I have recently read that WordPress powers 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world. I think that this number is even bigger with the new sites popping-up each day, and this is our way of helping WordPress users, by listing the most useful and recommended plugins for the 2012 based on my experience in running over 200 WordPress Blogs :
- Platinum SEO Pack – Most powerful free SEO plugin that enables On-Page SEO Optimization Out-Of-The-Box with the default settings. No need to edit its settings if you want to start blogging immediately and you can come back later and fine tune some options.
- Contact Form 7 – Every wordpress blog needs a contact page and you should not delay installing this plugin. Just copy and paste the html code provided and name your new page “Contact” and you have a nice looking contact form.
- Syon Easy Privacy Policy And Terms Of Use Plugin – Similar like Contact Form 7 but provides a code which enables you to have Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions in under 5 minutes total. It is recommended for any type of site, but IT IS A MUST for an Adsense site.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Simple to use plugin – it creates a XML sitemap of your blog posts and pages so your sites is easily crawlable and SEO friendly (RECOMMENDED).
A glance into plugins section of this blog:
- Quick Adsense – Plugin that allows you to define up to 10 ads which will be shown in various positions in the blog post body and up to 10 sidebar ads. So flexible and allows you to experiment and get the best position for your text based ads or banners in no time and spend your precious time on writing more quality content.
- Smart Update Pinger – It adds to the pinging functionality of wordpress and pings the services only when you first publish the blog post, and not when you are doing updates later, so you can’t be banned for spamming.
- Ultimate Google Analytics – Just insert your tracking number and Google Analytics is installed on every page and blog post.
- Pretty Link Lite – It enables you to create (structure) pretty links and hide your affiliate links in this manner – https://www.blog.com/product, it looks more professional and appealing.
- Hyper Cache – just enable this plugin and you are good to go (you don’t have to tweak and read extensive documentation to make it work), you have a professional caching enabled at loading and database performance on your server is greatly improved.
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – this stuff works so nice – it brings your similar posts under the current article increasing the pageviews and improves the linking structure of your blog.
- Scrolling Social Sharebar – You can see it in action on this blog by the left border. It allows your visitors to share the content easily and they can’t miss it!
Feel free to comment and suggest some other plugins so we can add them on this list. If you like this list, please share it with your friends and coworkers!