Top 10 Must Have Plugins for a WordPress Blog (V2)

BY Ben Lang Nov. 03, 2009 23 Comments

Plug-in

This is part two to the Top 10 WordPress plugins, Nate shared his top 10 here before on my blog.

With all of the experience I have using WordPress these are the top 10 plugins I would recommend.  Sociable, Contact Form 7, Pageear, All in One SEO Pack, TweetMeme Button, Popularity Contest, WP Cumulus, Intense Debate, What Would Seth Godin Do and Similar Posts. Feel free to download them using the links provided and let me know what you think.

1. Sociable

Description: Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! WordPress 2.6 or above is required.

Why top 10?

  • Social media sharing plugin.
  • Encourages readers to share your posts.
  • Easy to customize.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/

2. Contact Form 7

Description: Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Why top 10?

  • Contact forms.
  • Includes many features.
  • Easy to customize.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

3. Pageear

Description: Pageear is a free flash pagepeel plugin. It allows you to customize an ad in the corner of your site that peels down. It’s a very catchy script and will be sure to improve you advertising revenues.

Why top 10?

  • Peel down ad in corner of your page.
  • Visually captivating.
  • Encourages more ad clicks.

Download Here:

http://www.webpicasso.de/blog/pageear-free-peel-away-ad/

4. All in One SEO Pack

Description: Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. This allows you to easily edit your SEO options rather than edit everything within the code. It will improve your SEO tags automatically.

Why top 10?

  • Easily edit SEO for your blog.
  • Improves your SEO.
  • Easy to customize.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

5. TweetMeme Button

Description: The TweetMeme button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.

Why top 10?

  • Adds TweetMeme Button to your posts, pages and archives.
  • Encourages retweets of your posts.
  • Easy to customize.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/

6. Popularity Contest

Description: This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports

Why top 10?

  • Calculates how popular your posts are.
  • Includes popularity reports.
  • Easy to customize.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popularity-contest/

7. WP-Cumulus

Description: WP-Cumulus allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting. Clicking the tags can be a little hard but it does take you to the appropriate page.
Why top 10?

  • Shows 3-D rotating tag cloud.
  • Visually captivating for visitors.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/

8. Intense debate

Description: Intense debate comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Full comment and account data sync between Intense Debate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!

Why top 10?

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/intensedebate/

9. What Would Seth Godin Do

Description: Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors. By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location. The message can be excluded from Pages if desired.

Why top 10?

  • Raise your number of RSS subscribers
  • Cool customizable text, asking to subscribe to your blog.
  • Easy to customize.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/what-would-seth-godin-do/

10. Similar Posts

Description: Similar Posts displays a list of posts that are similar or related to the current posts. The list can be customized in many ways. Similarity is judged according to a post’s title, content, and tags and you can adjust the balance of factors to fit your own blog.

Why top 10?

  • Great for readers to find other similar posts.
  • Easy to customize.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/
So what do you think? Any recommendations or comments?

Blogging, Online Business
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23 Responses to “Top 10 Must Have Plugins for a WordPress Blog (V2)”

  1. @DavidBeKing Reply Nov. 03, 2009 at 11:06 pm

    Great post Ben!

    I just installed popularity contest, I will have to see how I like that.

    I have tweetmeme, sociable, all in one seo and those are awesome… they help drive traffic for sure!

    I would add "Digg Digg" to this list, that plugin is awesome as well!

    Great post, keep it up!

    David King

    @Davidbeking

  2. Roland Millward Reply Nov. 04, 2009 at 9:42 pm

    Thanks Ben for an interesting post. It is good to have someone like you review WordPress plugins and your review is much appreciated.

  3. Tony Ramirez Reply Nov. 05, 2009 at 12:30 am

    The WP-cumulus is such a great tool.
    I'm glad you posted this, it's time to upgrade
    some of the plugins I currently have.
    Thanks for the post.

  4. ROb Reply Nov. 05, 2009 at 1:30 am

    Great post and love the plug-ins you listed! I like the similar posts plug-in!

  5. Gabe | freebloghelp Reply Nov. 05, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    Great list. Can't go wrong with tweetmeme! And All-in-one SEO has been a great for me.

  6. Justin Reply Nov. 05, 2009 at 5:35 pm

    You're missing some of my favorites!
    Google XML sitemap generator – Super important for search visibility.
    and My link order – just so you can organize your blogrolls nicely.

  7. Blaineblogger Reply Nov. 06, 2009 at 10:06 pm

    Excellent list of plugins.

    I use or have used all of these except for "Pageear" which
    is one I really want to check out. There always seems to be
    one plugin that you've never used but that's cool.

    Thanks Ben

  8. Walte Call Reply Nov. 15, 2009 at 1:24 pm

    Thanks a lot for this very useful article. But I had trouble navigating past your web site because I kept getting 502 bad gateway error. Just thought to let you know.

  9. Sandesh Mascarenhas Reply Nov. 19, 2009 at 5:31 am

    Nice top 10 page plugins. Can you let me know the plugin for page navigation. The best one.

  10. Uttoran Sen Reply Nov. 25, 2009 at 8:42 am

    those are some really cool plugins, i always wondered how the tags rotated in certain blogs, now i know its because of “WP-Cumulus” will use this one, thanks,

  11. web design agency Reply Jun. 27, 2010 at 3:31 am

    What about onlywire auto post….That is a sick plugin too. Good list, prob hard to choose just 10.
    web design agency´s last blog post: Free Internet Marketing Workshop in Springfield- Missouri July 16th 2010My ComLuv Profile

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