Essential wordpress plugins

WordPress becoming more popular not just because of its features and it is free but because wordpress community is very active. WordPress community have huge wordpress plugin directory where new plugins get added regularly. If you run a wordpress website then you have already added some wordpress plugins to your wordpress website. Its more important to figure out which are essential wordpress plugins required for a wordpress website. So in this post we will list some of the best wordpress plugins for different section like seo,social sharing,contact form.

What is WordPress plugin?

Plugins are tools which are used to extend the functionality of WordPress. Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine.

Essential WordPress plugins for SEO

1] WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO is the most complete and advanced WordPress SEO plugin that exists today. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps. This plugin helps you to optimize your page content, image titles, meta descriptions, comes with tons of other features like Robots Meta configuration, breadcrumbs, permalink cleanup, canonical link element support, and optimized post titles.

2] All in One SEO Pack

Another free wordpress seo plugins which can be used to Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
Comes with features to support google analytics,custom post types, Advanced Canonical URLs, Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality.

3] Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML SItemaps plugin generates XML sitemaps for your WordPress website, so that it becomes easy for search engine crawlers like Google and Bing, to index your site better. It notifies all the major search engines when you create new content, helping your site be more thoroughly indexed.

4] SEO friendly Images

SEO friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to your images. If your images inside post or page content don’t have alt or title attribute then this plugins adds them according to your plugins settings so images inside your content becomes seo optimized.

5] Broken Link Checker

This plugin is very helpful to find all the broken links on your website. This plugin Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional). Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects. Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.

Essential Anti Spam and Security WordPress plugins.

1] Akismet

Akismet is the best wordpress anti spam plugin to protect your website from web spam. Akismet plugin filters comments and trackback spam. It runs on autopilot and provides 24-hour protection. Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns.

2] SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin prevents spam from automated bots by adding a CAPTCHA in comment, registration, login and lost password forms. So your websites comment,login and registration forms becomes more secure from spams.

3] WP-ReCaptcha

reCAPTCHA is popular and widely accepted CAPTCHA systems on many websites. WP-reCaptcha plugin integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods in WordPress as comment, registration forms and email protection.

4] Login LockDown

Limits the number of login attempts from a given IP range within a certain time period.

5] Better WP Security

The easiest, most effective way to secure WordPress. Improve the security of any WordPress site in seconds.

6]Revision Control

Revision Control allows finer control over the Post Revision system included with WordPress

Essential WordPress Comments and Poll plugins

1] CommentLuv (Free/Premium)

Reward your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. Encourage a community and discover new posts.

2] Facebook Comments For WordPress

This plugin integrates the Facebook commenting system (new, old or both) right into your website. If a reader is logged into Facebook while viewing any comment-enabled page or post, they’ll be able to leave a comment using their Facebook profile.

3] Disqus

Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.
The Disqus for WordPress plugin seamlessly integrates using the Disqus API and by syncing with WordPress comments.

4] Subscribe To Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

5] WP-Polls

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

Essential WordPress Social Bookmarking Plugins

1] AddThis

The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark and share your site easily with over 330 popular services. Get more traffic back to your site by installing the AddThis WordPress plugin.

2] ShareThis: Share Buttons and Sharing Analytics

Quick & easy sharing service that allows your users to share content – features Open Graph Sharing, Hovering Bar and CopyNShare!

3] Sociable

Sociable plugin adds a bar of icons of different social networking and bookmarking sites that you can choose for your articles. Using sociable plugin visitors of your website can easily share posts from your website on their social bookmarking accounts.

Stats and Tracking Plugins

1] Jetpack

Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

2] Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress is the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Of course, you could just copy the tracking code into your theme and be done with it, but then you’d miss a whole lot of features that this plugin has to offer you.

Other Most Needed WordPress plugins

1] Contact Form 7

Best contact form plugin for your wordpress website. Using contact form 7 you can add contact form on your websites. Comes with option to add,edit,delete input elements from your form.

2] WordPress PopUp

Good plugin to add popup ads or banners inside popup on your website. Comes with option to restrict popup from any particular page or posts.

3] Nrelate

Display related content from your site or blogroll, in a cool flyout box… similarly to NYTimes.com.