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I'm new to WordPress CMS and have just created a site+blog using it. What set of plug-ins do you recommend me to install? I believe there are some useful, proven and "must have" WordPress plug-ins for SEO, optimization of the site, social network and bookmarking services, spam prevention, etc. that you usually use in your projects. Thanks!

PS The question I ask might look as subjective, but I believe there is a certain set of plug-ins which is useful for every WordPress project.

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4  
This would be much better suited to the Wordpress site: wordpress.stackexchange.com – Tom Wright Sep 23 '10 at 15:58
Not only wordpress.se but also community wiki. Seems this is merely a matter of opinion depending on the purpose of the wordpress instance. – Chris Sep 24 '10 at 14:07

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Askimet is a must have for spam control

WordPress.com Stats is great for stats

WP Super Cache, or any other caching plug in, is good for performance

TweetMeme Retweet Button is good for getting users to tweet about a blog post

This is a list of the most popular plug-ins. That's probably because they're very useful in some way.

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up vote 1 down vote

JS and CSS Script Optimizer - combines your scripts and stylesheets into one document each for minimizing total HTTP requests. The web page generally doesn't render until all of the stylesheets have been loaded, so if you have several attached, this can really improve load time.

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Ooh thanks! Been meaning to look for a plugin to do that for a while now... – Andy Jan 25 '11 at 12:46
I see it's v0.2.0 - have you used this a fair bit? Is it stable? – Andy Jan 25 '11 at 12:48
I've been using it for several months without glitches. It really does a nice job - check it in YUI optimizer or Chrome or Firebug. My deployment is a small site though, not a big corporate or large organization, so I haven't exhaustively tested it. – dmsnell Feb 1 '11 at 3:17
Cheers for the feedback. Will start using at our place soon (also not large corporate sites:). – Andy Feb 24 '11 at 9:25
up vote 0 down vote

Akismet has privacy issues, false positives, and is highly recommended by some blackhats I know (so they can spam you more) - go for WP Spam Free. WP.com stats? seriously? Google Analytics with one of the many plugins combined with maybe Getclicky for live data. Well unless you are just looking at your stats for fluff and don't need to track goals. Why tweetmeme? These days even they don't recommend their own buttons - far better either topsy or the new Twitter buttons depending on the control you need for redirects and messaging.

Real essential?

There is no such thing as an essential plugin other than one of the many backup plugins for when you get hacked. It will happen... plan for it in advance.

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