When it comes to blogging, WordPress stands alone. It is used by far more bloggers than any other system available, and because it is open-source, it makes it easy to create plugins for it. The WordPress community created countless numbers of scripts and addons that make using WordPress much easier, and more fun and useful. There are so many great plugins, and with the built-in WordPress plugin search and install feature, it is even easier to add them to your blog.

With all the thousands of plugins out there, it can be hard to decide what one’s to use. There are many that are very similar. It all depends on your preferences and what works for your site. Some plugins I have found to be very useful, and don’t think any blog should do without. Others I just feel work with the kind of site I want to run.

Here is a list of 18 WordPress plugins in alphabetical order, that I would recommend to anyone with a blog, some of which should undoubtedly be used by everyone.

• Add Related Posts to Your Feed – Adds the above mentioned Related Posts to your feed (requires the Related Posts or Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin(s) to be installed in order to work).
• All-in-One SEO Pack – This is the ultimate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin. It automates the SEO process and gives you total control over individual title, tags, and description information for each individual post and page.
• Akismet – This plugin comes by default with all current WordPress installations, but requires activation. You can obtain a free key to activate it. It will catch most spam and place it in a approval queue so you can view it before it is posted on to your website.
• Bad Behavior – Prevents known spam bots from accessing your website and is compatible with Akismet (mentioned above).
• Easy Retweet – If your a blogger and you don’t use Twitter, then I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Twitter is one of the best ways to promote your posts, and get visitors to your site. With this plugin, people that read your blog, can tweet the posts, and help to send traffic to your site. It is a useful tool to gain traffic and visitors.
• Gamer’s Pack – More and more people are using their video game systems to browse the web. This is a plugin that makes your website easily viewable on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP gaming systems. It can also be useful for people trying to view your website on a cellular phone.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
• Google Sitemaps – Generates an XML-Sitemap file of your website that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will use to index your blog. This ensures Google is aware of all of your new posts, as well as any updates you’ve made to posts that were previously indexed and need to be updated.
• Permalink Redirect – This plugin does a permanent 301 redirect. This will ensure that search engines don’t penalize you for duplicate posts when they index your site (with and without the www, as well as posts that don’t include the trailing / ). This plugin now also redirects your site’s default feed to your Feedburner feed and allows you to set up custom redirects.
• Latest Tweets – This widget displays a specified number of your latest tweets in your blog. It is a way to add relevant links to related information.
• Related Posts – Easily one of, if not the most important plugin WordPress has to offer. This plugin shows a specified number of related entries below your post (or wherever you determine it to show). It is great for anyone, but especially sites with high traffic. It is a way to keep your
• Scissors – Scissors enhances WordPress’ handling of images by introducing cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking functionality. It helps save time by editing images in Photoshop, or some other image editing program. You can easily upload, and edit your images.
• SocioFluid – SocioFluid is a social bookmarking plugin for wordpress. It adds the ability for visitors to bookmark your posts to their favorite social bookmarking site. There are several sites to choose from, and it is easy to add and remove sites, as well as, customize the size and look of the icons. For more details you can check the SocioFluid Homepage.
• WordPress Popular Posts – This is a great plugin that displays a pre-determined number of your sites most popular posts, based on views, or other options. It can be used as a widget, or placed anywhere you choose it to show.
• WP-Ban – WP-Ban provides the ability to ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referer url from visiting your WordPress’s blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name, user agent or referer url tries to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned. There will be statistics recordered on how many times they attemp to visit your blog. It allows wildcard matching too.
• WP-Contact Form – Many e-mail spammers search the web looking for e-mail addresses to use for spam purposes. Having your e-mail address available on somewhere on your website (including in the code somewhere) makes you vulnerable to these people. This plugin creates a contact form that people can use to contact you, so your e-mail address is not displayed. It also includes spam protection and some other optional features.
• WP-DB Manager – This plugin gives you full control of your database, including how to back it up, restore it, and deleting tables when necessary. If this plugin proves to be to advanced, the alternative is WordPress Database Backup, which allows you to backup your database, but doesn’t make it easy to restore it if something comes up.
• WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

So there’s my list of 18 WordPress plugins that everyone should use, or at least try out. You never know what your missing if you don’t try it, and who knows, there maybe one that you don’t try, that you have been looking for all along. There are of course many more plugins that I could list, but these are one’s I find to be essential to my site. In the future I will post a more in-depth list of all the best, most useful, or most popularly used plugins.

If I have missed one you feel should be included, please let me know in the comments.