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Every single time I set up a WordPress blog (and I’ve set up quite a few now) there are a few plugins that I find myself wanting or needing every single time. It’s to the point that if I’m helping someone out on their blog and I go look at their plugins, I immediately wonder why they are not there!
These plugins vary from those that work behind the scenes to those that do their work out in the open:
Add Meta Tags
This falls into the SEO branch of necessary plugins. Basically, this plugin adds descriptive text into the header of each and every page– it takes information from your tags, categories, and post itself to place unique content very early into the page for the search engines to find it. By default, this information is the same in each and every page.
Google XML Sitemaps
This is yet another SEO plugin. What this one does it to take your posts, pages, etc. and builds an XML sitemap – or table of contents – for your entire blog. You can then login to a search engine’s website owner panel (in this case Google) and let them know about your file. This will help the robots (or spiders) to find all your content.
Ozh’ Absolute Comments
Never comment from your blog’s comment form again– unless you want to. Absolute Comments enhances the normal comments screen by giving you the ability to reply to comments right there. The cool part is that you’ll be able to see the whole comment stream, or just the latest comments, and you’ll never miss a conversation– and the reply uses AJAX, so you’ll be sparing load on your server as well.
Subscribe to Comments
I’m really surprised that this hasn’t made it into the core yet. This plugin allows a commenter to be able to have new comments sent to their e-mail address. You can see why this is such a great thing, since the regular blogger is commenting all over the blogosphere and cannot always remember where they’ve been.
WordPress Database Backup
This plugin can do an immediate save of a database, or you can schedule it to save your database on a schedule and have it e-mailed to you. It’s saved bloggers tons of time when something goes wrong– and just the time you think it couldn’t happen to you, it will!
What plugins do you feel you can’t live without?
