Here are the best plugins I’d recommend for any WordPress site. These should help you optimize your site for search engines, make it pretty as well as make site management easier.

All in One SEO Pack

This is the first plugin I install for WordPress. It’s a very good plugin to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. The plugin can set post and page specific titles, Meta tags and more. It’s a must tool to have if you are serious about putting your blog on Google rankings.

Slideshow Gallery

WordPress Gallery is a nice plugin to add a flash banner on your site. You can set as many banners as you want and have them randomized. This plugin works very well on the homepage of your blog. Highly customizable and very easy to use.

Super Tags Widget

This is a cool widget that lets you customize your cloud tag. You can limit the number of Tags with the maximum and minimum font size settings. It’s a no frills tag widget that works well with a minimalist site design.

WordPress iPhone app

I love this app because it allows me to update my website while I’m on the go. I can approve comments, publish posts, update and tweak pages. The best is that it works very fast on a reasonably good data connection.

Postie
If you don’t have a smart phone, try running Postie instead. It’s a plugin that lets you make blog posts with email. All you do is write an email to your WordPress blog, which posts the email as a blog article. You can include html, images and specify tags and categories.

Also worth mentioning are:

Some other notable plugins include the WP Security Scan, WP Polls, Related Posts, Random Image Widget and W3Total Cache.

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Zaki Usman

Hello, I'm the founder and CEO at ShoutEx. I like to blog about marketing, mobile and web topics. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.