6 WordPress Plugins That You MUST Have Installed on Your Blog
There are tons of plugins available out there and ready to be installed on your WordPress blog, but most of them are pretty useless, while others are not written as well as they should, resulting in high load times for your blog (which is a big DON’T, both from Google’s point of view, as well as your users’). To make your job easier, Uniblogsity is presenting you a list of 6 plugins that you MUST have installed on your blog, no matter what!
In order to install the plug-ins, click the links I will provide you with to visit the download page or simply click the “Add New” link under the Plugins tab in your WordPress dashboard (please note that the Linkwithin plugin must be downloaded first!)
1. WP Super Cache
This is one really important plug-in because it makes your blog load a lot faster by creating static HTML files of your posts (and therefore reducing the requests to your server, making it a good plugin for saving server resources too). With the WP Super Cache plugin installed, you can double the loading speed of your blog pages, which is something yo should never say no to!
Click here to download WP Super Cache
2. All in One SEO Pack
Its description says it all: out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. In other words, this really useful plugin optimizes your blog’s post for maximum search engine visibility. So without it, you are certainly losing a lot of potential visitors, and potential visitors mean potential income. You wouldn’t want to miss that, would you?
Click here to download All in One SEO Pack
3. Google XML Sitemaps
This is another really useful plugin because it automatically notifies the biggest search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask) when you post new content and actually creates (automatically, again) a sitemap file, making it a lot easier for search engines to index your posts and understand your content. So especially if you have a content-heavy blog, you MUST have this plugin enabled.
Click here to download Google XML Sitemaps
4. Akismet
We all love to get comments on our blogs, but spam comments are never welcomed: except for the fact that they usually promote websites or products that are not safe for all ages (or legal), they simply look bad and lower the value of your blog, discouraging regular readers to post a good comment. Therefore, you should do the best to keep these spam comments away and Akismet is the way to do it!
Click here to download Akismet
5. Digg Digg
You should make it as easy as possible for your readers to share your content on popular social networks (like Facebook, Twitter or Digg) and if your theme doesn’t have such an option implemented by default, you should use the Digg Digg plug-in which takes care of this problem in the best possible way and you can see it at work on Uniblogsity too.
Click here to download Digg Digg
6. Linkwithin – related posts with thumbnails
It has been proven by many studies that having a “related posts” area on your blog, the bounce rate drops significantly and the time readers spend on your blog increases. If your blog theme doesn’t have the related posts feature implemented by default, you could easily go for Linkwithin, the plugin that you see on thousands of blogs who offer related content. It might not have the smartest algorithms for selecting the related content, but it’s fast and looks really good.
Click here to download Linkwithin
And these are the 6 plugins that you must have enabled on your WordPress blog to get the most out of it. Have in mind, however, that depending on the type of blog you are running, there might be a few more you should want to check out and install. Just remember that plugins generally tend to increase the load time of your blog, so don’t overreact by installing to many plugins. After all, it’s the user experience you want to improve with the use of these plugins and if they are too many you will get the exact opposite!
Image credit: fuelyourcoding.com
