There are hundreds of plugins available for WordPress, both free and paid. If you start searching through them, you’ll inevitably find a bunch that sound like they would be really useful on your site. You install a bunch, and the next thing you know your site’s performance will take a hit because of all the overhead those plugins add.
You’re much better off to limit the number of plugins you install to only the most necessary to your site. In this article, we’re going to look at three plugins that should be installed on virtually any WordPress site.
Spam Filtering
One of the most critical, to your own peace of mind especially, is a comment spam filtering plugin such as Akismet or WP-Spam Free. These plugins will help reduce the number of spam comments for you to moderate, by filtering them out before they get into your moderation queue.
When your website is just getting started this may not seem like a big problem, but if you start getting ranked well for your keywords, and getting a lot of traffic, dealing with comment spam can become a full-time job if you don’t have some automated way of dealing with it.
SEO
Another important plugin to install is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugin like All-In-One SEO or Platinum SEO. These plugins will optimize the title tags for your pages and posts as well as the meta keywords and meta description tags. You can have them pull the details directly from the content of the post or you can manually override them for any or all posts.
Some premium themes include this feature as part of the theme, so if you’re using one that does such as Thesis or OptimizePress, you won’t need to install a separate plugin.
Social Sharing
One of the most effective ways to increase your blog’s readership is to have your current readers share your posts with their networks on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg. This gets your content in front of many more people than would otherwise see it, and can generate a lot of traffic in a short period of time.
There are a number of sharing plugins for WordPress such as Share This and Sociable that will add one-click buttons so your readers can easily share your content on these sites. The Facebook like button has also become extremely popular with bloggers, giving the ability to interact with Facebook fan pages and friends.
Google’s just launched it’s version of the Facebook like button Google+1, seems that Google is trying to grab a piece of the social media pie for itself.
There are many other plugins that might be worth installing, but many of them are specific to certain types of sites. These three will help improve your results no matter what your site is focused on.