-a-Friend

I’ve covered this plugin in an earlier post on how it is the neatest word of mouth promotion tool out here for blogs and websites. This plugin overshadows every other alternatives by miles!

The positive part is that it allows the Tell-a-Friend system to access your various web profile and contact lists (it does not store any of your account details), where you can set up a message and send the page to your friends, colleagues, and networks of your choice.

It’s definitely the neatest way to promote a great page, article, image, joke, and so on (this page maybe?) to everyone you know in all the major email and social media websites.

http://tellafriend.socialtwist.com/

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed this Top 10 list of the must have plugins for your blog. Do get them if you find them useful for you. If you have any good words to share about those plugins featured in this post, do share them in the comments below. Thanks!

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