WordPress is a CMS platform used by millions of site-owners to make the best possible use of the widely available features. These features do not limit within WordPress itself, because there are several third-party tools and services that add life to the adventurous journey of using WordPress.
Following is a list of eight essential and important tools and services for any WordPress blogger. Some of them might not be useful to you, but there are others who might find it very useful.
Disqus
Used For – Engagement On Blog
Disqus is a tool for the “comments” area of your WordPress blog. It replaces the default WordPress comment system, or the default comment system by the theme being used.
Disqus has proved to be very powerful especially for blogs that receive a lot of engagement. It has been efficient enough to reduce spam comments like never before. Commentators can publish the comment by logging in using any of the following –
- Name and Email Address (and website, if applicable).
If a user has one approved comment on a particular blog, he/she doesn’t have to login again to comment on any article on that blog.
Google Analytics
Used For – Site Statistics
Every WordPress site owner wants to know about the traffic they are receiving on their blog, right? Google Analytics provides you just about everything under the “blog traffic” category. It is not possible to mention every feature google analytics can offer you in this article but it is one tool every site owner should definitely use.
It tracks every visit as an individual. This means that once a visitor lands on a page on your blog, Google analytics keeps track of every activity that the visitor does – including clicks, page views, time spent, clicks on ads, exit page etc.
Flickr
Used For – Pictures and Media
Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) is a service that hosts pictures. It allows users to either upload a picture in almost any category known to human kind.
The users who upload the pictures do it at their own satisfaction. They are not forced to do any paper work, or legal activities.
The photos that can be used on blogs and sites can be found at Flickr Creative Commons – where anybody is free to use the pictures. The only required condition is that the author should be credited for the picture – which is automatically added to the HTML code of the photo.
DropBox
Used For – File Storage
Even though WordPress allows you to upload files upto 64 MB, for some people it might not be enough. For example, if one is providing extremely high graphics file around 400 MB each, it might not be efficient to upload it to your site. Also, uploading and managing such large files (on your server) might be a challenge. Dropbox makes it completely easy to upload, download, share whatever files your want.
A free user gets 2 GB free space in the beginning, and can get about 17 GB (free) more with referrals etc. – but the paid plans are also worthwhile. This can be a very beneficial service to you as a blogger.
Paper.li
Used For – Sharing
Paper.li is an online “newspaper” on which a publisher can post any articles on the web. It basically allows you to collect articles from any categories from a wide variety of sources such as Twitter, RSS etc.
The output, when published, is just like a newspaper with several different columns and numerous selected articles. All the articles are shown with excerpts and are linked to the original source.
Furthermore, the newspaper can have ads from platforms such as Google Adsense. This helps with the blog monetization part.
Aweber
Used For – Email Marketing
Aweber is being used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers, web-masters, and sellers. Not only is it used to connect with your readers, but also as a tool to monetize your blog/site. When the subscribers increase, so do the chances of making more sales (of self products or affiliate products).
Aweber easily integrates with WordPress, making it very simple for the users. It provides beautiful “opt-in forms” through which visitors can subscribe to the site. The forms are very easy to integrate into any WordPress site.
FileZilla
Used For – FTP solutions
FileZilla is a widely used software basically as a file manager for hosted servers. Even though web hosts provide online file managers, having software just makes it much better and easy. Not all WordPress users need File-Transfer-Protocols, but yet many do. Filezilla is a software readily available both for almost all operating systems such as Windows, Macintosh, Linux etc.
File uploads, downloads, editing etc. can be easily done with Filezilla. One reason to use a software rather than the online file manager is that one does not need to open up the browser and login to the file manager.
TweetAdder
Used For – Automatic Tweeting (traffic generation)
TweetAdder is a tool that completely manages your Twitter profile and helps it grow like never before. The tool has countless features, and mentioned below are a few of them.
- Automatic Tweeting
- Automatic Follow/Unfollow
- Automatic tweets from any RSS feed.
- Auto-generation of Tweets using Keywords
- Usage of URL-shortners for all the links
- Automatic DMs to the new followers, and many more!
If used wisely (in a way that doesn’t annoy the followers), Tweetadder can be very beneficial for any WordPress blogger.
W3C Link Checker
This one is a bonus tool 
W3C Link Checker is a web-based checker for dead links that can quickly scan your entire site for broken links at regularly scheduled intervals.
Conclusion
Those were eight (plus one bonus) tools that can be very beneficial for you as a WordPress blogger.
Although they support many different platforms such as blogger, tumbler etc., WordPress has the highest users amongst all and they definitely support the usage of WordPress.
Any tools or services you personally recommend for WordPress?