What are WordPress plugins?

Before I start sharing and talking about what are the popular and useful WordPress plugins for new blogs, I just thought that we should first know what are plugins? Based on my research and from the Plugins section of the WordPress Codex:

Plugins are tools to extend the functionality of WordPress. Plugins offer custom functions and features so that each user can tailor their site to their specific needs.

Basically, plugins are like special customizations that can improve a WordPress blog depending on the user’s needs and wants on their blog. There are many different WordPress plugins out there, some shares the same functionality but also differs in some other ways. These plugins are available from different and several sources but there is always the Official WordPress Plugins Repository to easily look for a plugin that can best tailor to your needs.

As I have said: there are many WordPress plugins out there but not all of them are very useful especially to new blogs. When I was just starting on blogging using WordPress, I too was also confused of what plugins to use and what are those that can really suit to my needs and help me blogging. That’s why I made this simple list to help others and not let them through the same confusion I gone through. Here’s the list in no specific order:

1. Akismet – a plugin which identifies and blocks comment and trackback spam on blogs. In other words, it is basically an anti-spam plugin. Akismet is usually installed with WordPress but needs a WordPress.Com’s API key to activate and use. It’s useful because it’s easy to use and do most of the work for you. No one wants spam on their blog right?

2. All In One SEO Pack – a plugin streamlined for some best practices in WordPress SEO. It optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. More information and support can be found at the plugin homepage. This plugin is very useful especially to those who wants to optimize their blogs for search engines but it also depend on what keywords you want to target and enter on the plugin settings.

3. Blogroll Links Page – this plugin is used to publish your blogroll on and individual post or page. Its main function is to help others save time on maintaining a Links page. It can easily be inserted to a page or a post just by adding the text "<!--blogroll-page-->" on your page or post.

4. Contact Form 7 – this plugin can manage multiple contact forms and easily customize the form and mail contents flexibly with simple markup. This plugin is very useful on maintaing a Contact page for your blog with ease.

5. Google Analyticator – this adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics. It provides bloggers to easily insert the Google Analytics JavaScript code to a blog and eliminates the need to always insert the code when changing themes or blog templates. After activating this plugin, one should visit its settings page and enter your Google Analytics UID to enable logging.

6. Google XML Sitemaps – this plugin creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol are notified about the update. This plugin is useful with the All In One SEO Pack plugin if you are practising SEO on your blog.

Honestly, all the plugins on the list above are used here at my blog and I’m satisfied with all of them. Well, that concludes this very long post about useful WordPress plugins for new blogs. Hope this post helps others know more about plugins.

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