Nowadays Everyone has at leat one WordPress blog, but most users don’t know what plugins to use for their blog and they can’t find something suitable for their needs.
I decided to create a list with more than 60 WordPress plugins that every blog should use. I don’t say that you should use all of them, but each of them is very important for any WordPress blog and they have basic functions which are needed for any type of blogs.
To save more time and make the page load fast only first 20 plugins are with screenshot. Every single plugin has a link and a description. The link points to official plugin page.
The list is divided in more categories: contact forms, live statistics and information, SEO optimization, images galleries, social bookmars, blog comments plugins and more other.
STATISTICS AND INFORMATION
1. Firestats
In my oppinion the best wordpress plugin for monitorizing the visitors and information about current readers. I currently use it for my blog and I can tell you that is great plugin. The statistics can be customized to display countries, ips refferers and many other caracteristics.
2. Quick Stats
Is very similar to Firestats plugin but it is used because it comes just with summary statistics to load fast.
This plugin alows you to add tracking code to your blog without having to edit any code.
FeedBurner Feed Stats allows you to view your FeedBurner stats from inside your own blog without having to go to Feedburner.com.
It displays various information and stats about your blog or visitors in a widget.
Display Adsense stats inside of your blog using flash statistics mode.
SEO PLUGINS
Without a dub the best WordPress SEO plugin ever created. AOSP is actually a CMS designed to help you get the best SEO optimization for your blog.
It came with automatic links changes in order to create better optimization for your blog. It can be customize to attribute nofollow to links you want.
A all in one meta keywords and description generator. This great plugin will help you to improve your SEO fast without getting you a headache.
10. Meta Robots WordPress plugin
Is a great plugin which can automatically add meta tags to your posts and pages.
This plugin creates an automatically xml sitemap for your blog.
Is a optimization plugin which adds automatically meta tags and alt attribute to all images on your blog.
This will help you to create 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors.
Ultimate Tag Warrior is a multi-headed hydra of a plugin. It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like). From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.
UTILITIES
15. My Page Order
This plugin helps you to change the place of your pages links.
16. GD Star Rating
The best plugin to help you get votes for your articles
See if links from your site are not available, removed or just redirected and manage them with this great plugin. Broken Link Checker will help you to automatically unlink, change link or remove the page.
18. Post Ideas
Add post ideas using this plugin. Post Ideas will store all of your posting ideas and you can use them when you want to.
This plugin is great for people who want to build a store within their blog.
This WordPress plugin allows you to create sections of text in your post or page which expand/collapse when clicked on.
21. Advanced Tagline
Advanced Tagline gives the option to have multiple taglines for your blog and display them at random or sequentially with each page view.
Change the default WordPress login screen to a customized version. Great for client projects or multi-authored blogs.
23. WordPress Search And Replace
Allows you to search your posts and pages and replace information automatically. Careful though – once done it can’t be undone!
Displays a widget with latest twitter updates.
25. Zemanta
Zemanta provides contextual content recommendations to you while you write. It enhances your blog post with relevant images, videos, links, and SEO optimized tags. All recommended content is blogger friendly with clearly marked licenses (Creative Commons or similar).
26. Series
Series extends the current taxonomy system by creating a new taxonomy called “series.” Here’s the current feature list:
- Series: List Posts widgetAllows you to lists posts from a specific series and order them how you like.
- Series: Related Posts widgetLists posts related to the current post on single-post views (not displayed otherwise)….more
Adds a great ajax login panel to every page of yours for users to log in faster and easier.
Simple yet very useful plugin that helps you to integrate a social bookmark menu to your blog posts.
29. Search Highlighter
A plugin that highlights the search terms in your posts. Only tested with WP 2+ and not MU.
30. WordPress Database Backup Plugin
Obviously it creates backup files for your wordpress database and exports it in a file which you can save it.
CONTACT FORMS
31. Cforms 2
Best Contact form plugin which every blogger should use for it’s WordPress blog. I highly suggest you to use it for creating contact forms. It can be a little tricky for some of you but it worth to install it.
Another great contact form plugin. Easy to create and integrate in every post or page you want.
33. Contact Form 7
Simple and flexible contact form script
IMAGES GALLERY AND ADMINISTRATION
34. LightBox 2
Best images gallery effect you can get from a wordpress plugin. Lightbox opens the images in the same page in a iFrame sized as image and it adds a navigation bar right under it.
35. NextGen Gallery
Helps you to build and integrate a photo gallery right in your blog.
The author image plugin for WordPress lets you easily add author images to posts and articles on your site.
37. Get The Image
This is a highly intuitive script that gets an image either by custom field input or post attachment.
38. Inline Gallery
It’s quick, simple and basic, perhaps a little too basic, no thumbnail gallery display.
Integrates well with the blog, sort of odd that thumbnails open images in new blog page, then clicking image in blog page pops up a JS/AJAX image window, allows captioning of images in gallery.
40. Wp Highslide
Pretty slick, images expand in place, no gallery management features.
SOCIAL MANAGEMENT PLUGINS
41. Twitter updater
Send a Tweet to your Twitter account anytime you publish a new post to your blog, will automatically shrink it down via TinyURL.
42. Bookmark Me
Supports bookmarking to many international sites including German, Dutch, Lithuanian and more.
43. Social Boaster
Turns your Digg, Twitter and Delicious activities into a blog post that will be shared on your blog.
44. DandyID Services
DandyID is a free service that enables you to connect, manage, and share all of your online identities from a single location.
45. Twitter Tools
This plugin will create a connection between your blog and your twitter account and it will let you to manage things, updates and information.
This plugin will help you to submit automatically your blog posts to major social media websites. For the moment, Auto Social Plugin is working just with delicious but soon it will be available for more.
Monitors your social traffic activities.
48. Share This
Adds a cool menu to your blog with social sites you have choose from a list..
49. Notable
Notable will place buttons on your blog posts to different social media sites.
50. Digg This
Helps you to add the Dig This button to your site. Digg social plugin has the potential to drive huge traffic to your site in a relative short amount of time.
Allows users to choose if he wants to be informed about future comments on the article he commented on.
52. Spam Karma
Analyzes comments for spam based on a karma system.
53. Custom Smileys
Adds a bar with cool smileys for users to add in their comments.
54. OpenID Comments
Let’s users to comment using their openid account.
55. Bannage
Let’s you to ban users who commented on your blog by name or ip adress.
56. DoFollow
Removes the nofollow attribute from comments links. This will encourage people to comment on your blog more often.
57. Twitter Avatar on Comments
This plugin lets people to use the twitter avatar when they comment on your blog.
Plugin that works with WordPress 2+ versions and features AJAX. It allows quick and easy subscription and unsubscription options.
Displays Recent Comments in a widget.
Announces the user who commented on your blog when the comment posted was approved.
BONUS PLUGINS
Sometimes an RSS feed has a low bandwidth and during the page creation WordPress has to wait after those RSS feeds has been downloaded. This plugin allow the site to read the RSS after the page was created, not during the process.
This plugin provides a widget which can contain links to pages in the administration panel in one of your sidebars. These links are only visible to those already logged in as an administrator.
Speeds up the connection to the ping websites.
Creates Pagination for pages and makes the navigation on your blog much easier and faster.
Helps you to add adsense code to your blog and manage them.
This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference.
Adds a box befor or after the post (you choose) where is a text which says from what site the user comes from and asks for a digg, delicious bookmark, an upvote on reddit or just simple feed subscribtion.
CommentLuv
Shows the link to comment user last blog post under the name.
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Special thanks to plugin developers and my readers! Thank you!
If you have more plugins and you think they should be posted here just use the contact form and send us your ideas.
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I visited this blog first time and found it very interesting and informative.. Keep up the good work thanks..
very nice article…keep on the good work
hi, im using 5plugins to my site. Your post is very informative. now i can use other plugins which can help me to better optimize my blog.