5 really useful WordPress plugins

Luckily, I chose to use WordPress when I started blogging and today I’m pretty glad about it considering all the plugins available for it.
I’ve spent the past few days wondering how I could improve my blog, it really needs to be improved, and blogging experience and have in my quest read loads of articles and checked out quite a few WordPress plugins.

For this post I have shortlisted 5 plugins that I feel are really useful and should be installed on every blog.

I’m not trying to say that these are the only useful plugins, I’m sure you’ll find a lot more out there but these are the ones I came across and really liked.

Without further ado I present you with my list of 5 really useful WordPress plugins!

These first two are time savers. They’ll automatically do two things that you should always do after publishing a post.

Google XML Sitemaps

This WordPress plugin will create and update an XML Sitemap for your blog everytime you publish or update a post.
It will also notify all major search engines every time there is a change in your Sitemap.
If you don’t know about XML Sitemaps you really should take a minute to read about it. You can read about XML Sitemaps here.

After publishing a post I also tweet about it on Twitter to let the handful of followers I have know that I have put up some new content, and that brings us to the next item in my list.

Feed2tweet

This is a really simple plugin that will automatically tweet your new WordPress posts to your Twitter account.
You can customize your tweet messages and it supports multiple URL shortening services (tinyurl, is.gd, bit.ly).
There are other plugins that do this but I chose this one because of it’s simplicity, this is all it does.

With these two plugins under the hood, I save at least 10 minutes per post! Most importantly, the process has been automated so I can forget about it and focus on other things.

The next item on my list will slightly improve your blogs usability.
The pagination on most WordPress blogs are just… well… no good and that’s why I suggest using this next plugin.

WP-PageNavi

This little plugin adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.
You’ll need to make a slight change to your template, add a line of code, but it’s totally worth it.

The next 2 plugins are meant to increase interactivity on your blog.
I personally feel that the first one of these two is more a must have than just a useful plugin, but that’s just my opinion.

Subscribe to Comments

This WordPress plugin enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent comments on a post.
It also allows them to unsubscribe from future notifications so don’t worry about that.
With this plugin it will be easier to start a conversation in your post comments and I definitely think you should install this one.

WP Greet Box

This plugin lets you show your visitors a different greeting message depending on their referrer URL.
Greeting messages automatically get inserted into the top of your posts and you can, for example, suggest your new visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.
You can also set a timeout to forget a visitor so you do not keep nagging your visitors with greeting messages.

That’s it! That’s my list of really useful WordPress plugins. What did you think of it? Do you know of any other plugins that you think are useful?
Leave a comment and let me know what your thoughts.