There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Wordpress plugins available today. These plugins can add all sorts of features to your blog – pretty much anything you can imagine. Finding the perfect plugins for your blog can be tough, and a time consuming process. For every custom blog setup that I perform, I install and configure this list of plugins.

GL3 Media’s Recommended Wordpress Plugins

• Akismet – The best anti-spam Wordpress plugin available. Akismet does a fantastic job and catching comment spam.
• Wordpress Database Backup – It’s absolutely critical to backup your Wordpress database on a regular basis. WP-Database Backup makes this an automatic process, so you don’t have to spend time backing up manually.
• Subscribe to Comments – This plugin adds a little checkbox after your comments section, allowing visitors to receive an email update every time someone leaves a new comment.
• WPtouch – Creates a mobile version of your site, instantly.
• Wordpress Popular Posts – Lists your most visited posts in your sidebar, so your visitors can access them quickly and easily.
• Hyper Cache – Wordpress can use a lot of server resources “out of the box.” Using a caching plugin such as Hyper Cache can drastically reduce server load, and improve the performance of your site.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Automatically creates a sitemap for Google, to help it crawl all the pages of your site. It’s automatically updated every time you create a new post as well – no maintenance required.

A few popular Wordpress plugins that I don’t install, and why:

• All in One SEO Pack – A great plugin to be sure. However, since I install the incredible Thesis theme with each custom blog install, there’s no need for this plugin. Thesis has fantastic SEO built right in, which means no need for an additional plugin.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement – Thesis allows you to set a custom feed URL without the need of an additional plugin.
• Google Analytics for Wordpress- Guess what?  Thesis lets you add your Google Analytics code right in the options panel.  No need for an extra plugin.