Wordpress has become the best blogging software and will continue to reign as the best. With the popularity of Wordpress, I am surprised to find the unpopularity of certain plugins being used. If you manage a Wordpress blog, I would strongly consider my list of the top five plugins to use:
Wordpress Database Backup - An excellent automated or manual backup solution for your Wordpress database. A classic.
Akismet - Can someone say SPAM? Yes, we all hate it and Akismet is the best Spam protection you can get for handling comments on your blog. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.
All in One SEO Pack - If want exposure and traffic to your blog, you might as well optimize it for the search engines. This automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin works right out of the box for your Wordpress blog.
Google XML Sitemaps - It is a simple, but very effective tool for auto generating sitemaps every time you make an update to your site. This plugin is the best tool to tell Google how it should crawl your blog and where to find everything you want found.
WP Super Cache - Speed and responsive all wrapped up into one little plugin. This plugin must efficiently caches your system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.