After blogging for 9 years at Blogger I decided to move and the first thing I looked up was what were the must have plugins for WordPress. 
I asked web designer Ana Lynn Amelio, the author of WordPress Blog Design Course for her advice.
This is the list of must have plugins for WordPress Ana sent me and I added to my site:
- Shareaholic (for sharing buttons under your posts, and related content)
- Simple Social Icons (to display your social media profiles in your sidebar)
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- Wordfence Security (the main thing you need to do here is enable the caching service under Performance tab in Wordfence menu)
- Contact Form 7
- Comment Luv or Disqus for comments
- GrowMap AntiSpam Bot plugin
- Jetpack it’s nice for some additional features like notifications when someone replies or comments on your post, stats, and the ability to push your posts to your Facebook, Twitter, Google +… – you will need to sign up for WordPress.com account to use it
I also asked the #ibabloggers at the International Bloggers Association blog which were their must have plugins for WordPress and both Giada and Megan agreed with the Disqus point but
Joanne T. Fergusson from “What´s on the list?” was the dissenting voice about the Disqus commenting system:
I agree with most of them, but not the Disqus; as some one who literally visits hundreds and hundreds of sites each week, commenting etc…slows down the process big time for me!
Want to know more? According t WordPress these are today´s most popular plugins and these are the highest rated plugins. And here you have a list of must have plugins for WordPress divided by what they do that keeps getting updated.
3 tips to help you choose plugins:
Tip #01: start your search by looking at the official WordPress plugin directory Have a look at the ratings, updates and support.
Tip #02: when you are looking for technical blogging info on line always check the date the blog post was published. Things change so quickly on line!
Tip #03: as tempting as it is, do NOT download every plugin you can think of. Every plugin weights into the loading time of your site and people get impatient and leave if it does not load quick enough. Choose wisely.
Your turn: tell me your own must have plugins for WordPress and one plugin you have uninstalled and why.
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