Must Have WordPress Widgets, Plugins Themes

Widgets

The number and type of widgets you use on your WordPress blog will depend on your theme and the amount of space available on the sidebar. A 'Categories' widget is essential to allowing your readers to browse your pages, and the 'Recent Posts' plugin will make sure regular visitors don't miss a post. A 'Search' widget is also a valuable addition to a website, particularly if you have a lot of content. Most websites place this at the top of their sidebar.

Plugins for Functionality

'Akismet' is an essential plugin for any WordPress site with comments enabled. To activate Akismet, you need a WordPress API key which can be obtained by signing up for an account at WordPress.com. The 'Contextual Related Posts' plugin adds a list of similar posts at the end of each post, and the 'Subscribe to any' and 'Add to any' plugins help your visitors subscribe to your site and share your work via their social media accounts respectively.

Plugins for Monetization

The 'Yoast SEO' plugin allows a great number of search engine optimization procedures to be enabled without going into the HTML source code. It can turn post tags into title tags, which is beneficial, but if you want to override this for individual posts, the 'Custom Title Tags' plugin will do this for you. The 'WhyDoWork' AdSense plugin allows Google AdSense ads -- or any other type of ad -- to be positioned at various places through your articles using a simple interface.

Themes

The 'Thesis' theme is a highly customizable theme framework that makes it easy to customize the styling and functionality of your site without any HTML knowledge. However, it comes at a price, and the 'WooThemes' templates also offer a large range of functional and stylistic editing options but for free. For an impressive home page to your blog, the 'WP-Coda' theme uses JQuery to make a slide-show based on your site's pages, and displays it on your blog's main index.