A couple days ago I wrote about the plethora of plugins needed to create a secure family style blog. Today I’m going to tell you about the 5 most essential plugins everyone needs to have installed and activated regardless of your blog style or niche.
WordPress.com Stats
Wordpress.com Stats is a pretty powerful “real” time stats package that was built for WordPress.com blogs. It’s also been ported to a plugin for WordPress self hosted blogs as well. The Stats info sits in your Dashboard and gives you data for number of visits (by day, week, or month), top posts of the day, top searches of the day and most active posts all time.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is also a traffic stats plugin but is much more powerful than WordPress.com Stats, however, the data only updates once per day (at night) so you can’t view real time statistics which is why you should use both. Analytics provides the same data as Stats but also includes map location of visitors, visitor 
information such as browser version, OS version, screen size, ISP info, detailed referrer stats and much more. Also included in Analytics is report functionality where you can schedule reports to be emailed daily, weekly or monthly.
FeedBurner FeedSmith
FeedSmith is Feedburner’s own plugin designed for WordPress.
Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin 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.
Postalicious
Postalicious is a great, recently updated, plugin for casual bloggers (like me) who want a quick way to keep their blog activity going even when they don’t have the time to create new original content. Postalicious takes your Delicious, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes feeds and creates a blog post. It’s very configurable and automatic. I have Postalicious post my links daily (when there are at least two links). You can choose what categories to assign to the post, have it auto published or saved as a draft, etc. Delicious has their own tool , which they still refer to as “experimental”. Don’t waste your time, Postalicious is way more powerful.
Akismet
You have to have a comment spam killer if you have a blog. Akismet, was built by Matt Mullenweg, 
WordPress’ creator. Generally installed automatically when you install your WordPress self-hosted site, Akismet should be a no brainer.
Akismet is a spam-fighting service that is different from others such as Spam Karma 2 or Bad Behavior in that it checks the content of the comment anonymously with an online server, to determine whether it is spam or not.
