These are my common plugins that I always install on all my blogs:
- Akismet – Fighting with spam. I use only this plugin and it does the job very well
- Auto Post Thumbnail – I’m lazy with setting the featured image. This plugin will auto take the 1st image in post content and set it as the featured image.
- Contact Form 7 – Very powerful and easy to customize contact plugin.
- SEO Smart Links – Do some cool SEO things for links and images
- Smart Archives Reloaded – It’s designed for archive page, but we can also use it for sitemap page
- Yoast SEO Plugin – I used AIO SEO Plugin before, but I decided to switch to Yoast’s plugin as it has good feature of recommendation while editing posts.
- W3 Total Cache – it’s the best cache plugin for me, it does some jobs in optimization, also
- Widget Logic – Instead of hard code into theme files, I use this for controlling my widgets
- WP-Optimize – Do some optimizations such as: delete spams, post revisions, optimize tables
- WP-PostViews – For simple stats like popular posts. It’s lightweight, works with cache, and has nice widget
- WPtouch – I found this’s the best plugin for mobile