Top Ten Wordpress Plugins for Your Blog or Website

Wordpress makes designing a website or running your own blog a breeze with thousands of custom themes to choose between. These themes handle the layout of how your content is presented to your viewing public.

You can expand upon the functionality of your website simply by adding plugins.

Installing a new plugin to your site is as easy as logging into your Wordpress backend, going to Plugins, click Add New, and upload the plugin you downloaded.

We use all ten of these plugins with great success on our website www.recapgaming.com. If you care to see them in action, follow the link.

Below we will go over the ten best plugins you should be using for your website.

If you allow users to post comments you will soon find out there are thousands of bots scouring the internet and spamming blogs with links. Akismet will help protect you from this spam. Akismet has blocked over 93 BILLION spam posts to date.

Akismet is made by Automattic, the developers of Wordpress itself. It compiles spam received on other participating wordpress blogs to effectively block or filter them on your website. Akismet is free to use for personal use, or $5/month for business use.

[Wordpress Plugin link: Akismet]

If you are running a commercial website and are looking for a free alternative we recommend Antispam Bee.

You might not think to backup your Wordpress site, but it's extremely important. Keeping your data safe protects you from losing everything if you get hacked, user error, hardware failures, or incompatibility issues that may arise.

Using BackWPup this process couldn't be any easier. You can schedule your backup to an external ftp site, a Dropbox account, e-mail, and more. You can also run your complete with a click of a button from your admin bar. And to top it off it's free.

[Wordpress Plugin link: BackWPup]

Improve your page speed with the #1 caching plugin.

After installing W3 Total Cache, you can expect to see up to 10x faster page loading. Visiting a website that takes a long time to load is terrible for the user experience. Google also penalizes your site in its rankings. Google analytics displays your site speed under the content section and is an important part of your site health.

[Wordpress Plugin link: W3 Total Cache]

In the backend of Wordpress this plugin will display your google analytics directly into your Dashboard. You can also set access levels of who else can see it so you could share traffic statistics with your team.

You can also get a plugin from the same author to display Adsense revenue if you are interested.

[Wordpress Plugin link: Google Analytics Dashboard for WP]

Using social media is important for the growth and reach of your website. Adding these "social stickers" to your site lets people easily follow your networks at the click of a button.

You don't have to enable all of them, just the ones you want.

[Wordpress Plugin link: Social Stickers]

BuddyPress is a social networking solution that can tack onto your website. Each user will be able to post statuses, message other users, and make connections.

BuddyPress is easy to use and with social features your website will never be the same!

[Wordpress Plugin link: Buddypress]

Allowing your visitors to easily share content is also very important. With Digg Digg you can enable sharing to varying networks at a click of a button next to every post you publish.

It also shows a counter so you can see how many times each article is shared with each network. Don't go without this one! Sharing over social networks could give you millions of views, it just depends who shares it.

To top it off it's free to use!

[Wordpress Plugin link: Digg Digg]

Disqus is a powerful commenting plugin used by major companies like CNN and IGN. Even smaller websites like Android Police, or our own, RecapGaming.

Disqus helps remove poor comments, link spamming, etc by allowing your community to upvote the better comments. You can also monetize your content section by allowing Disqus to show similar discussions from other websites (completely optional). If your visitors click through you are paid.

[Wordpress Plugin link: BackWPup]

This may look confusing but it's a small plugin that does something very important for you. When Google and other web crawlers come to your website to see how and what they should index into their search engines, this plugin will provide that answer for them with a sitemap.

Additionally every time you update your site with a new post the search engines are notified of the change automatically for you.

This makes everyone's life easier and will optimize how your site is indexed.

[Wordpress Plugin link: Google XML Sitemaps]

Finally at spot number ten, we found the YOP poll plugin to be the best way to present nice looking poll data your users can engage in.

[Wordpress Plugin link: YOP Poll]

Ewww Image Optimizer automatically and losslessly reduces file sizes as you upload images to your blog. Losslessly means you lose no image quality at all. And since the file sizes are smaller your website loads faster, improving your user experience and google search rankings.

Ewww Image Optimizer will also optimize all the images you already have on your website if you tell it to.

With nothing to lose and everything to gain I had to add this one onto the list.

[Wordpress Plugin link: Ewww Image Optimizer]

If you want more literature on WordPress Plugins or Themes there are more available at Amazon.

If you enjoyed this article I recommend reading

• Top Ten Ways to Promote Your Blog

I hope you enjoyed this top ten list and found something you can improve your blog or website with. If you want to suggest a plugin I missed please let me know in the comments below.