What made WordPress most popular blogging CMS? Probably all of you have at least one answer. What I would say is, it solves all the problems a blogger might face while running a blog and it provides all the features a blogger may want through various plugins and widgets. Ultimately it made blogging much more easier and flexible than ever.

Over the past few years, I have been running a few blogs and tried a dozens of plugins. Some of them are simply cool that full-filled my need and some of them couldn’t do that. In this post I will be listing more than 15 plugins that you will need more or less to run a WordPress blog successfully.

Akismet

Yeah, I know all of you know about Akismet. But this list wouldn’t be completed without it. Akisment is the best solution to protect your blog from spam comments. It’s kind of ‘activate it, and forget it’ kind of plugin.

All in One SEO Pack

Though there are lots of SEO plugins out there, but you don’t really need to be confused while “All in One SEO Pack” gives you the solution. You can upgrade to pro version as well to get some more advanced features.

Advanced Access Manager

If you are running a multi-author blog, then you will definitely need a role/access manager plugin. “Advanced Access Manager” plugin will provide a graphical interface to manage user roles, capabilities and post/page access. Before this plugin was released, I was using “Role Manager” another simple yet good plugin to manage user roles.

Contact Form 7

Give your readers a simple way to contact you, otherwise you may lose some opportunity. “Contact form 7″ made it really easy to add a contact form anywhere in your blog.

FD Feedburner Plugin

Having all the subscribers in one place will make it easy to manage them and show ads to make more money. This plugin will redirect all the feeds to Feedburner feeds seamlessly for all users. You just need to tell the plugin what your Feedburner feed URL is and you’re done.

Google Analytics for WordPress

If you don’t wanna mess with code, then simply use this plugin to implement Google Analytics on your blog. It also provides some good features like outbound links & downloads tracking.

Google XML Sitemaps

A XML Sitemap is a method by which you can help a search engine to index all the pages on your site. This plugin will automatically generate a sitemap and update it when necessary.

Hungred Post Thumbnail

So, your cool WordPress theme doesn’t have a built in thumbnail feature? Give this plugin a try to do that for you.

Pretty Link Lite

If you are an affiliate marketer, then you probably want to hide those ugly affiliate links. “Pretty Link Lite” allows you to shrink, track and share any URL from your WordPress site.

SexyBookmarks

This is the most popular plugin to show social bookmarking buttons in your posts or pages. ShareThis is another good plugin to do that.

Skt NURCaptcha

If you allow users to register on your blog to write guest post or some other reasons, definitely you will be spammed. “Skt NURCaptcha” includes a reCaptcha to the register form that will help you to get rid of spambots.

Sidebar Login

Give your registered users an easy way to login to their dashboard. This plugin will create a widget that you can simply place on your sidebar to show a login form.

underConstruction

The underConstruction plugin allows you to show up a temporary under construction, maintenance or coming soon page that users who are not logged in will see.

WordPress Popular Posts

Showcase your most popular posts based on comments or pageviews. It will allow you to show popular posts on your sidebar or even on posts or pages.

WPtouch Plugin

One of the best plugins to create a mobile friendly version of your website. It creates a touch version of the website when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Also known as YARPP is the one of the best plugins out there to show related posts. Though its new version doesn’t allow to set a Match threshold thus most of the time it ends up showing “no related posts found”. That’s why I’m using an older version (I don’t recommend to use an oder version of a plugin) which is much more flexible.

Not only installing this plugins but also there are a few things to do after installing WordPress to keep yourself right. Did I miss any vital plugin that should be added in the list? Share your opinion below.