WordPress is a wondrous development, continually developed for. There are updates for the whole system periodically, and then plugins to help enhance your website in ways you wouldn’t be able to with little or no programming skills. They are generally always easy to use and manage, and are available right on the WordPress website. Easy peasy!

Before you go and download a ton of plugins for you site, be warned! Too many plugins will bog down your website, making it sluggish and annoying to the frequent or infrequent visitor, especially on a slower connection. Your website is going to load those plugins before it loads the site, so if you have ten, twenty or thirty plugins (sounds excessive, but people do it), then you’re probably going to do more damage than good. Sure it’ll be able to do cool things, but no one is going to want to stick around to see what it does! So there you go, you’ve been warned. Otherwise, have fun with this little list of 10 plugins I have compiled for you. There are some good SEO plugins in here, and check out more on their site.

Akismet - This is built into WordPress, but if for some reason you don’t have it, you’re going to want it. This is going to keep your spam down, filtering it. You can mark your messages as spam, or approve them for posting.

Get Recent Comments – If you want to display your most recent comments on your homepage or something, this is an easy tool for you.

Search Meter – See what people are searching for on your site! This might help you know what to write more about or to post more of.

Search Pages – This makes your search box that is built into your blog search more than just your blog posts.

Simple Tags – This plugin helps you decide which tags are the best for your posts.

Sitemap Generator – This helps you customize and create your sitemap.

SEO Friendly Images – This helps you ensure your images are SEO-friendly with alt and title tags.

SEO No Duplicate – If you have duplicate content on your website for some reason, you can tell search engines which pages to ignore and which ones to crawl.

Sociable - This automatically adds favorite social networking site links to your posts.

Top 10 Posts – This will display your most frequently clicked top ten posts. You can also easily change it to a much larger number.