Skip on over to Site Sketch and see the 15 best wordpress plugins for 2010. Here’s a quick list for reference:
Each of these plugins are used at Site Sketch 101 and I personally recommend each of them to you. The following plugins are posted in the order that I recommend them.
WP Super Cache – This plugin is great for two reasons. First, it makes your pages load way faster. Second, since it stores static versions of your site, it requires much less CPU processing than using WordPress all by itself. This WordPress plugin is number one on the list for a reason.
HeadSpace 2: WordPress SEO Made Simple- Move over All in one SEO. There’s a new guy in town. HeadSpace provides you with the features you need to drive your site to the top. People spend way to much time working on SEO and too little time writing great content. This plugin let’s you put your focus back where it belongs. It takes care of all the SEO work that your blog will need.
Akismet – Akismet is the comment spam fighter that comes built into WordPress and it does a mighty fine job. Activate this plugin and you won’t need to moderate or captcha your comment submissions. Akismet does 99% of the work for you.
WPtouch iPhone Theme – This plugin allows you to instantly and effortlessly transform your website into a mobile paradise. Whenever a mobile user accesses your blog a pleasant looking lighter version designed specially for mobile devices is presented. This is a must have for 2010.
Backtype Tweetcount – If you’re using the TweetMeMe tweet counter badge on your blog then kill it right now. Nobody wants to authorize another program to access their Twitter account just to share a link to your site.
Nofollow Case by Case – This site’s comment links are dofollow. I’ve stripped out all of the nofollow tags from the comment section of Site Sketch 101. You leave a comment here and Google page rank will chase you all the way back to your site. This plugin is what makes that happen. So leave a comment here and then install this awesome WordPress Plugin at your blog.
WP-DBManager – This little gem is amazing for backing up your website. It actually has quite a few functions that it can perform but perhaps it’s most impressive feature is it’s ability to email the entire WordPress databse to me every day.
Thank Me Later – This plugin is great. It sends an email to all first-time visitors. You can write up the email to remind them about your RSS feed or just to invite them to connect with you personally. I do both.
WP-PageNavi – Those ‘Older Posts’ and ‘Newer Posts’ links are boring. With WP-PaveNavi you can get page buttons so users can go directly to whichever page they want. Plus they look a lot better than plain little links.
Permalinks Moved Permanently – Last year I moved all of my permalinks to post the page so that they wouldn’t be so long. This would have meant that all of the links to my posts would generate 404 errors. This plugin just forwards all the links and PR to the new addresses.
SEO Slugs – Using your entire post title as the slug for the article can make web addresses long and it can waste the opportunity to focus on using your keywords. This plugin strips out all the unnecessary words from the permalink for you so that you don’t have to.
SEO Smart Links – Do you inter-link your articles? You should. Linking within an article to other articles is a great way to build Page Rank throughout your site and it’s a great way to get readers to find your other articles on similar subjects. This plugin will interlink keywords to your other articles for you.
Subscribe to Comments – This plugin took a little bit of work to get it to work right but it’s great because it allows people to subscribe via email to any other comments that show up on a given post. This helps get readers to keep coming back.
Top Commentators Widget – At the bottom of the sidebar here, you can see the top 10 commentators for this month. This is a great way to provide a dofollow link back to the people who help make your site great.
WordPress Related Posts – If a reader enjoys one of your articles then one of the best things that you can do is to put some more articles in front of them to keep them digging through your site.