As the journey of blogging continues, we often hear from others about plugins that we should add to our blogs – well I have a few recommended plugins that are working for me and would love to share.

Akismet:

This plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments”. By default, this plugin is included in every WordPress.org blogware. All you need is the WordPress.com API key to activate this feature. Without this plugin, you will receive a lot of spam comments when time pass by.

Sociable:
Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites. These little color icons make it easy for your readers to bookmark your posts to their bookmarking sites. There is a variety of bookmarking sites icons to add on. It also makes your blog more cool.

All In One SEO pack:

Well I don’t know about you but I am still learning and don’t really understand  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a term used by the website owners to signify the customization done to a blog in favor of a better search engine results from Google, Bing etc.

CommentLuv:

This plugin shows a link to the last post from your commenter’s blog right in the comment box.  Just activate and it’s ready. You must be grateful to your loyal readers. To show your appreciation, why not give them some link love? When your reader enable CommentLuv when they post a comment in your blog, their latest blog post link will be added at the end of his/her comment too.

Visitor Maps and Who’s Online:

This is a fun plugin that lets you see who is visiting your blog – it well let you know if bots are finding you, will tell you what the last url that the person was at and the list goes on and on – wait till you see the map it gives showing your visitors

WP Comment Auto Responder:

I don’t know about you but this plugin is worth it’s weight – this is the one that will send an auto thank you to your visitor after they have commented – this one I really like – only thing is – make sure you rewrite the thank you message to say what you want it to say.

WP Super Cache

This one I just got as my blog seems to be running so slow and after chatting with a techie guy at my hosting site, he recommended this one to speed up my blog.  I have to say that it has helped some but still not fully recovered.

Therefore the reason for this post – I have read that you can have too many plugins and I know can get addicting as there are so many out there that do so many wonderful things.  My questions are ………….does anyone have suggestions or tips on how I can speed my blog?  Do you think that a person can have too many plugins?  Do you have any recommended plugins?