My Favorite WordPress Plugins

There are tons of WordPress plugins out there and I have tried a bunch, but here are the ones I have found to be the most helpful for me and my blog:

Akismet:

• Protects your blog from comment and trackback spam.

Broken Link Checker:

• Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard.

Comment Reply Notification:

• Allows you to reply to a comment and sends an e-mail to the commentor.  I like this because sometimes I want to reply to someone and this makes it easy to have a conversation thread with them.

Contact Form 7:

• Simple contact form I use on my Contact page.

Giveaway Countdown:

• This is the widget I have on my sidebar that advertises my blog giveaways.  It is the only plugin I paid for ($15) but well worth it!

Google Analytics for WordPress:

• Adds Google Analytics to your blog.  I admit I haven’t done much with this but I wanted it there so when I have time its already tracking!

Google XML Sitemaps:

• Okay so I can’t remember why I added this one and I don’t do anything with it, but it says it will help search engines (like Google, Yahoo, Bing…) better index your blog.

Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering:

• Numbers my comments.  Especially nice if you are not using Rafflecopter and need to pick winners for giveaways.

Hyper Cache:

• My host (Hostgator) suggested I add this to make my website load faster.

Official StatCounter Plugin:

• Again I don’t really check this out but on occasion it is nice to see this and track it.

Social Sharing Toolkit:

• Allows me to use a social media plugins in each post and on my sidebar.  Easy to add in my links and customize.

ZipList Recipe Plugin:

• Allows me to add recipes easily and organized!

Any plugins you want to share?