5 WordPress Plugins for Better Blogging

If you blog, you’re heard of the open source WordPress platform. We’re huge advocates. Making a great experience even better are the excellent free plugins provided by the vibrant WordPress community. We occasionally bring you a few of our favorites. Here are five more.

1. Google Analytics for WordPress

No blog is complete without analytics. Track and measure how your blog is performing with the free, robust Google Analytics. Find out who your audience is, where they’re coming from, how they’re getting to your blog, which blog posts get the most traffic and a host of other useful information. After setting up a Google account, download the plugin on your site, enter the tracking code, and you’re good to go.

2. WPtouch

It’s all about mobile these days. People are increasingly using their smartphones and tablets to access the Internet. Now you can quickly transform your WordPress blog or website into a mobile theme for easy browsing on your iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry devices. And you don’t have to know a lick of code to enable this. Simply download the plugin, activate it, and your site is mobile ready. With over 3 million downloads and a four (out of five) rating, it’s a must have app. There’s also a “pro” version for around $49 with added functionality including an iPad interface.

3. WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Backup. Backup. Backup. With the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin, you get to backup your backup. Choose a day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed and your blog or website files will be dropped in your Dropbox! You can also set where you want your backup stored within Dropbox and on your server as well as choose what files or directories, if any, you wish to exclude from the backup.

4. WP-Table Reloaded

WordPress doesn’t play well with tables but the terrific WP-Table Reloaded plugin takes care of the problem, and then some. Create and manage tables right in your WordPress admin area which can then be inserted into your blog posts, pages or in text widgets. Rows are sortable and color coded with search functionality and much more. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.

5. WordPress SEO by Yoast

Good content rules, and a little search engine optimization doesn’t hurt either. But it all gets quite confusing. Download the Yoast plugin and let it do the work for you. Hailed as the most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog, the plugin’s features include a snippet preview, a page analysis to help you optimize titles, keywords, description and other content, and much, much more.

These are just five of our favorites. Feel free to add yours below.