The first installment of this 2 part series on what plugins every WordPress installations should have, is going to focus on the first plugins you should install.  These should be set up before you start posting, it will make managing your website easier and more efficient.

1. Fluency Admin: This plugin will customize the admin user interface of wordpress.  It makes everything much more organized, and adds some nice keyboard navigation options. Fluency also allows you to easily customize the login/logout screen with a logo of your choice, replacing the wordpress default logo.

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2. Google Site Map: Search engines (google, bing, yahoo) like site maps.  It helps them index your site faster and better which in turn improve your sites visibility in searches.  A nice part of this plugin, is it will automatically update your site map every time you post something new.  Great for sites the post frequently.

3. Google Analyticator: With any new site you need a way to track visitors.  I like to use Google Analytics.  Its free, reliable, and gives you a good amount of information.  This plugin will save you from going into your sites code to put in the javascript needed for Analytics to work.  It also puts a summary of your site stats right in your WordPress dashboard.  Giving you a good idea of how your site is doing and saving you from logging into multiple sites.  The more you can put in a centralized area, the better.  Here is a screen shot of what the box looks like in your dashboard.

4. Akismet: Keep spam off your site.  This is by far the best and most widely used plugin for keeping spam off of your site.  Akismet comes with any WordPress installation, but to activate it you need an API key.  Luckily this is free with any wordpress.com account.  Once you make an account the API key is emailed to you.

5. All in One SEO: Every site needs Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and this plugin makes it pretty simple to do.  Traditional SEO is done through the coding of your website.  For those that don’t want to mess with their code this plugin does a nice job of it.  Through the plugin’s option menu you can set a description for your website and keywords for search engines.  There are several other customization options, but you can learn more once you install the plugin.  You can also do SEO on a post by post basis.  At the bottom of the post editing page this box (see below) will pop up.  You can make a custom title, description, and keywords for the post, or choose to turn off SEO for the post entirely.

In the second installment of what plugins every WordPress installation should have, I’ll focus on the plugins that keep your website running smoothly.  As it grows, you’ll need more and more help keeping it safe, secure, and loading fast. But more detail on that later.

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