I’ve seen a few posts around the blogosphere that offer up lists of ten, twenty or thirty WordPress plugins that they claim are essential for every blog. The bottom line is that the more plugins you have, the slower your website will become. We want a quick and efficient blog, so sometimes it’s better to deal with simplicity than shiny extras. That being said, I wanted to make a list that broke things down into category-intensive labels… plugins that you will want to have if you have a certain type of blog.

Dump the large lists of WordPress plugins and focus on the essentials. Sure, there are some awesome plugins that you should install on any blog you ever own… but there are plenty of plugins that work better if you have a photo blog, a stock market blog or even a collection of essays. So without further ado, here are my personal “Top Ten WordPress Plugins That You Need,” followed by a few high-caliber plugins that you should install for various niche blogs.

The Top Ten WordPress Plugins That You Need!
You might be writing about politics, or you might be writing about animals… regardless, you are going to want to install all of the following plugins to boost your reader participation, increase traffic and boost your blog to the top of the rankings.

1. Akismet
Naturally, the self-proclaimed “king” of spam catching has to be your number one plugin. I’ve caught about 15,000 spam comments on theNetFool.com with this plugin and absolutely love the fact that it is catching about 95% of the junk that comes through. Best of all… it’s completely free to obtain a license!

2. All In One SEO Pack
If you are trying to boost your Google Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs), it’s important to optimize your entire website so that it is better received by major search engines and news agencies. Make this a priority. WordPress by default is terribly organized, so set up AIO and max out your traffic.

3. Google XML Sitemaps
I’m a big proponent of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Google absolutely gobbles up websites that make an updated “sitemap” available. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin does this for you, so you’ll have everything ready to go.

4. Brian’s Threaded Comments
Threaded Comments is the most recent plugin that I have installed, and I couldn’t be more pleased. This adds the functionality of having your guests respond and interact on a whole new level in the comment area. By embedding “replies” inside of the original comments, we no longer have to sort through a laundry list of comments to read a conversation.

5. Subscribe Remind
Want to boost your RSS subscriber numbers? Sometimes, this really is as simple as a quick reminder. Subscribe Remind is my favorite plugin to add a short plug at the bottom of each post… asking for readers to subscribe to your feed. A simple WordPress plugin with a huge implication on your traffic.

6. WWW Redirect
Did you know that having people link to your site differently (e.g. “http://yoursite” v. “http://www.yoursite”) is killing your traffic and rankings? WWW Redirect changes everything automatically to “www.” format with no need to muck around in your .htaccess file. This is a no-brainer!

7. CommentLuv
Give your readers an incentive to comment on your blog! CommentLuv really spreads the link love around, and will allow you to reward every comment with a fresh link back to their latest blog post. This is a win-win situation that will encourage more comments than ever before.

8. Comment Relish
Too many people ask me how I generate that nice email that goes out the first time you comment on theNetFool.com. I have used Comment Relish to mail out an automatic “welcome” letter on every blog I’ve ever owned, and you can even ask them to subscribe to make things more useful. It’s completely automatic after you set it up, and your users will thank you.

9. Top Commentators
Going with the theme, having a blog where people are commenting is a powerful tool. Since we want to leverage our reader base to the best of our ability, the Top Commentators plugin will gift your shining stars with a free link back to their blogs if they are among the most active.

10. ShareThis or Sociable (Social Media Networking)
Social Media has exploded as a reliable and fast-paced source of traffic and reputation for many blogs. Use either ShareThis or Sociable (both are great) to add a quick link on the bottom of every blog post/page so that people can Digg/Stumble/Reddit/etc. your best material with better accuracy.

This list is ordered to the best of my ability, and I really feel like I hit on all of the areas that you will want to optimize and add features to on your own blog. I use all of the following on The Net Fool dot com, and have never thought twice as they all add something unique.

Top Five Finance Blog Plugins
Got a financial blogsite? You probably would love to have some streaming news on the market and stock quotes in a prominent position of your website. Try out these WordPress-compatible plugins to increase the functionality of your blog!

1. Embedded Stock Data
This plugin is my absolute favorite overall, very smart. Chances are, if you are writing with a financial slant, you are going to at least mention a few publicly traded companies here and there. With Embedded Stock Data, you can embed the stock price and some more information right in your posts!

2. Stock Quote Sidebar
Research shows that a majority of the American public has money invested in the stock market in 2008, so the odds are strong that you have at least a few thousand invested in publicly traded stocks. Keep track of your performance and let your viewers know how you are doing with Stock Quote Sidebar!

3. Stock Quote Tooltip
Similar to the Embedded Stock Data plugin, Stock Quote Tooltip creates an awesome mouseover effect that will reveal a daily stock chart of any company that appears in your blog posts. It’s lightweight and very easy to set up.

4. Stock Symbol Plugin
Despite a slight lack in support, SaneBull is my favorite “tooltip” (mouseover) stock market plugin because of the beautiful streaming data that it pulls every time you mention a stock in your posts. Try it out and see for yourself!

5. Yahoo Finance Badge
Yahoo has come up with a great sidebar widget to stick in your financial blog anywhere you want. Called the “Badge” by nature, Yahoo’s new tool let’s you track your portfolio live, and you can even grab the latest news headlines and have them displayed on your website.

Top Five Community & Multi-Author Blog Plugins
Lot’s of websites nowadays are run on a community basis. With WordPress so easy to use, many people have multiple authors feeding articles into the website. Let’s have a look at some of the plugins that make this functionality more worth your while.

1. Role Manager
This is one of the best kept secrets in WordPress plugins, and is definitely in my personal top five. If you have multiple authors on your blog, you can use Role Manager to change specific capabilities on a user-to-user basis… so you can give control to your best writers in a more effective and safe way.

2. Get Author Profile
One of the best functions of WordPress is that it allows you to set up user profiles for each author. But this is no good if nobody can see it! Use the Get Author Profile plugin and get your writers’ information put into the spotlight.

3. Profile Pics Plugin
If you have multiple writers, it looks much neater to allow each to submit their own image for you to list alongside their posts. Profile Pics is the plugin for you! Use this simple add-on to enhance the way each post looks when published.

4. Future Posts Calender
Ever scheduled a post into the future but weren’t really sure when you wanted it to launch? Use the Future Posts Calender to manage and organize your posts in order to have everything go public at exactly the right time. This one is new to me, and absolutely brilliant!

5. Our To-do List Plugin
What if you have multiple authors, but can’t always communicate? Out To-do List lets you put up a public chalkboard to write down and designate tasks throughout the week so everyone is on the same page. This brings a whole new level to your administrative backend!

Top Five “For-Profit” Blog Plugins
Are you just in it for the money? No need to be shy, we all like a little revenue to keep us motivated to write… so here are the best five monetization plugins to get your advertisements pulling in more cash than ever before.

1. OIO Publisher
If you are looking for your end-all solution to manage, sell and promote advertising on your website… look no further than OIO Publisher. At $37, it’s the best buy that I have ever made and you will make the initial investment back 100% in no time!

2. Adsense Manager
I don’t use this plugin because I no longer have an AdSense account. However, the Adsense Manager is known far and wide as the best Google Adsense ad management system for WordPress blogs.

3. WP-Amazon
If you’ve ever wanted to link to a book, movie or product relative to your post, you probably should be using WP-Amazon to pull live links from Amazon that display professionally where you want.

4. PayPal Donate
One of the more simple ways to make money on your blog is to ask for it. Add a PayPal donation button to your blog with ease with the PayPal Donate plugin made for WordPress.

5. AdRotator
AdRotator is the best system that I’ve come across other than WordPress for installing different ad slots around your website so that you can list your advertisements in the most effective places possible.

Top Writing and Document-Intensive Blog Plugins
Many blogs nowadays focus on writing. With a lot of professionals publishing new websites to write on, many of these are very article-intensive and a lot of people write things like newspapers, poetry and case studies. Let’s pick the best for these blogs!

1. WP-Print
As simple as it sounds, WP-Print adds the function to allow your readers to print each article straight from your blog in an optimized format. This one is simple, but very effective, and is one of my favorites.

2. Post2PDF
If you can’t have it in printed version, Adobe reader (.pdf) files have started to become the new standard in reading technology. Give your visitors the chance to grab posts in .pdf format with Post2PDF!

3. ThinkFree Document Viewer
Many of us have important documents to distribute or personal works that we want to reveal on the internet. ThinkFree Document Viewer solves this problem and allows you to let your viewers check out what you have uploaded much easier.

4. Blurb Book Publisher
Did you know that you can mold all of your articles into an actual book format? With the Blurb plugin you can publish everything quite easily, making this one heck of an addition.

5. AttachFiles
It’s not easy to list files you have available for your users to download if you are running a blog. AttachFiles solves this problem and let’s you provide incomers with a quick link to the files you have offered.

Top Image and Photo Blog Plugins
Photographers are some of the most influential bloggers of our time, and many blogs like to recount personal episodes with the use of images on their websites. Check out some of the best image plugins for keeping track of it all.

1. Image Manager
This is by far the number one plugin for getting your images up in your blog posts and articles every day. With more features to account for, you’ve got to check out what Image Manager has to offer.

2. Batch Image Uploader
If you’ve ever used the WordPress image uploader, it can really be a pain if you need multiple images at once. The Batch Image Uploader plugin solves this issue.

3. iMax Width
Many of the images you will use exceed the width of the content area. iMax Width fixes this forever by establishing some simple resizing rules that will get everything fitting where it needs to be, saving your layout the horror.

4. ThickBox
Once of the best Web 2.0 effects is having images load up in a nice browser-centered overlay in a zoomed-in view. Don’t know what I mean? Check out ThickBox for one cool effect.

5. Yet Another Photoblog
Photographers and photobloggers rejoice with YAPB, one of the best photo-blogging WordPress plugins available. Organize your images in a whole new way.

Whew! Those sure were a lot of targeted and reliable plugins, eh? My suggestion would be to use no more than 15 of these… meaning the ten must-have’s and five from one of the lists depending on how your blog is focused. WordPress plugins are great, but they can slow you down if you have too many. Still, some are simple too cool to pass up… here’s to the great developers that gift us with these awesome additions!

-The Net Fool

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