The 9 Most Useful Wordpress Plugins

Wordpress is not a new publishing platform. It is often touted as being the best personal publishing blogging software you can have for free.

Along with the increasing popularity of Wordpress, it's number of user-contributed plugins also started to grow. Today we have a plugin for nearly everything imaginable. However, if you are looking for the plugins which will add great functionality to your Wordpress blog, you find it hard to sift through all of the other plugins to find exactly what you are looking for.

Therefore, we've decided to come up with a list of plugins which will make your blogging life easier. So without wasting any more time, let's see the review of those plugins.

DISQUS Comment System

The Disqus Commenting System is a very advanced commenting system for Wordpress. It replaces the default Wordpress comment box with its own and adds a lot of new feature which you simply won't be able to resist. Among the great features Disqus offers are:

• Threaded comments and comment ratings
• Powerful moderation and admin tools
• Filter out spam, trolls, and unwanted commenters
• Enable your visitors to become a real community
• Moderation by email or mobile
• More comments and increased engagement

The benefits your commenters get are that they are able to:

• Track and manage comments and replies
• Verify commenter reputations across sites
• Have more control over your own comments on websites
• Never lose your comments, even if the website goes away
• Build a global profile, or comment blog, to collect and show off what you're saying
• Have an easier way to comment on websites using Disqus
• Reply to comments through email or mobile
• Edit and republish comments with one click

Now if you are bandwidth concerned, you might be happy to know that Disqus stores the comments and required scripts for the commenting system to work on its own dedicated servers, so you save on your bandwidth too!

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache

Talking about bandwidth saving, here's a plugin which comes in handy: WP Super Cache. What this plugin actually does is to generate static html files out of your php scripts. Therefore your website's server can serve out pages in very high traffic time quite easily without stressing your server to generate each page each time a visitor wants to load up a specific page. Thus WP Super Cache enables your server to handle huge amount of traffic when a post of yours make it on to the front page of Digg or any other social website.

Sociable

Sociable

Since social websites have come into the picture, we might as well talk of a plugin which allows your visitor to easily bookmark your posts on such social-driven websites. Sociable enables you to do exactly that. With Sociable, you can easily choose between 50+ social website icons you want to show up on your posts for your visitor to use. This is one of the best and most easy to use social bookmarking plugin you can get for Wordpress.

Slimbox Plugin

Slimbox is an alternative for the Lightbox JS to overlay pictures in your posts. It adds a nice effect to your pictures and you can create an image gallery really quickly using this plugin. What better about this plugin compared to Lightbox, it's that it's only 7kb in size - and has all the functions of it heftier counterpart.

WP-PageNavi

WP-Pagenavi

This plugin is a very useful one. It adds a more powerful way of navigating around your blog. This enables your visitors to move around your post with ease and without hassle.

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack

The All In One SEO Pack implements all the good seo practices into your Wordpress blog out of the box. It enables you to tweak your posts and website so that they are optimized to the best for SEO. If you want to give your post to have a chance of grabbing a good listing in search engine pages, then you'd better have All In One SEO Pack.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemap

Speaking of search engines, most webmasters know that Google is the most influential search engine in the web sphere. They also know that if they want to get traffic, they need to optimize their content for Google and make Google know of the existence of their content. Google uses sitemaps to localize pages on a website. if you have a good, regularly updated sitemap, the chance of your posts showing up in the search engine pages are high. Creating a sitemap manually after each post can be a tedious task, so here you are with a plugin which automatically creates the sitemap for you and notifies the search engines as well!

Adsense-Deluxe

Adsense-Deluxe

If you are planning to make money out of your website using Google's Adsense programme, you might as well install the Adsense-Deluxe plugin which will facilitate your integration of Google Ads into your web pages. This plugin is one of the easiest to use and comes free. This plugin also support the Yahoo Publisher Network Ads.

cforms

cforms

Finally we are going to talk about cforms. This plugin allows you to easily design and integrate contact forms on in your posts and pages. It uses AJAX to power the contact form but also gracefully degrades to standard javascript if AJAX is not supported by the visitor's browser. The uses of cforms are endless, you need to check out its website if you're even remotely interested in forms.

That's it! We've presented you with nine plugins of our choice. We hope you like them as well. You can easily leave your opinions below, using the featured Disqus Commenting System and bookmark us using the Sociable plugin and rest assured our servers won't go down because of high traffic due to the fact that our Wordpress blog has the WP Super Cache plugin installed!