We have spoken indepth on TweaksForGeeks.com about how Blogger simply does not compare against WordPress as a blogging platform to use for a website. Therefore, the likelihood is that you have chosen to run your website with WordPress – congratulations! But, the problem with WordPress, when you first use it, is that the level of customization can be quite difficult to comprehend! Do not worry, my friend. One area of customization that is a necessity to use is the plugins area. If you do not know what plugins you should generally use for your WordPress website, take a look at the below plugins which are some of the best plugins WordPress owners can use to help the running of their website (and improve it too).

#1 WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is by far one of the best plugins to use to make sure that your website is as search engine optimized as possible to help increase the level of organic traffic going to it. The plugin does lots of SEO ‘stuff’ such as creating a xml sitemap for your website, allows you to modify and create meta tags, descriptions and titles and provides a red/amber/green light service on how search engine optimized your articles are after saving them.

#2 W3 Total Cache

Even if you do not choose to use W3 Total Cache (which is an unwise decision), it is a necessity to have a cache plugin for your WordPress website. The reason for this is because a cache plugin can dramatically improve your website’s performance and the time it takes for pages to load. What the plugin does is compress the pages down so that the download of pages on your site are quicker, resulting in faster loading times. Not only is this beneficial to your web users, websites with fast loading times usually rank better on search engines too.

#3 Akismet

Akismet is a plugin to filter through the spam comments and prevent them from being approved and published onto your articles and pages. 

Now you might think that your website might not get much spam. However, it is common for spam comments to be as high as 75% of the total comments posted on the site. If you feel you have the time to sift through all of your website’s comments to decide which is spam and which isn’t then you are not utilizing your time to its fullest!

The problem I had when I use to use Blogger was that the spam filter inbuilt into the platform sometimes filtered some real comments as spam comments – luckily for the Akismet plugin, you can be guaranteed that no real comments will be filtered into the spam folder because the algorithms for deciding if a comment is spam are much more complicated than Google’s free blogging platform. As well as this, Akismet is used by its millions so a plugin this successful can’t be doing a bad job, am I right?