WPzing

1. WordPress Database Backup

One of the most important plugins you’ll ever need for your WordPress site is WP-DB-Backup.  This plugin offers a oh so valuable option to backup database on a regular basis.  You can schedule backups to an email address of your choice.  It will send a download link at the interval of your choice be it hourly, twice daily, once daily or once weekly. A must have for all blogs.

2. Subscribe to Comments

Subscribe to comments adds a little check box at the end of your comments form that gives users the option to be notified by email when more comments are added.  It is easy way to increase reader involvement and to keep them coming back to add to discussions.

3. CommentLuv

Another key comment plugin that you need for your WordPress site is CommentLuv.  After the visitors comment it leaves a link to their last blog post (providing they fill in the part of the comment box that says url with a blog that has RSS).  This is a way you can give back to your blogs community by giving a link to the most resent post on that authors blog.

4. Akismet

Akismet is your blogs main spam stopping plugin.  This plugin comes bundled with your WordPress install, although a good number of new WordPress users don’t utilize this plugin.  To get the benefits of this spam stopping powerhouse you will need to get a WordPress.com account  to get an API Key.  After you have got your account setup login to WordPress.com and navigate to the profile section, at the top of the page you should see your API key.  Your blog or site will now be free from getting all bogged down with spam.

5. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a really amazing plugin that helps your sites load speed by generates static .html pages for WordPress, in turn reducing the server load making your sites pages load faster.  Then when your site hits the front page of Digg, Delicious, Mixx or other like bookmarking sites your site will not crash do to the traffic load.

6. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps is an all in one solution for generating Google,Yahoo, Ask and Bing compliant sitemap for you WordPress blog. A sitemap is a key element to your site without it, a search engine won’t necessarily know that content exists.  Once you have a sitemap Google’s bots that go out and index the internet will know exactly where your content is.  This plugin is easy to use it has a number of different options.  Once you have it installed , don’t forget to get setup this can be done with Google Webmaster Tools.

7. WP Security Scan

WP Security Scan is a plugin that scans your WordPress install for any potential vulnerabilities and fixes them flags these items up.  Although this plugin does not do a extremely in depth analysis, it is worth having to get your basics and obvious vulnerability’s. WP Security Scan checks these following main areas:

• Passwords
• File Permissions
• Database Security
• Version Hiding
• WordPress admin protection/security

8.  RSS Footer

RSS Footer is one of the basic plugins every WordPress blog needs.  In it’s most basic form it adds post from: [site name] to the button of your sites RSS feed.  The plugin has a very extensive options page for custom setup.

9. CyStats

CyStats is a WordPress plugin that is a feature-rich statistics plugin with an integrated admin area.  Some of the many features include bounce rate, hits , visits for day, week, month, year and a lot more. It also features tracking of admin area visits, overall this is a fantastic WordPress statistics plugin.  There is a great review of this plugin at weblogtoolscollection.com

10. All in One SEO

All in one SEO is to put it simply the easiest way to quickly get your WordPress blog search engine friendly.  It optimise’s your blogs posts and pages so they can be indexed efficiently by the search engines.

• Gives the ability to define meta description, keywords and title of a post or pages.
• Allows independently defined homepage title, keywords and description.
• Allows you to easily define your post, page, category, archive, tag and search title formats.
• Avoids the indexing of duplicate content (this is often a big problem with blogs when there are archive pages containing the same information as posts).
• Auto generation of post descriptions.
• Allows the option of setting “noindex” for archives and categories.

11. Google Analytics for WordPress

Google analytics for WordPress plugin will automatically track and segment all of your outbound links from within posts, your comment author links, links that are within comments and blogroll links.  This awesome plugin can even track download links and adsense clicks.  It can track image search queries along with working together with Urchin.  This plugin was designed and built by a WordPress genus and great contributer to the WordPress community Yoast De Valk, his site Yoast.com is a must read for any WordPress enthusiast.

12. TweetMeme

The TweetMeme button plugin allows the use of Tweetmeme service which aggregates all the most popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular.  This service then categorises these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise of the busy web to find what you’re really interested in.