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In 2003, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created WordPress as a fork of b2. WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured, personal publishing system, built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.

A WordPress Plugin is intended to extend the abilities and functionality of WordPress.

I believe there exists a specific set of plugins, which should be installed immediately.

As far as WordPress is concerned, it shouldn’t matter what order WordPress Plugins are installed. However, I have noticed a natural progression to follow, for every WordPress Website I administer. This natural progression has never let me down.

WordPress logo grey

These First Five WordPress Plugins, should have very little (if any) effect, on coding or aesthetics of the publicly visible portions, of your WordPress website. Installing these WordPress Plugins, in the order I list them, is the natural progression I follow, for every WordPress Website I administer.

1. Akismet:
Comment spam is a huge problem for blogs. Luckily, the plugin Akismet, by Automattic, comes pre-installed with each WordPress (self-hosted) installation. It is pre-installed, but not activated and I always make sure there isn’t a newer version of Akismet before I activate it.
2. Hello Dolly:
While the Hello Dolly WordPress plugin also comes pre-installed, I don’t ever activate it. While I highly respect it’s developer, Matt Mullenweg, and understand why it was developed, I find it quite useless. I leave this WordPress plugin installed, but deactivated.
3. WordPress Importer:
If you ever have to restore a WordPress powered web site, the WordPress Importer plugin, by WordPress.org makes this process easy.
4. Better Plugin Compatibility Control:
I refer to the Better Plugin Compatibility Control WordPress plugin a lot. It helps me keep an eye on which versions of WordPress, specific plugins are compatible with. This information is displayed below the name of each installed (activated or deactivated) plugin, in the plugins section of the WordPress Administration Panel.
5. Categories to Tags Converter:
Inevitably you will need the Categories to Tags Converter, as you add more and more content to your blog. When you determine specific categories should be tags or certain tags should be categories, you’ll be glad WordPress.org developed this plugin.

If your WordPress website was designed and built, using HTML5 and CSS3 valid code, validation should not fail, after the installation of these specific WordPress plugins.

If you need help with your WordPress website, WordPress plugins or HTML5/CSS3 validation, hire a professional to help.