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Creating a blog and trying to dedicate my time to it was the best thing that I’ve actually accomplished myself. I remember when creating a website in the past used to require some HTML knowledge, so I was never able to open a website myself. Now these “Content Mangement Systems” such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla are simplifying things a lot by not requiring us to do all the dirty work. Everything has been coded and passed on to us in a small zipped file with instructions on how to install it on the server. Although it was supposedly so easy, I also had trouble with it and I used a one-step-install add-on that my hosting servers provided. I thought I was done with all the mayhem of installing the correct stuff, but boy was I wrong.

After setting up my blog with the correct theme I liked, I noticed that there were a lot of other options I wanted to include. Every single time I visit a blog (especially the unique themed ones), I see all these nice add-ons that are placed on the header, sidebar, and footer of the blog template.

Don’t tell me that you have never visited a blog that uses a lot of those nice add-ons, which don’t neccessarily have to be flashy, and you end up wanting them for your own blog. This is actually very normal because if you’re new to the blogging scene, you would want your blog to look as professional as it could. I use Wordpress and the best thing about using this CMS is that there are so many add-on plugins that I could test out.

Wordpress plugins are mostly created by bloggers like you and me. The plugins are created with a lot of coding, which saves some of us a lot of time because we don’t have to do all that work . Once you download a plugin, all you would have to do is uploaded it to your plugins’ folder and activate it through your administrative dashboard.

Now don’t go crazy over all the plugins you find because having a lot of plugins does not mean your blog would look spectacular. When I started my blog, I downloaded about 30 plugins and I activated every single one of them just because it looked cool or did something that helped me in blogging. After activating all the plugins, I was able to move the widgets around my sidebar to the way I want it, but it ended up slowing everything down and crowding every spot on my blog.

Each plugin you activate for your blog, you will be calling the plugin database, which uses some of your server resources. If you are like me and you activate 30 plugins, you will end up slowing down your blog’s load time by a grip and the result is that you will lose a lot of visitors. What will you do now that you know the more plugins you have doesn’t necessarily mean everything will work great for you or your viewers?

Knowing where to download the correct plugin is pretty difficult because there are so many imitation or recreations out there. There are tons of great bloggers out there with a list of their most used or most popular plugin for their blog. This is where you come in to check out what each of those plugins do because you may realize that the ones listed are the actual and only ones that are needed.

I’ve never posted a list of the plugins I used before, so I thought to myself why not list them here for you guys

• 404 Notifier - If any of your readers type in a wrong URL of one of your posts or arrive at a post that you have deleted, this plugin would give them an error on your blog rather than one of those generic “PAGE NOT FOUND” images. You can even create a custom message for a ‘page not found’ and you will be notified of these problems through e-mail.
• Akismet - If I’m correct, Wordpress comes with this plugin. If you don’t have this activated, I don’t even know what to say. All I can say is you should be getting a lot of spam comments without you knowing…
• Brian’s Threaded Comments - I didn’t start using this until 1-2 months ago, but I love it. This actually brings in a lot more comments because your readers could communicate with each other through this system
• Clean Archives Reloaded - An archive page is necessary if you wish to give your readers an easy access to all your posts. If you don’t have an archive, it would be very difficult to find your older posts.
• Contact Form 7 - Without a contact form on your blog, you will probably never receive an e-mail by one of your readers. Sure you’ll get spam e-mails, but you will also receive a lot of e-mails regarding your blog.
• Google XML Sitemaps - I don’t know much about sitemaps, but all I know is that if this plugin is activated, search engines will be updated with your posts and changes each and every day.
• Simple Tags - Max was the one that introduced this to me last week. This plugin uses tags to give you higher priority in search engines. The best thing I like about this plugin is that it suggests tags for you . Thanks to NSpeaks for telling me that this plugin also has the “Related Posts” option embedded into it!
• WP-DBManager - I backup my Wordpress content daily with this plugin. Everything is automated and you don’t have to worry if someone hacks your Wordpress account because you will have a backup

As you can see, I only have 9 to list, but to be honest, I still have about 31 active plugins right now, which isn’t such a great idea…:-( Using plugins are addicting especially for someone that doesn’t know how to code everything into the blog theme. The list above are just the main ones I recommend all bloggers to start using.

You could run on those 9 plugins and you would do absolutely fine with your blogging. Only the bare minumum is needed and you never have to push yourself into using all the latest add-ons. Plugins are mainly used for is just to make things simple for you while you blog. Some plugins actually wrap up and organize a lot of the blog content into one easy click. A lot of times, plugins aren’t really needed because you tend to work a lot harder when you do everything yourself.

How many plugins are you running on your blog?

Update: I fixed the related posts link to a new plugin

Update 2: Thanks to NSpeaks for telling me that this plugin also has the “Related Posts” option embedded into it!

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