WordPress Plugins You Need

While WordPress was designed with ease-of-use in mind, it also has a powerful plugin system that allows you to add almost any functionality to your site you could want. These plugins are a must for just about any site out there.

If you want to make your WordPress site the fastest it can be, then you need to be using WP Super Cache. It takes your pages and creates a static copy of them that is loaded, so WordPress doesn't need to query the database nearly as often.

This doesn't only speed up your site, but it means you can serve more traffic with the same hosting plan, another huge bonus.

The only people who visit your site that will need to use database queries are those who are logged in, have left a comment or have viewed a password-protected post. Due to the information needed for those items they can't get cached info. Fortunately, almost everyone who visits your site will be outside of that list.

If you want the best performance you can get, this is the way to go.

Polls are a great way to engage your readers. PollDaddy makes this a breeze. PollDaddy comes with:

• 20 different styles
• End date for your polls
• Multiple choice polls
• Public or private results

To extend your reach even further, your polls can even be embedded on other websites. If you aren't already, start using polls on your WordPress site today.

Comments are the best way to increase stickiness on your site, and get people coming back. IntenseDebate makes it a fun, easy process to get more people commenting on your site.

It has an impressive list of features that include comment threading, reply-by-email, commenter profiles, reputation points, and OpenID integration.

Unlike some other commenting plugins, IntenseDebate stores all of your comments on their servers and in your WordPress database, so if you want to uninstall it's not a problem. It is also search engine friendly since it displays an HTML version of the system for users who don't have JavaScript enabled.

If you want to take advantage of the huge amount of search engine traffic that is out there, this is where to start.

The All In One SEo pack will automatically handle optimizing your site titles and meta tags, giving you a better shot at being clicked when someone does see a search result. It ill help you with canonical URLs, so you don't run in to any dreaded duplicate content problems.

If you think that just enabling permalinks will do the trick, think again. Install this plugin and thank me later.

If you use WordPress and Twitter, you will want to use this tool. It syncronizes your posts between your blog and Twitter making sure your content reaches the most eyes with the least effort. It also has built-in filtering so it doesn't create a constant loopof posting back and forth.

To have the best chance of being fully indexed in Google, they recommend have a sitemap that you submit to their Webmaster Tools site. Google XML Sitemaps automatically keeps your sitemap up to date for you.

Have you ever wanted to display a widget, but only show it on a page or in a post? Widgets on Pages makes this an extremely easy task. Allows 'in-page' widget areas so widgets can be defined via shortcut straight into page/post content. There is one default widget area that can be used or you can add more from the settings menu. You can currently have an unlimited number of sidebars. Each sidebar can be called indepentenly by a shortcode and you can call more than one per post/page.

If you've found this hub to be helpful be sure to rate it. If I've left off your favorite plugin, or you want to add your thoughts on one listed, be sure to leave a comment.