I Make Use Of: 20 Essential Wordpress Plugins

I only have a few other plugins running on my Wordpress installation, but these are the most useful Wordpress plugins for a variety of reasons. In addition, none of these plugins ever caused me a problem and luckily several of them are updated often to improve performance. Enjoy and as always, please feel free to comment…

• Google Adsense widget - Pretty Self Explanatory, but it allows for a sidebar widget (and other places with configuration) for displaying your Google Adsense ads.
• All in One SEO Pack - enables certain modifications to your Wordpress Blog to provide Search Engine Optimization. (enable Search Engines to better pick up your site)
• AJAX Comments - this provides an easy and quick Comments interface in your comments section for your visitors which updates without a page reload.
• Akismet - So far this “SPAM” catcher has caught everything that is SPAM (and trust me, it’s odd, but you receive SPAM comments on Wordpress blogs.
• Blogroll Page - Easily create a new page that if you insert a snippet of code, it displays your Blogroll, as in http://www.thefattytalks.com/blog-roll/
• Enforce www. Preference - Important Search Engine Optimization fact is that Google and other search engines will pickup domain.com and www.domain.com if you do not have this plugin enforced. This helps because duplicates are bad for Search Engine Optimization.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - Now that Google bought Feedburner (.com), Feedburner’s Pro features are now FREE. So, once again, Thank You Google! Feedburner FeedSmith alters your Wordpress feed to automatically switch to the Feedburner feed, in my case www.makeuseof.com/feed/ becomes http://feeds.feedburner.com/Makeuseof. Feedburner is awesome because you can customize your feed with extra social links, email this and you can monitor subscriptions, errors with your feed and even have your feed optimized.
• Google XML Sitemaps - Sitemaps are important for Search Engines to easily and speedily recognize your Blog and the pages it contains within. Keeping an up to date Sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools increases your visibility with Google.
• Google Analyticator - Enter in your Google Analytics “unique code” to monitor your web site traffic. Google Analytics is by far the most comprehensive FREE web site tracking and statistics web site.
• iWPhone - Simple Plugin that optimizes your blog for the IPhone. I tested this out recently and it works like a charm.
• MyBlogLog Widget - MyBlogLog is a great community of Blog authors who share their favorite blogs and their communities around them. This sidebar widget displays Recent Readers from MyBlogLog. (see it in action on MakeUseOf.com sidebar)
• Picasa Photos - I think the Picasa Photos look great compared to the Flickr Photos when they display on the sidebar, several options are available.
• ReCATPCHA - Akismet is great for catching Spam, but sometimes it just gets annoying to have to delete and look through (just in case) hundreds of comments, ReCAPTCHA is a comment CAPTCHA plugin for Wordpress that integrates well, helps ‘digitize books’ and more importantly works with IE, Firefox and Safari.
• Subscribe me - This plugin is a great sidebar widget to add to the top of your sidebar that adds a variety (which you can choose from) of “Subscribe to my feed” through…
• WordPress.com Stats - Note: You need a Wordpress.com API Key (I luckily first used adamhirsch.WordPress.com for my blog and now synchronize them), so I had this key (found in Options –> Users –> Your Profile). This plugin though, recently updated, allows you to view your Blog Statistics (most popular posts, visitors, referrals) on your Wordpress.org Blog Stats menu.
• Sociable - A great plugin with many options (you can choose which to use) of Social Bookmarking services to add to the bottom of posts in your pages, single posts or feeds.
• Share This - Similar to Sociable, but not as trustworthy I realized (has glitches in where the window opens in IE), provides Social Bookmarking in an easy pull down menu and a really simple “E-mail This” post, which is mainly why I use it, since you don’t have to leave the post area at anytime.
• wp-cache - Simple plugin that “Caches” your web site for optimal load times.
• WP Plugins Tracker - New Plugin that I love, checks all your plugins (activated or not) and determines if your version # is the same or outdated. Easily click the Plugin Name to go to the Plugin’s Web Site to download the updated version from there.
• WordPress Mobile Edition - Simple plugin that you upload also to the “Themes” directory that enables optimization for mobile phone viewing.

That’s it. Those are the plugins I installed, activated and use. Trust me, I’ve tried others, these, for the general purposes of a simple blog (no videos, pictures, directory or code explanations). You may also check out Aibek’s Top 20 Wordpress plugins for Power Users.