Edit: Yes, Akismet is pre-installed on WordPress.org. Sorry about the confusion.

WordPress by itself is great, but at the same time, it’s just a bare-bones package. That’s why there’s plugins, in fact, thousands of them waiting for you at the Plugins Directory. Some of these plugins are so good, they should be required by WP-law, while others are complete trash. How do know which to get and which to avoid?

I’ve compiled a personal list of plugins that every WordPress.org user should have. Whether you’re a devout photoblogger or just a beginner, these plugins will enhance your WordPress experience and bring you functionality that you can’t live without.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

This blog was originally hosted on WordPress.com, where there were excellent perks such as site statistics and email subscriptions for blog posts. When I migrated to WordPress.org self-hosted, all this functionality was gone. I really missed my site stats and Publicize. Fortunately, Automattic has developed a plugin called Jetpack, which extends WordPress.com functionality to self-hosted blogs. Among the WP.com features included are Post by Email, subscriptions via email, and mobile theme. You also get some really useful features such as LaTeX syntax highlighting, Photon, and shortcode embeds.

MP6

As of this post, the wp-admin UI for self-hosted blogs has a lot of catching up to do with the WP.com shared-hosting blogs. That’s why MP6 was created; to bring the new admin interface to self-hosted blogs. And that’s all it does, nothing more, nothing less.

Akismet

Spam is the bane of any blog author’s life. Like graffiti on a street corner, it makes the blog unattractive and deters users from re-visiting the site. Fortunately, there is Akismet, the best spam prevention plugin out there. While Akismet is pre-installed on WordPress.org, you need to register for an Akismet account for it to work. Akismet is extremely successful at stopping spammers in their tracks. During my 4-1/2 years of running my blog, it’s filtered out thousands of spam comments, only missing a few and catching a few false positives. Best of all, it’s a pay-what-you-want plugin. And yes, that includes “free”.

WP Super Cache

If you’ve ever looked into the WP internal code, you’ll notice that it’s full of PHP scripts. While this is good for such a dynamic CMS, it can really affect your site’s page load performance. By pre-caching pages into static HTML, you can speed up page load by a lot, increasing your search rankings and providing users with a better experience.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of caching plugins out there, but WP Super Cache is my favorite. It’s simple to use, doesn’t clutter your admin backend, and does the job beautifully.