WordPress plugins are pieces of software that can extend WordPress to do pretty much anything you want. They can reduce spam, increase site security, add social bookmarking functionality, improve your site’s search engine optimization and much more.

With over 9000 plugins to choose from on WordPress.org, there’s no shortage of choices out there. The question becomes which are the essential plugins you need for your WordPress for business website. As a shortcut to get you started, here are 5 plugins I install on pretty much every WordPress site I set up.

1. Google XML Sitemaps As the name implies, this plugin generates an XML sitemap for your WordPress site. What’s a sitemap you ask? It’s a document that contains a lot of information about all the pages on your site and how they all link together. Sitemaps are very helpful when it comes to search engine optimization because they help the search engines index your site better. What Google XML sitemap does is automatically generate a sitemap whenever you put new content on your WordPress site and then notifies all the major search engines.

2. All In One SEO PackWant to rank high in the search engines? Of course you do! The search engines already love WordPress sites and using the All In One SEO Pack will only deepen the search engines affection for your site. This plugin will do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to Search engine optimization for your right out of the box. All you need to do is install it and it takes over from there. Of course, if you’re a bit more advanced in the ways of search engine optimization you can tweak this plugin to get things exactly as you’d like. (Quick note to keep in mind: This plugin may be redundant if you selected a WordPress theme, like the Thesis Theme for WordPress, that already have SEO functionality built in to them.)

3. Contact Form 7Chances are on a business website you’re going to want a way for visitors to contact you with questions, comments, etc. Using Contact Form 7 you can easily customize a form to place on your website. Simply drag and drop fields to create a form with the fields you want. Then copy a short code onto the page of your site where you want the form to appear and you’re done! It doesn’t get any easier than that.

4. Google Analytics for WordPressFor any website, it’s important to know how many people are visiting your site, what pages are they visiting, what keywords they’re using to find you and more. This plugin helps you easily do that. You’ll need to register for a free Google Analytics account first. Then enter your Google Analytics account ID into this plugin and you’ll start collecting more data about your site’s traffic than you’ll know what to do with.

5. WordPress Mobile EditionMobile is huge. As more and more smartphones pour into the market, more consumers are using their phones to surf the web. If you don’t have a website that can be easily viewed on a mobile phone’s browser, you may be losing out on potential business. This plugin makes sure that doesn’t happen. Once installed, the plugin detects mobile browsers and gives your site/blog a mobile-friendly interface so it looks great on mobile devices.

Adam Kreitman is a Saint Louis online marketing consultant. While he is not a designer, he got tired of seeing small business clients with overpriced, poorly designed websites so he started helping clients develop sites using WordPress. To get the word out to a larger audience he started a website which provides tips, video tutorials and resources for using WordPress for business.