Today I was doing a research about some plugins I used when starting my blog and found interesting, that from the most popular wordpress plugins, I almost tested all in some moment of my short blogging career, and I am sure most of us have use them to, because they are, for some bloggers part of the site already. Plugins like Google XML, All in one Seo Pack or Akismet are known for all.

One great thing about wordpress as CMS are the thousands of plugins you can find to improve any aspect of your blog and even better you don’t need any code skills or experience to use them! For that reason they are present in all kind of blogs. These 30 plugins are the most popular because they are excellent or just useful, people who has used them, were such happy, they even went to wordpress.org and rated, to show the author and their colleagues how the plugin was really useful for them. So from there I took the 30 first and put them here for you.

Obviously you can’t have all these plugins installed on your blog because it could be a time bomb before they collapse, but you can try at least some of these according to your needs. I just give you a little opinion about them and is up to you is they can help you getting your blog better, more comments, or creating a community, here you have them.

Until now you will find on the wordpress plugin section:

7,388 plugins, 63,095,089 downloads, and counting

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin is really helpful on SEO terms, It creates a sitemap for search engines, including your pages and articles once they are created, making a simple structure to be found easily. That way you can get more organic visitors.

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.

All in One SEO Pack

>Is really helpful to create and set up the main title of your blog and every post you create, some simple and clear fields with the elements you want to optimize for  Search Engines and that’s all. There are some WP themes including this feature lately, but the plugin is that easy to use and free that it continues between the most popular.

Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

NextGEN Gallery

When you create a portfolio on your WordPress blog or site you need a beautiful way to stand your work out from the typical thumbnails, and this plugin gives you all the features you need to have a nice image gallery on your site. You don’t need to have any knowledge of JQuery to create a nice and professional gallery.

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

Contact Form 7

There are some great other contact from plugins but this one gives you the most simple set up for a form, just select what kind of form you want and ad the fields you need, that’s all. Obviously you can make a test before going live.

Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

WP FollowMe

This is one of the most recent plugins from the list, with the increasing numbers of tools twitter related, this plugin has become  a must have. A simple badge with great customization options. Great if you want to get more followers, as we all want. (follow me)

WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allows you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog.

WP-CodeBox

I don’t have it right now on my blog but I already tested for some coding tutorials I am preparing and I think is really simple and easy to use. If you do some coding tutorials it can be great to have.

WP-CodeBox provides clean syntax highlighting and AJAX advanced features for embedding source code within pages or posts.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

These is the first bookmark plugin I installed, and the set up is that simple that you just have to select what you want to appears and that’s all, it has all bookmark sites, and include a mail to a friend. On the other hand if your reader are not tech-savy they can never noticed the Share/Save button.

Help readers share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and over 100 more.

WPtouch iPhone Theme

If you want to reach every kind of user including those from smart phones this plugin can give you a nice clean interface on that small devices, your content will stand out from the rest and the visitor can have an easy access to all your articles.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.

Easy AdSense

It helps you to set up your adsense codes on your blog, almost every place is cover by this plugin, sidebar widget, link units and google search, you copy your codes from your adsense account and paste them here. Is a simple way to get you blog monetized.

Easy AdSense manages all aspects of Google AdSense for your blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box. Easy and complete!

WP-Cumulus

Ever wondering how to create a nice tags cloud with 3d animation, well, this is the easiest way you can find. This is one of those plugin I haven’t tested because is based on a flash file, so I stay with the normal tags cloud.

WP-Cumulus displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere.

GD Star Rating

If you want to know how much your readers like your articles, just install it and wait to get the feedback, including post, comments, pages.

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up advanced rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog.

Sociable

The second sharing plugin I installed, you can choose what sites you want from the list and even if it has less options than add to any, it looks better on the post footer.

Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

Google Analytics for WordPress

If you are really new on the Internet and don’t know how to add your analytics code on your Theme, this plugin is for you. Get you Analitycs ID and select what you want to be traced on the site, update and wait to see the results. it couldn’t be more simple, that’s the reason this plugin is so popular.

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.

WP Super Cache

With this plugin you will have a faster loading of your pages, it creates static pages for visitors who don’t leave comments or are not logg in. This is just a better version of  Wp cache.

A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

WP e-Commerce

Do you want to include an e-commerce section to your blog/site, install this plugin and go to the options, all you can need is here. You don’t need any experience to get your shop online.

WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.

Page Flip Image Gallery

Page flip gallery is another option if you want to get a different look to your pictures. Is flash based and the final result include sound and some effects.

FlippingBook WordPress Gallery plugin helps you to create Image Gallery with Page Flip effects on your blog.

WordPress.com Stats

The best way to know how successful your blog is, is thanks to stats, more you know about your visitors more you can help them to get what they want on your site. You can use this plugin as complement of  Google Analitycs for WordPress.

You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.

WP Security Scan

As WordPress is an Open Source CMS hackers can have access to the main code, every release try to make more secure this platform but chances are some bug appears any time. Better is to be prepared for those attacks.

Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities.

Broken Link Checker

A good blog is full of links and a great one has all the links working because that is important to Search Engines en real visitors. This plugin scan all your content for those dead links.

This plugin will check your posts, custom fields and the blogroll for broken links and missing images and notify you if any are found.

SexyBookmarks

This sharing plugin is one of the latest but is the most attractive visually, the JQuery effect and the icons are great. Personally is what I use now.

Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three.

Twitter Widget Pro

Twitter is everywhere and you have to be present on it, if you want to get some visitors and relations, this widget gives you more options to insert on your blog.

A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including parsing @username, #hashtags, and URLs into links. Requires PHP5.

FeedWordPress

If you want to show your readers what blogs you follow just add this plugin to your blog and add the feed you want to display.

FeedWordPress syndicates content from feeds you choose into your WordPress weblog.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

If you have a video blog or interesting videos to present on your site, use it to make it easy, all the customization options of the video sharing sites in this plugin.

Allows easy and XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more.

Akismet

The most powerful antispam for wordpress if you are just starting with your blog, this is one fo the two plugins already installed on wordpress, so don’t deleted because is really effective.

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

WP-PageNavi

Default wordpress page navigation is boring, you can only see the next page of articles or the older, but if you install this plugin and set up a nice CSS for the navigation, you can easily give to your readers a nicer way to go trough your olders post.

Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog.

Redirection

Working with a .htacces is not the best way to solve a problem on you site when you don’t really know what you are doing, this plugin let you redirect the pages you deleted, changed or don’t want to be shown. Really practical if you change the permalink structure.

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.

Really Simple CAPTCHA

Spam is the king of comments on most blogs, some nasty comments can pass even with a spam filter,  so this simple field on your comment form can let you far from spam. Honestly I don’t like to much captcha plugins in general, because they are not easy to read sometimes, and readers are not always in the mood to field more information.

Really Simple CAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins. It is originally created for my Contact Form 7 plugin.

TweetMeme Button

This is the king of twitter related plugins, I am sure you’ve seen it thousand of times in all kind of blogs, that is just because we all want to get a retweet, and readers love to do it with great content the most easy way. You can either install the plugin if you don’t want to mess with code, but you can also copy the code from the Tweetmeme site and paste it on your theme. Less plugins you have, better.

Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

WordPress Exploit Scanner

If you want to be sure your blog is safety and you are not a master of databases, instal this plugins and run it. Is that simple.

Search the files and database of your WordPress install for malicious code or spammy links left by a hacker.

WP-Optimize

Almost the same than before but with some other features about optimization and cleaning options.

This plugin allows you to clean up your wordpress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin. Also renames any username.

WP Greet Box

This is one of those plugins I don’t have but I want it, It creates a simple and nice box on the top of your post when a visitor come from different sites and remember him that he should subscribe to your blog, including a close option if he doesn’t.

Display a different greeting message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from.

Random Pages Widget

I tried this plugins at the beginning but if you don’t have a good number of post, you don’t need it, and even then maybe you can try adding to your sidebar a Most Popular Post list or Last Post list, also there are some good tips to create your own.

Displays random posts and pages in sidebar. This increases the number of indexed pages and gives users an interesting way to browse your site.

Now, have you use some of this plugins? or do you know another who is better that one from the list. Any other you think should be on the list.

I would like to hear from you, about your experiences.

Other resources and further reading:

Top 35 Plugins of WordPress to Share Your Blog Post from pelfusion

20 New, Useful And Promising WordPress Plugins from 1st Web Designer

31 Useful Twitter Plugins For WordPress To Choose From from 1st Web Designer

20+ Brand New and Incredibly Useful WordPress Plugins from Net.Tuts+

10 WordPress Plugins Guaranteed to Save You Time from Six Revisions

Top Twitter WordPress Plugin Roundup From Blue Print Design Studio

107 WordPress Twitter Plugins from Skyje

Have you subscribed to my RSS feed? if the answer is not, maybe is because either you don’t really know what is it or because my blog is not really interesting to you at this moment to take that decision. Well, the idea behind this article/experiment is to remind you my dear fiend, that you have not subscribed to Blog.Exxcorpio yet, and you should! Either thanks to the next video or the big RSS icon on the sidebar or last but not less important (is the most important) with the oncoming changes and features for the website (at the end of the article).

The idea is encouraged you to become and RSS subscriber thanks to this options:

1. What is RSS?: If you don’t know what RSS is, learn and subscribe.

2. The Big RSS Icon: You have two big options to subscribe.

3. Oncoming News: You have some good reasons to subscribe.

That’s all.

Considering that it is Wednesday here, I will track the results next Wednesday to see how many visitors I encouraged to become RSS subscribers.

Ok now just go with the experiment.

1. What is RSS?

Please watch this simple video below that explains RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to see how many things you can get from an RSS subscriptions. If you don’t have an RSS reader you can just create one here and if you already have a Google account  just subscribe, and that’s all, literally you will save hours of your time every day, weeks or years to come.

If you want to read about it you can go to  what is RSS? on Wikipedia

- Now you can subscribe by email or by RSS feed

2. The Big RSS Icon

Ok this point is the easiest, now with the big icon here you can subscribe for free to Blog.Exxcorpio and get all the articles directly on your reader or if you want it on your email box, you can also subscribe by Email.

As well for the next week (depending how it works) I am having a big RSS icon on the sidebar where my first ad placement was, why? because I had nothing there yet and I thought maybe it could be more interesting if I use a more aggressive strategy to get more attention to the RSS subscription.

- Now you can subscribe by email or by RSS feed

3. Oncoming News

As any blog  the work never ends and more if is just a new blog like mine, so every time I can, I try to make code improvements (the more difficult as I am not a master on php… yet), some design changes, writing better quality articles and even more awesome list for inspiration or tools for designer and bloggers and one of the most important some giveaways for all my readers and more things but tell you after.

I am working on some other test I will be running next weeks to see how things work or not, because I am a little new on this field of blogging and because on the blog world as well as the design world everything is about experimentation, so in this point If you can give me some feed back about the changes, it would be awesome as the idea is get better for you, the readers.

Finally, if you want to be informed in first place about all the great things I have prepare for the next weeks, you can also follow me on twitter.

- Finally you can also subscribe by email or by RSS feed

Do you think this experiment is going to work? ]]> http://www.blog.exxcorpio.com/2009/08/19/what-is-rss-and-the-subscribe-to-my-rss-experiment/feed/ 45