1. Akismet

Akismet is a very powerful comment filter that checks each comment against the Akismet web service to see whether it looks like a spam and caches them under the “Comments” admin screen for you to review.

2. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is a one-stop-destination for all SEO related functions. You can optimize your site with this plug-in as it has fantastic features like:

• Advanced canonical URLs
• Fine-tune page navigation links
• Built-in API to accommodate other plug-ins to extend the functionality
• The ONLY plug-in that provides SEO integration for ecommerce sites built on WordPress
• Nonce security
• Automatic title optimization and META Tag generation for search engines
• Avoids content redundancy

3. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker monitors your blog and checks for any broken links to bring them to your notice on the Dashboard. It detects redirects, missing images, modified links, and links that don’t work very efficiently. Each link can be modified without manually editing each post individually. This saves a lot of time and effort.

4. cforms II

cforms is a powerful and feature rich form plug-in for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.

5. FeedBurner FeedSmith

For the best results using FeedBurner with your self-hosted WordPress site, the FeedBurner FeedSmith plug-in is the best and most popular choice (originally authored by the legendary Steve Smith). The plug-in will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.

6. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps plug-in generates an XML Sitemap for search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com and thus better indexing of your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plug-in supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

7. WordPress Automatic Upgrade

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows the user to automatically upgrade to the latest WordPress version provided by wordpress.org. This plug-in backs up all the files and the database before installation and provides a link to download it later. Downloads the latest files from the Internet, unzips them, and puts the site under the maintenance mode temporarily until the installing will be successfully completed. This is an intelligent plug-in that remembers to re-activate each plug-in that it had deactivated prior to the upgrade installation. The complete process is smooth and hassle free for the user.

8. WP Super Cache

The WP Super Cache plug-in helps in reducing page load time by generating static HTML files from your dynamic blog. This HTML file is cached on the web server and rather than loading heavy PHP scripts, the browser swiftly loads these light weight static HTML files. Hence your server won’t remain busy as before and will serve more visiors.

9. WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup, as the name suggests, is the plug-in specifically designed to save backup copies of your WordPress database including the tables and the forms. One really appealing feature of this plug-in is that you can store database tables other than your WordPress blog’s in the same database.

10. WP-PageNavi

WP-PageNavi add a more advanced paging and navigation feature to your WordPress blog. Travelling between web pages was never before easier and more fun.

1. Blogger to WordPress when blog is hosted on Blogger.
Import your blog directly from the Blogger if you are hosting your blog on Google (i.e. Blogger itself). You will know this when you see a“.blogspot.com” after your blog mane in the URL. This is because you are using Google’s BlogSpot domain to host your blog on the Internet.  In your “Manage” or “Tools” panel of your WordPress dashboard and click on “Import”.

From here go to the Blogger import option and authorize the blog that you will be importing to WordPress.

Then you need to grant WordPress an access to your blog account on Google and start “Import”. Pretty straightforward, huh? Well, you are done transferring your blog on Blogger that is hosted on Blogger itself (very important point to be noted) to your WordPress blog.

2. Blogger to WordPress when blog is privately hosted on personal domain.
This one is for those of you who are hosting your blogs privately on your personal domains. Well, if you are using Google’s Blogger service to maintain your blog on your own domain, there some bad news for you. You will not be able to import the Blogger blog that is not on Blogger. It is obvious, isn’t it? WordPress allows importing Blogger blog as there’s a code written for it that includes tine BlogSpot domain. But if you are trying to mention a Blogger blog hosted on a domain other than BlogSpot, WordPress has no solution to this query. Though don’t be disheartened, as there’s a solution to it. Now let us rewind back to a sentence that said that Blogger allows Blogger to Blogger blog transfer. Even if you have different domains, this function still holds true. So, transfer your privately hosted blog on to a dummy blog created just for the transfer purposes, but remember to host it on BlogSpot account. This is how you do it:

Go to you blog (the original one hosted privately on your personal domain) Settings on your dashboard and click on “Export Blog” under the Basic > Blog Tools section. Press the flashy orange button that says “Download Blog”.

Save the blog as an XML file. Now if you haven’t yet created the dummy blog for the transfer, this is the right time to do it. When you have created the dummy blog, there will be screen that tells you to “Start Blogging”. Don’t just start yet, open the “Advance Setup Options” and click on the “Import Blog Tool”.

Browse and select the XML file that you had downloaded earlier and press “Import Blog”. You got your dummy blog ready, with all your blogs and their comments intact. Think you are done? Well, you almost there. Follow the step #1 above to transfer your blog hosted on BlogSpot domain (your new dummy blog) to your WordPress blog. Voila! You are done now. You may delete your dummy blog if you may wish, but after the import process is over on WordPress and all your blogs are being shown on the new WordPress blog.

You may think this to be a tedious process to transfer your Blogger blog to another Blogger blog and then import it on the WordPress blog. But believe me, this is the only way, there’s no other method to do so, unless you are a coding master and decide to rewrite your WordPress functionality yourself. For the lesser coding efficient ones this is a tried and tested method for them.