7+ Must Have Plugins For New WordPress Bloggers

We all love plugins but it’s becoming a bit like finding the needle in the haystack don’t you think?

Reason being, there’s over 32,000 now which makes it a fair challenge for anyone to find the best one’s.

When i mention the best, i mean plugins you must have so you’re fully covered all crucial installation settings and don’t miss anything that gets in the way of running a  successful blog.

Regardless of what theme you are running (because i really have tried the best) here’s a list of plugins you really must install if you’re new to WordPress.

Jetpack

This plugin is built and maintained by WordPress themselves and enables you to take off whenever someone posts a nasty comment right? Wrong, its a plugin which includes many other plugins which you can enable or disable at anytime.

• Subscriptions – Build your list from the very start and auto send beautiful emails to your subscribers that look professional.
• Contact Forms – Very impressive looking, easy to customize contact forms which run submissions through Akismet so you don’t get any spam. You also don’t need to install an anti captcha plugin which can annoy your readers who wish to contact you.
• Akismet – The worlds best anti comment spam plugin made by the company behind WordPress, Automattic.
• WordPress.com stats – Another great feature built into Jetpack which makes it super easy to learn about stats before you dig deeper into Google Analytics.
• Gravatar Hover Cards – Personalize your posts and create an avatar so your face is displayed next to every comment you make on every blog. Hover cards pop up when someone hovers over your Gravatar image and display a small Bio of the author which is linked to the profile on the Gravatar site.

WooDojo

Developed by Woo, this plugin, in principal, is a bit like Jetpack as it includes a range of other plugins which you can enable or disable when needed.

• Custom Menu’s – Did you know you can easily use a different navigation menu on any page or post? Simply create as many custom menu’s as you need and select which one’s you want to display on which posts or pages.
• Tabbed widget – Very popular way to display different links for popular & latest posts with thumbnail images, comments, tags etc.
• Woo Sidebar Manager – Easily display different sidebars with different widgets on different pages and posts

Also includes social widgets, login branding, short links and custom code.

Related Posts

Here’s 3 of the most popular related posts plugins to choose from.

• Related Posts Thumbnails – This is one of the best plugins for displaying related posts with thumbnails after your posts
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This is the most popular if you want to display a list of links after your posts.
• WordPress Related Posts – This plugin pulls the data from WordPress.,com stats and works out related posts that way. You’ll need Jetpack installed to use it as it includes WordPress.com stats.

WP Super Cache

The worlds most popular caching plugin speeds up your site and improves page loading times. This plugin is co developed by the company behind WordPress, Automattic.

Another great caching plugin for the more advanced is W3 Total Cache.

WordPress Seo by Yoast

The only true all in one Seo plugin for WordPress. Its the best hands down and its free.

The worlds best Seo software company, SEOMoz have written an extensive guide on how to setup this plugin which has been acknowledged by Yoast as better than his own setup guide.

Includes everything you need like sitemaps, redirects etc.

Wordfence Security

The best all in one security plugin for WordPress users covers the most crucial bases to protect your site from anything nasty.

Here’s just some of what you’ll get:

• Alerts via email when someone tried to hack into your site
• Scans for malicious software
• Login security to prevent brute force attacks
• Live traffic stats so you can check out who’s on your site and what I.P address they come from

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

This plugin creates a full backup of both your files and/or databases.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox is a plugin that automatically uploads a backup of your files and database, to Dropbox.

Choose a day, time and frequency you want your site to be backed up and this plugin will send it to your Dropbox account.

Conclusion

WP Sites use most of these plugins except any caching or backup plugins as this site is hosted on fully managed servers which focus on speed and security.

[plugit]These plugins are excellent for beginners because they are all fully supported, updated on a regular basis and best of all, free!.[/plugit]

Seen a better list than this one or like to add to it?