If you don’t know yet, my design blog is managed with WordPress. In the past, I have used tons of widgets and plugins. Now that I’ve managed to cut nearly half of them out, I’d like to share the essential plugins I still use.
Some of them are used only on occasion. There’s no specific order. I actually copied this straight out of my dashboard.
All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
By Michael Torbert | Visit plugin site
Auto Post Thumbnail
Automatically generate the Post Thumbnail (Featured Thumbnail) from the first image in post (or any custom post type) only if Post Thumbnail is not set manually.
By Aditya Mooley | Visit plugin site
BJ Lazy Load
Lazy image loading makes your site load faster and saves bandwidth.
By Bjørn Johansen | Visit plugin site
Broken Link Checker
Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
By Janis Elsts | Visit plugin site
Contact Form 7
Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.
By Takayuki Miyoshi | Visit plugin site
Defensio Anti-Spam
Defensio is an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors as well to those of your readers and commenters. To use this plugin, you need to obtain a free API Key. Tell the world how many spam Defensio caught!
By Websense, Inc. | Visit plugin site
Disqus Comment System
The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. Head over to the Comments admin page to set up your DISQUS Comment System.
By Disqus | Visit plugin site
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
By Arne Brachhold | Visit plugin site
IGIT Related Post With Thumb
Show related posts with thumb image after Posts. Ajax Base Admin options. Options for dynamic height and width of Thumb.
By Ankur Gandhi | Visit plugin site
Jetpack by WordPress.com
Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users.
By Automattic | Visit plugin site
Lightbox Plus
Lightbox Plus implements ColorBox as a lightbox image overlay tool for WordPress. ColorBox was created by Jack Moore of Color Powered and is licensed under the MIT License.
By Dan Zappone | Visit plugin site
Multiple Galleries
Add multiple galleries per post using simple checkboxes for selecting images you want to include.
By Kaspars Dambis | Visit plugin site
Really Simple CAPTCHA
Really Simple CAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins. It is originally created for my Contact Form 7 plugin.
By Takayuki Miyoshi | Visit plugin site
Regenerate Thumbnails
Allows you to regenerate all thumbnails after changing the thumbnail sizes.
By Viper007Bond | Visit plugin site
WP Super Cache
Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.
By Donncha O Caoimh | Visit plugin site
Most of these plugins have been essential to my blog’s functionality for quite some time. I’m always open to new plugins that will benefit my site. What else do you recommend?
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