Ten Plug-Ins Every WordPress Website Needs

We recommend WordPress as the content management system for our clients’ websites not only because we have actual proof that blogging is great for business, but also because the availability of plug-ins and other third-party applications that integrate with the WordPress platform.

With WordPress as your business website content management system, you have flexibility in your setup and there are thousands of plug-ins available for you to integrate into your site. The trick is choosing the right plug-ins for your website and online marketing needs, and making sure you don’t select plug-ins that conflict with each other.

If you are blogging for business, here is a quick list of ten plug-ins we recommend using in your small business website:

1. Platinum SEO Pack– makes it easy for you to optimize your website and set the title tag, meta description tag, and meta keywords tag for your posts and pages, as well as set the “index” and “follow” properties individually for each of your pages and posts
2. Akismet – Protects your blog from spam comments
3. Sociable or Sexy Bookmarks – Adds social bookmarking icons to encourage your visitors to share your content on sites like Digg, Technorati, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
4. Google XML Sitemaps – Updates your sitemap each time you edit your site and submits the new sitemap to Google
5. XML Sitemaps - Updates your sitemap each time you edit your site and submits the new sitemap to search engines such as Yahoo and Bing
6. Google Analyticator – integrates Google analytics into your website
7. Post to Twitter – auto-syndicates your blog posts to Twitter and allows you to include text in the post such as “New Post:”
8. Similar Posts – Serves up other blog posts that are similar to the one they are reading to encourage visitors to stay on your website longer
9. W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache – Speeds up website performance
10. Dagon Sitemap Generator – Generates a blog archive that can be displayed by both month and year, as well as by post/page title

Whether you want to add a photo gallery to your site, serve up daily quotes, or syndicate your Twitter feed on your blog, there is more than likely a WordPress plug-in available that can make it happen for you.

Just remember to do your homework and read the reviews for each plug-in. Sometimes plug-ins can conflict with each other and cause problems with your website and sometimes the plug-in you find hasn’t yet been tested for the version of WordPress your website is running.

When it comes to plug-ins, do your homework and ask people you respect if they use it and what they think about it.