Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogging

Over the past few years of blogging using WordPress I’ve found a number of essential plugins for the platform. I’ve written this post to provide as a resource for myself and others and will try to periodically update it if I find new/better plugins.

Plugins I’m using at the moment:

• WP Super Cache: caches your site (basically makes it run faster and use fewer resources)
• Jetpack (Website analytics, will need a WordPress.com account to use)
• Google Analytics (Don’t really need now I have Jetpack but still like to take a look at the data it collects)
• Akismet: Spam filtering (Will also need an account on their site to use)
• WP Smush: Image compression and resizing functionality
• All in One SEO Pack
• Fancier Author Box: Adds a box after articles with information about the author
• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved: syntax highlighting for code
• Tabby Responsive Tabs: Add tabbed sections to posts

Plugins I’m not currently using but come recommended and may use in the future:

• Simple custom post order: reorder posts
• Yoast: SEO tool