5 Plugins You Must Use in Your WordPress Blog

Nowadays, WordPress has become the most popular platform for blogging. If you have created your WordPress blog and is wondering how to get good traffic to your site, then here is the answer- Use Plugins! Plugin is the component for the extra-functionality of the self-hosted sites like WordPress.

Here are 5 plugins that are must for any WordPress blog.

1 – There should be an anti-spam plugin in every blog. If your blog is bombarded with spam comments, it is harmful for search engine optimization as well as for the blog. Akismet is the best plugin in this category. It is available with every WordPress installation, but you have to activate it through an API key that you can get from its official website. Akismet automatically puts the spam comments in the junk folder, places some of them into moderation if it is not sure and let the proper comments filter through it.

2- One plugin is needed to help in search engine optimization of the blog. The higher rank your blog gets in the search engines, the more traffic you will get.
For this purpose, you can use All in One SEO Pack. It is easier to set up, generates meta tags and optimizes titles automatically, and there are many more other features. A new user can just install it and it will do its job. Advanced users can fine-tune everything.
There are other plugins like WordPress SEO that do the same work. Make your choice. Do not use two plugins for the same functionality.

3- To load the blog quickly, a caching plugin is necessary. When a visitor tries to see a page of your blog, it might take some time for every tag, code, plug-in, image to load. To avoid it, a caching plugin is to be installed so that it stores the cached version of the dynamic PHP pages periodically and when people land on your page, it shows up the “last picture” it took. One little problem that might occur is that if there is change, then the changes will be visible on the site after some minutes when the plug-in will detect it. Popular caching plug-in is WP Super Cache. It is easy to install and serves the purpose. There is W3 Total Cache, having more features and functionality but it is heavier and might seem difficult to someone with less technical knowledge.

4- Give the people an option to send you mail directly from your WordPress blog. They will love it and you will get better feedback and make more contacts. Contact Form 7 is a great plug-in to create the contact form. It is light, can be customized, and you can insert CAPTCHA to prevent bots from submitting the form.

5- XML sitemap is now very critical for SEO, Google XML Sitemap – This plugin for WordPress will automatically generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.

But always remember – Do not use too many plugins. More than 15 plugins will slow down your site and will drive away the visitors. Choosing the right plugin is the secret.