Wordpress is a fantastic blogging platform, and as I showed you yesterday, it can be a great CMS platform too. Wordpress works great as it is, but one of its greatest assets is how extendable it is. There are hundreds of great plugins for Wordpress, but these are the 12 most useful in my opinion to anyone building an online business:

Askimet

Coming as standard with recent versions of Wordpress, you simply need to enable it from the plugins page. You’ll also need a Wordpress API key which you can get for free at Wordpress.com

Once activated, Askimet will check comments against a spam database and will significantly reduce, or even stop spam comments all together!

Feedburner Feedsmith

If you’re using Feedburner (and if not, why not?) this useful plugin will detect all the ways to access your original WP feeds and redirect them to Feedburner so you can track every single subscriber.

Google XML Sitemaps

Pretty obvious from that name what this one does, it generates a sitemap of your blog (or Wordpress CMS site) which is supported by Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo!

Link Cloaker

If you promote any affiliate services or products from your site this plugin is invaluable. It automatically cloaks outgoing links in your posts and pages so that your ugly affiliate URLs are replaced with something much more friendly!

Social Bookmarking Reloaded

Want to easily add social bookmarking icons to your posts? Not a problem, simply install this plugin to get Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and more icons added to each post and page (and of course you can choose which ones to enable!)

WP Contact Form

Easily add a contact form, protected by an anti-spam question, to any of your posts or pages.

StatCounter

You may have read in previous posts that I’m a big fan of StatCounter, and this plugin makes it very easy to add your tracking code throughout your site.

Google Analyticator

And if you prefer Google Analytics to StatCounter, or want to run them both, then this is the plugin for you!

Simply Exclude

This is a very interesting plugin. Quite simply it allows you to exclude posts or pages from specific categories from appearing on your front page, archives, search results or feeds. You can set exactly what is and isn’t enabled and where, and it’s great for stopping one time offers and time specific posts from clogging up your archives and search results months or years after they are no longer relevant.

SEO Title Tag

This one does pretty much what it says on the tin! It allows you full control over your title tags.

WP Super Cache

Ever clicked on a link on Digg and found that the page can’t be found? More than likely the server collapsed under the deluge of traffic that front page exposure on a site like Digg can produce. In order to protect yourself from this, and speed up delivery of your pages, a page caching system like this is just the ticket. Basically it creates and serves static HTML versions of your pages, rather than bogging down the PHP engine with thousands of requests. Lots of options and easy to use so give it a try.

Database Backup

Personally I like to do my backups from phpMyAdmin, but if you want the convenience of running backups from your Wordpress control panel this is the plugin for you. Just beware that you’ll need to write enable folders to use it so I suggest enabling them (CHMOD 777) only temporarily for the backup, the CHMOD back to 755 for security purposes. Of course that prevents you from using the built in scheduler, but a small price to pay for keeping your site secure.