My Top 5 Recommended WordPress Plug-ins
Yup another top list coming your way now! This is a list of my top five recommended plug-ins that I use on almost every WordPress website I setup.
1. Sidebar Login — this adds a sidebar widget to make it easier for you to login to your blog. It also offers a great little feature to help you retrieve your password in case you lose it. It will also allow people to register on your site if that is something you want to offer.
2. Count Per Day — this is a visitor Counter, which shows reads per page; today, yesterday, last week, last month’s … on dashboard and if you want to display it out you can use a widget.
3. Google XML Sitemaps — This plug-in generates a special XML sitemap to make it easier for search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to index your blog. The site map is automatically recreated every time you make a new post and it is resubmitted to the search engines right away.
4. Twitter Blog — Twitter Blog will not only tweet your blog post, but it will also check hourly for replies to that tweet and turn it into a comment on that blog post. It also uses the bit.ly API for URL shortening and adds link generated to your bit.ly account for tracking purposes. Tweets with a hashtag of #anything (customizable) can also be converted to a blog post.
5. WP-reCAPTCHA — Integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam solutions into your WordPress installation and will also protect any email addresses from being harvested from your site but bots.
These plug-in I use on almost every installation of WordPress because they make it easier to use and provide some basic tracking and SEO for your site. I do recommend many other plug-ins but those will wait for another post.
