Looking for some good plugins for your WordPress blog? Here’s a list of the top 5 essential WordPress plugins that I’ve found. These 5 plugins will help with reducing spam on your blog, improving security, adding mobile device support, blog statistics, and improving search engine visibility with your site.
- Akismet. This is the first line of defense for spam on your blog. Its available in the base install of WordPress. All you need to do is to sign-up for the Akismet API key (free) and enter it into your WordPress configuration. It also helps the community when you tag a comment as spam.
- Login lockdown. This prevents your blog from getting hit by sites trying to run dictionary or brute force attacks on your WordPress logins. You can configure the maximum login retries, retry time in minutes, and lockout length. Highly recommended.
- WPtouch. Make your blog accessible through touch screen mobile devices such as Apple iPhone, Google Android, Blackberry Storm/Torch, and Palm Pre. Great user interface and easy to install.
- WordPress.com Stats. This is an easy way to get stats on your blog. You can check out referring links, top posts, search engine terms, clickthrough links, and incoming links. Its available in the base install of WordPress. Requires a WordPress.com API key (free).
- All in One SEO Pack. I like the number of options that this optimizer has for search engines. You can setup custom post types, canonical URLs, title optimizations, META tag generation, and much more. Its one of the most popular plugins with 7.5 million downloads. Note: there are some issues with this plugin on certain installs of WordPress 3.1. Another alternative SEO plugin is WordPress SEO by Yoast.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-lockdown/
