11 Must Install Plugins for A New WordPress Blog
All those who use WordPress as their blogging platform love it. And we love to extend it too by adding plugins.
If you’re starting a brand spanking new WordPress blog, here’s a list of 11 plugins you should certainly consider installing, to help improve your and and your readers’ experience on your blog. These plugins are in no particular order:
1: WordPress Database Backup
This plugin is must-install-and-use. It allows you to create backups of all your posts, comments, user data, and post meta data, without you having to go to your phpMyAdmin interface. And it’s quite satisfying to know you have a backup safe, should something go wrong with your blog 
You can also schedule backups and have them sent to your email account. Here’s a tutorial on managing your backups with Gmail.
2: Google XML Sitemaps
We all know how important sitemaps are, for effective indexing into search engines. But, you don’t want to have to update a sitemap file with each and every update to your blog. Let Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator do it for you. An amazing plugin, all it requires is answers to a few questions and you’re set to go. And it automatically updates itself with each new post to your blog.
3: All in One SEO Pack
This plugin provides search engine optimization to your blog. You can configure the titles, and meta data(keywords and description) for each post. You can also have can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive, tag and category pages to prevent duplicate content issues.
4: FeedBurner Feedsmith
If you’re burning your feed with FeedBurner, the FeedBurner FeedSmith is a must have plugin. What this does is that it redirects all the links in your site pointing to your feed (such as www.puttingblogsfirst.com/feed) to your FeedBurner feed address, such as (http://feeds.feedburner.com/PuttingBlogsFirst).
This makes it sure that FeedBurner gets to monitor all people who sign up for your feed, and not miss out anyone.
5: Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
You want to have a way for readers and other people to contact you. The best way to do this is to have a contact form, which people can fill in and send to you. The Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form is the ideal (among others) plugin to do this. This plugin creates a form with many configuration options. It even has a spammer check (a logic question). There are several styles available, or you can choose your own custom form design.
To top it all, there’s comprehensive documentation too, to help you set up your form.
6: Enforce WWW Preference
There’s a (big) difference between whether you include or remove the www part of your domain name(http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com). This difference matters to the search engines too, and they might see these two variations of your blog’s domain name as different blogs (instead of the same). And so you get penalized for duplicate content.
Using this plugin, you can define the default (www or no-www). There’s a way to do it using .htaccess too, but that’s too techy. 
7: WP Super Cache
You’ve got to prepare in advance for big traffic days (Digg and Slashdot Frontpages, etc). All this traffic guzzles bandwith like there’s no tomorrow. But you can avoid that situation by activating the WP Super Cache plugin on your blog. What this does is that it generates HTML files of your posts, and serves them instead of the PHP files, thus preventing all that PHP code from being re-processed over and over again
8: Subscribe to Comments
Keeping your readers updated on the conversation is one way you can gain readership. The Subscribe to Comments plugin allows commentators to subscribe to the comments on a particular blog post. Kind of like an RSS feed for comments. Whenever a new comment is posted on that particular post, the subscriber gets an email, with details on the new comments.
9: Comment Relish
Thanking readers for commenting on your blog is the best way to show your appreciation for that commenter. The Comment Relish plugin sends out a predefined email to new commentators (who have never commented on your blog before).
I’ve seen some welcome messages in return too, by gracious readers. Nothing is more fulfilling than that!
10: Share This
Written a killer post? Why not let readers add it to their favourite bookmarking and social media sites and spread the word?
The Share This plugin does just that. It allows readers to share the post on many popular services and moreover, it lets them blog about the post and email their friends about it too!
11: WordPress Automatic Upgrade
The guys over at WordPress often release upgrades to the software, and some are really important security upgrades. But manually downloading and uploading the new files is a headache, with a great potential of messing things up, and consuming bandwith too.
Enter the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin, which makes upgrades a whole lot easier. It automatically makes database backups, downloads the new files, uploads them to your server, cleans things up, and you’re done! Best of all, it consumes little or none of your bandwith, at least lesser than what it takes for the manual upgrade
That’s All
What would be your favourite plugins for our beloved blogging software?
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Some others :
http://lesterchan.net/ (WP-Email) Allows you to add a link for ppl to send a post by Email to your friends with a nice form (not just a link that opens outlook or something similar)
Askimet.. Ok it’s there by default but you need to enable it
And I use sociable instead of Share this, it’s been ok so far.
That’s about it !
Let’s see–my indispensible plugins also include Spam Karma 2, AntiLeech, Brian’s Threaded Comments, PhotoDropper, In Series, SRG Clean Archives, and WP Ajax Edit Comments. I especially like PhotoDropper, which makes putting Creative Commons licensed graphics from Flickr amazingly easy.
I already have 9 of the plugins you have mentioned. can’t wait to try Comment relish and Google SItemap plugins.
All of you, thank you for your suggestions.
Mr Muggles, I’d thought about including Akismet too, but since that’s already included, why bother
Infmom, I tried using Spam Karma, but it messed around with other plugins.. so had to disable it. Ajax Edit comments is one rocker too!
Muhammad, as a recent “convert” to WordPress, this post is exceedingly helpful. I do have most of the plug-ins, but didn’t know about the others, which I’m going to add right away.
I also use CommentLuv as a way of showing gratitude for comments from those who have blogs.
Thank you for the list!
Joan
Useful post!
I’m using most of the plugins you’ve mentioned already, but I will certainly try those which I’m not use yet.
Thanks a lot!
Hi Siyab,
Thanks for the wonderful tips. Learnt quite a few new things! You got a thumbs up from me on StumbleUpon for this
Shinil.
http://twitter.com/shinils
Great list of plug-ins! I don’t recommend the automatic upgrade though, because (as far as I know) it asks you to put in your server log-in details. That, in my opinion, makes your blog vulnerable to some hacks should the plug-in author wish to do something nasty.
#4 and 6 can be done with .htaccess, so that’s 2 plugins less to overload your DB.
Instead of share this, you can manually add a smaller list of links in single.php
I can’t believe you forgot Better Comments Manager, Ozh Admin Dropdown and What Would Seth Godin Do.
Lucas – Thousands of WordPress users are using this plugin. They trust the author not to do something nasty. And, if there was a backdoor or something, it would have been discovered long ago in the source code
Sumesh – I agree, they can be done with .htaccess, but not everyone wants to get their hands dirty
How could I forget the other plugins!!
Wordpress is a great blogging platform and getting it search engine optimized really isn’t a hard task. Using proper permalinks and robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content and a few other methods can really make a difference. The All in One SEO plugin is really the best bet.
Landed here from SU and like the post, must have plugin for wordpress
The only one which i will not suggest will be sharethis it actually slow down the page a bit and this create problem when you get lots of traffic from some nice website like DIgg/Reddit/Su.
though thumbs up for nice article.!!!
Wow! what an idea ! What a concept ! Beautiful .. Amazing ?