The ability to install plugins is one of the major benefits of having a wordpress blog hosted on your own server

WordPress plugins are free and download-able and can extend your WordPress blog to do almost anything you can imagine – from useful plugins that back up your database to “cool” plugins that customizing your message to new vs. returning visitors. To be faced with the thousands of plugins available to you and choose the right ones that work with your blog can be a daunting task. There are many plugins that do the same thing but with very different results.

Here is my list of Top 10 Best WordPress Plugins that I have come across and also use on my blogs (in no particular order).

• FireStats (includes Most Popular Posts) – one of the best statistics plugin for WordPress. Also includes a “Most Popular Posts” widget for your sidebar.
• AddThis - help your visitor promote your website or blog. Put the AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget on your site or blog, so any visitor can easily bookmark it. The widget works with all popular bookmarking services. You may also consider ShareThis as an alternative look.
• WP Post Ratings – adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• Simple Tags (includes Related Posts) – Tagging made easy. This plugin has flexible configuration and suggests tags from the net and Yahoo which is great for SEO. This plugin also allows you to include “Related Posts” to your content based on your tags.
• CFormsII – cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. It may be a little hard to configure but you can really do so much customization with it. If you’re looking for something simpler, try Contact Form 7
• WP Database Backup – don’t risk losing all your work! WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database. Save to database, email or desktop.
• All in One SEO Pack – this plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (SEO: Search Engine Optimization)
• WP Super Cache – this robust plugin will increase the responsiveness of your website and reduce the server load. It works by caching your pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests without querying the database. It is also built to handle sudden bursts in traffic.
• Google XML Sitemap Generator – the biggest advantage of using WordPress is the manual work you save because the software already knows where all of your content is. This plugin is a huge boost to your SEO as it will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your blog to Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN Search every time you update your site.
• Akismet – spam is a huge problem for wordpress blogs. As soon as the search engines recognize your blog, you will start to receive spam in your comments. Akismet makes this a non-issue by checking your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. It was created by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress.

A few more plugins deserving mention:

• Seth Godin’s First-time vs Returning Visitor – displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade – wordpress automatic upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one.
• Subscribe to Comments – this robust plugin enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent comment entries so you can keep track of the discussion.
• Lighter Admin Drop Menus – creates drop down menus for WordPress admin panels so you can navigate to the page you want with one click. Fast to load, adaptable to color schemes, comes with silk icons and an options page.

Want more? Browse and search through the entire WordPress plugins directory.

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