Sure it works and you can blog out of the box, but might as well go to WordPress.com for a free blog and just use custom domain for that then, right? It's true

Sure it works and you can blog out of the box, but might as well go to WordPress.com for a free blog and just use custom domain for that then, right? It's true that many go on and talk about 20 "must" plugins, when you really must have only a handful. But none... bad advice. With that said, truly must haves are something like these - Cache (W3 Total Cache), backups (e.g. WP-DBManager) and optimization (WP Smush.it). And unless theme provides the functionality, not using XML Sitemap generator and some SEO-plugin is throwing away free traffic. Plus personally, I consider Google Analytics for WordPress a must, as it makes special tracking easy/automatic (e.g. views per category), that would require theme tweaking otherwise - in addition to adding analytics tracking code handily to the blog. p.s. Using cache has very little to do with traffic - and one of the biggest mistakes people make is to start thinking about caching when they already have traffic - what if something goes wrong when you're getting 500 visitors a day? Wouldn't it have been smarter to do all that when you had 1 (yourself)? - The site just works better with cache and optimization, even if just one person reads it - and the few visitors like it more because it's fast.