My six must have WordPress plugins (now seven)

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I’ve built a fair few WordPress sites over the years, these plugins are my firm favorites across my sites. Most of these are utility plugins that provide an enhanced and / or new feature set to my installations.

WP Greet Box

Welcome your visitors
Display a different greeting message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from.

Author / Site: Thaya Kareeson | Visit plugin site

Disable Trackbacks

Kill all SPAM track backs
Globally disables trackbacks to cut down on spam. Very, very few people legitimately use trackbacks and spammers love them, so it’s worthy tradeoff.

Author / Site: Viper007Bond | Visit plugin site

Google XML Sitemaps

Automatic Sitemap file generator for better search engine visibility
This well known plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

Author / Site: Arne Brachhold | Visit plugin site

JH404 Logger

Log 404 errors on your site
Logs and shows all 404 errors to a convenient window on the Dashboard allowing you to spot incorrect links and other errors easily.

Author / Site: Joe Hoyle | Visit plugin site

Livefyre Realtime Comments

Real time comments system for WP
Implements livefyre realtime comments for WordPress, the best external comment system I’ve found, even with Akismet switched on SPAM was a bit of an issue for me. Superb support in my experience, also has a fairly speedy loading time. It has a brilliant array of features including, SSO – Single Sign-on support, threaded comments (that are also backed up to your local copy of WordPress), comment mentions (similar to Twitter mentions), Facebook & Twitter integration to mention a few.

Author / Site: Livefyre, Inc. | Visit plugin site

Smart 404

Rescue your visitors from 404 errors
Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.

Author / Site: Michael Tyson | Visit plugin site