A WordPress QuickStart Guide - What Plugins Should I Use?
Read more about: Business Blogging, Site Tools + Tips
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I lluuuuuuuurrrvv WordPress Plugins - despite the fact that sometimes poorly coded ones have broken my blog. 
With the latest version of WordPress, they have built-in protection against bad plugins. Regardless, they offer a level of functionality and flexibility quite literally unparalleled with any other blogging platform.
When you first start out with self-hosted WordPress, you’ll want to make sure you have the bare essentials:
WordPress Plugins for New Blogs
Akismet - check to ensure you have the latest version - upgrade if you don’t
Custom Contact to create a contact form
FD FeedBurner Plugin - which requires that you have already signed up with them for your free account (which you have already, right?!?!)
Google Sitemaps - Helps with Google Juice
Head Meta Description - ditto
Related Posts - increases page views and helps readers find related content
Subscribe to Comments - readers used to actually request that I install this before I set it up - very popular
WP Cache to speed processing and ease server load
WordPress Plugins for Established Blogs
These plugins help to leverage your current traffic, subscribers, and commenters into more of the same!
Sociable social media bookmarking (I actually recommend Andy Beard’s AntiSocial as it is better SEO optimized)
Show Top Commentators - reward the talkative bunch
Brian’s Threaded Comments (which sadly I’ve never been able to get to work on this site)
The Digg Button once you are ready to tackle the social media beast
Popularity Contest to show off your best work
SRG Clean Archives - check out this wonderful and easy organizing utility!
Must-Have 3rd Party Services
Burn your feed with FeedBurner (now Google!)
HitTail for stats and Search Engine Optimization
MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog
Claim your blog on Technorati
Sparkplugging Founder Wendy Piersall is dang passionate about helping people start & grow a business while maintaining life balance (somehow).
Dawud Miracle has one focus: to help you get it. The it? How your website, and blog, can change the way you do business. You can find out more at 
Very nice list of plugins! There are a few on your list that I am not using so I will have to investigate those.
While I’m a great fan of Ultimate Tag Warrior, the plugin isn’t supported anymore, and 2.1-2.2 versions of WP seems to be having problems with it, although I haven’t. Also, 2.3 will feature built in tagging in the core so recommending this plugin to new blogs isn’t something I’d do.
Also, Share This by Alex King is less obtrusive than Sociable (avoid icon clutter!). Established blogs should probably install Spam Karma and Bad Behaviour as well, to stop comment spam.
Great list!
It’s nice to get a list for beginners and more avanced bloggers. Could have done with the former when I was starting out. It all sounded like mumbo-jumbo to me then!
Oh snap, I’m going to write a post about this on Guest Blogger blog soon!
Anyway, I like All in One SEO plugin for title and meta tags.
SimpleTags for easy technorati tagging.
And a Contact form one that Douglas Karr is now hosting.
W, can you please do a post about how to install these? also can you tell us how to make sure that they won’t interfere with our widgets like my fiasco with the text link ad install? i need to get sufficient on these sorts of things, so I don’t have to email you at midnight on a Friday night again!
I didn’t know Andy Beard had updated Sociable. That fixed the Stumble bug.
Thank you!
Having the latest version of Akismet installed isn’t going to stop SPAM any better. Since all the backend SPAM filtering stuff is hosted by Automattic externally, you’ll always have the latest SPAM filters. That being said, you should keep it up-to-date for security reasons and the like.
WP Cache reducing load on the server is also debatable. Since you’re getting the MySQL from the hard drive also, it’s not going to save much.
Thanks for the mention Wendy.
I’m glad my SRG Clean Archives plugin made your list of useful WordPress plugins.
Gold star for you
I have over 75 plugins installed. You think that might be too much?
Thanks for the guide Wendy. I just registered my first domain (for my use) today, and have been setting up WordPress.
This guide has been a lot of help.
- Mike Scott
I am still struggling with some of the plug-ins I have installed but seems like they are not working.. or may be I don’t know how to make them work.. like the Ultimate Tag Warrior.. and Social Bookmarking… I have the database backup plug in and set it up to get the backup emailed daily but I haven’t seen any yet! will be trying Andy’s Sociable and the contact form.
Wendy, I just completed your 10-days to a better blog free e-course and the information you provide there as well as here on this blog is priceless…. your blog is like an encyclopedia on blogging .. thanks a ton for such valuable information!
Hi. You have a great selection here. I have a similar post about plugins - http://getstartedtodayonline.com/getting-plugged-with-the-plugins/ - however, I mention how I cant get the google site map to show up, the simple tags inside [] to show up as instructed, the UTW also didnt work :). What I also want to know is how you have that part at the end of your post.. if you like this article with the 3 different options and their widgets.??
I can tell I am going to be hanging out here more often:)
Andrea - another emom
This is simply awesome! I will go through them one by one and pick those suit me… Thanks so much for the recommendations!
Great stuff!! We are trying to install some of these now. The WP Database link goes to a page that says it is no longer supported/offered and the Custom Contact page goes to a Donation form. It’s a whole new language to me som maybe Custom Contact = Donation form???
We’re also trying to do the notify me of followup comments plug in but it might not work with our existing theme because we have it installed but the checkbox is not showing up on the comments section.
We figured out the follow-up comments and now are trying to figure out how to move our feed. We are already set up with Feedburner at our wordpress hosted wordpress.com site and we want to change the feed to our new URL without losing our subscribers. Anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks!!!
What is your thought of Ultimate tag vs All in one Seo? So they do the same thing? Thanks Wendy
@Aruni: Did you solve your problem with feedburner? You can simply change the URL in your Feed details to the new URL. That way your subscribers will get the new feed. I did the same about 14 days ago.
@Pearls and Andrea: Are you still struggling with plugins?
@Dennis - I solved one but have three others outstanding…have submitted support tickets…still waiting to hear from them.
One has to do with how the posts are coming through email. Now they are listed in summary format (top part only and no images) despite having checked full text in wordpress and feedburner. While on wordpress.com the email came out with latest posts including images.
The other has to do with the email posts missing the post date on them. So not it comes out saying Post: (i.e., no date shown).
The final has to do with feedflare. We were able to post the code into the Single Post theme editor section but could not figure out the right place to put it in the Main Index section. Our theme does not seem to have the code they suggest we put it before.
Other than that, it’s going well. I still need to move the images over. Fortunately, we had set up a re-route so that http://www.babblesoft.com/blog would go to babblesoft.wordpress.com so most traffic should go directly to our site but any permalinks I left on other sites will go to our old blog which has a note that gives out our new address but since we deleted old posts the user gets a 404 message.
Still getting used to the slightly different set-up. We kept the same theme until we can figure everything out…but eventually I hope to happen upon another theme.
Hi Dennis - I sort of gave up on the ultimate tag warrior and social bookmarking plugins this weekend!
With the social bookmarking, the text shows up on the individual posts, but this is not the same as I see on many blogs, just like at the end of this very post! May be its a different plugin than what I am using..
With WP Backup, I noticed my email is set up to the blog email (which of course I have no idea how to access) but I will try and change it my gmail….
Installed the Contact form and that seems to be working..
Thanks Dennis - my email tyropearl at gmail dot com…
help much appreciated!
@Aruni: I use a plugin call Full Text Feed. You can grab it here: http://cavemonkey50.com/code/full-feed/
It overrules the setting in Wordpress. That setting doesn’t work any way, so download the plugin instead. It works with the images as well. I’m afraid I can’t help you with the other two issues, but let me know how it works out for you.
@Pearl: What are your issues with those two plugins? I’ve used UTW and Sociable for quite some time now, so perhaps I can help. Do you want the tags to show on your sidebar?
Thanks Dennis! I’m actually a bit surprised that I haven’t heard back from Feedburner yet on the other issues.
I’ll check out the cavemonkey plug in and install it later.
The other weird thing I’ve noticed is that I no longer get email notifications when someone submits a comment. I just happen to log in and see there are comments waiting for moderation. I have all the same boxes checked (I think) for comment moderation but am not getting email notification. Hmmmm. Any thoughts on that?
Thanks so much for your help!
Wendy, thanks for the tip on HitTail, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
when you say ‘Claim your blog on Technorati’ what do you mean?
@ jt:
JT - it simply means to let Technorati know that you own your blog: http://technorati.com/account/blogs/