20+ WordPress Plugins You NEED.

This post is more for me than you.  Now that I have 20 plugins that I install on every blog I set up, I need a list.  I use widgets for a lot of the features I need in a theme, so that if I change the theme to something completely different, the custom code I need for things like Feedburner and Analytics stay as widgets.  If you think there are some that are better than the ones I list here, just let me know.

Akismet

This one should be self explanatory.  As your blog grows in popularity, your spam comments will too.  If you have comments activated, you’re going to want this plugin.  It comes as part of WordPress by default, so don’t feel like you need to go looking for it.

All in One SEO Pack

This is probably the single best thing you can do to optimize your blog for SEO.  You can do things like set your meta tags, page titles, headers, and SEO friendly URLs.  In general, it does a good job setting up your on-site SEO, and every blog that’s looking to rank well should use it.  That being said, don’t forget about your off-site SEO.

Auto Post Thumbnail

I think every post should have an image in it.  It pulls your readers in and sells your posts.  A lot of new themes for WordPress are set up with featured images since they added them in version 2.9.  The new term for themes revolving around featured images is a “magazine” style theme.  This plugin will automatically take the first image in your post and make it the featured image in the post.  Now you can be lazy about your featured images.

Contextual Related Posts

You can increase your page views by giving your readers similar posts to what they like.  It keeps readers on the site longer and increases your overall readership.  This checks the context of your current post and then indexes the inforation and looks up similar posts in your archive.

Feedburner Subscription Widget

If you’re not sending your readers to a Feedburner Feed, you’re really missing out.  Feedburner can aggregate your content and notify people via RSS when your blog is updated.  Their email service is great for people that don’t know what RSS is or don’t use it.  It emails a subscriber automatically every day you make updates to your site.  This plugin allows you to add a subscription widget to the sidebar of your blog.

fbLikeButton

This simply adds a Facebook “Like” button to your website.  Facebook is a great way to drive traffic, so be sure you’re leveraging the social graph to increase your popularity.

Follow Me

You can add all of your social profiles to the Follow Me widget and give people the ability to connect with you outside of your blog.  My favorite setting for this is the pullout window frozen to the left side of the page.  It then uses Lightbox to pop out a selection window when they decide to follow you.

Google Analyticator

This adds your Google Analytics code so that if you change your theme, your analytics don’t go down.  If you’re not using Google Analytics, then you’re missing out on a level that I can’t even begin to express right now.

Google XML Sitemaps

Submitting XML sitemaps to Google is the best way to update their index with new content from your website.  This is especially important if you’re publishing news that can be breaking.  If you hit the top of Google first, you tend to stay there.  The best way to get indexed immediately is by submitting a sitemap.

Robots Meta

This updates your robots.txt file and removes dofollow links from URLs that don’t need it.  It really helps indexing bots for search engines find the right content.  Depending on the size of your site, this can have a significant impact on your search rankings.

RSS Footer

You can add a footer to your RSS feed.  This is really good for getting links from people that are stealing your content by syndicating your RSS feed to another website.  You can also use this to add your social media links and other important information to the footer of each post in your RSS feed.

SEO Slugs

This removes Google stop words from your url Slugs, so you don’t have useless words making your URLs longer.

Sociable

This allows people to easily submit your articles to social media websites like Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, etc.  You need to make it really easy for your users to submit your articles to other websites, otherwise they won’t do it.  Many of the social media article sites are very key in driving traffic and can make or break a website’s success.

Subscribe to Comments

You should make it easy for your users to subscribe to your comments, so that they can follow up with what they’ve said before.  This allows them to be notified via email when the comments on a post are updated.  If users are commenting on many blogs, they will undoubtedly be looking for and using this feature.

Top Commentators Widget

Everyone that knows me, knows that I run TopCommenter.com and I stand behind this widget.  It promotes comments on your blog by incentivizing users to compete to be in the top commentators.  If they are, they get a dofollow link from your site to theirs.  This is a great way for people to manually increase the off-site SEO of their site temporarily.

TweetMeme Retweet Button

This is strikingly close to the functionality of the Sociable plugin, but is even easier and is specifically for twitter.  Your users can easily retweet your posts, which will be tracked by TweetMeme.

Twitter Tools

There are a slew of tools for twitter in this plugin, but the biggest reason I use it is for updating my twitter feed whenever I add a new post.  There are other features that are useful, like twitter feed digests daily or weekly.  Basically that means it will take all of your tweets for the last week and make them a blog post.  I think that feature is annoying to users, but that’s my opinion.  It also includes a widget to put your Twitter feed in the sidebar.  I use that widget usually too.

Twitter Tools Bit.ly URLs

You need this to use shortened URLs in the Twitter Tools plugin.

WordPress Threaded Comments

This allows users to reply to eachother (or you to reply to users).  This creates more of a conversation feel in the comments and eliminates the issue of people at the bottom of the list from responding to people at the top of the list and creating confusion.  Some people don’t like this because sometimes people will reply to the first comment to be at the top of the list.  Meh.

Wait! There’s More: 2 Bonus Plugins

Self Shortener

If you’re sending people to the same links over and over, send a lot of links, or are simply looking to mask the destination URL, why not keep all of the URL shortening in your control?  This also works great if you have a short domain name, because it makes even more sense then.

NextGEN Gallery

If you post artwork or photos often, this is the single best way to keep yourself organized.  I usually recommend this to artisans or people that take a ton of pictures and want to share them.  They have some pretty cool widgets for showing galleries and random images too.  They have built in slide shows and gallery navigation as well.

Conclusion

This is what I use.  I’m not sure if they’re the best, but they work really well for me.  If you’re having issues with any of them, just let me know and I can help you.  Do you have other plugins you use?