Top List of the Best and Must Use WordPress Plugins

List of the Best and Must Use WordPress Plugins

Categories: Blog Setup, Blogging Tips, Featured, Wordpress Plugin

This page has a list of some of the best WordPress Plugins out there. Check out this list of top WordPress plugins and find out which plugins you should be using to improve your blogging efficiency.

Must Use Plugins

Akismet – best guard against comment spam for WordPress blog!
WordPress Database Backup – This plugin is a life saver when things go wrong! It allows on-demand backup of your WordPress database.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

WordPress SEO by Yoast – Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. If you are using the “WordPress SEO by Yoast” plugin then don’t install this one.
Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Blog Statistics Related

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This plugin requires a WordPress.com API key to function.

Caching Plugin

W3 Total Cache - The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. After you use the w3 total cache plugin you won’t go back to using WP Super Cache.
WP Super Cache - WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

Blog Security

LoginLockdown – Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery

E-commerce, Paypal Donation and Payment

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart – is a very easy to use plugin that allows you to sell products or services online in one click from your WordPress blog. Very useful when you want to sell eBooks or digital products from various posts and pages and need a WordPress Shopping Cart solution.
WP Easy Paypal Payment Accept – This is a very easy to use WordPress plugin to Accept donation or Paypal payment for a service or a product in one click. Handy when you are trying to put a customized donation option in the sidebar of your blog.
WordPress eStore – This plugin provides a complete solution to sell digital products securely from your wordpress blog.

Membership Plugin

WordPress eMember – WordPress eMember is a membership plugin that can turn your existing or new WordPress site into a membership site easily.

RSS Subscription Related

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader.
Category Specific RSS Menu – A simple WordPress plugin to add category specific RSS subscription menu into your posts, pages, sidebars. Very handy when your blog covers multiple topic from non related subjects. This plugin was developed by me.

Contact Forms Related

Contact Form 7 - Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
cforms – cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin.
WP Contact form – WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you.

Social Networking

Sociable – Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
Share This – This is a very useful plugin that allows your visitors to share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.
Fat Free WordPress Social Share Buttons Plugin - This is a very simple and FAT FREE share button plugin that adds Google plus one, Facebook and Twitter share buttons to your blog posts.

For Google Adsense

Simple Google Adsense insertion – Easy to use WordPress plugin to insert Google Adsense to your posts, pages and sidebar. This plugin was developed by me.
Adsense-Deluxe – Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Capable of handling complex adsense management.

Affiliate Related

WP Affiliate Platform – WordPress plugin for affiliate recruitment, management and tracking. This plugin lets you run your own affiliate campaign/program and allows you to reward (pay commission) your affiliates for referred sales.
WordPress Affiliate Link Cloaker – Allows you to automatically convert specific keywords from your blog posts and pages into your affiliate links. It also cloaks the affiliate links and gives it a prettier and shorter alias (great for an affiliate marketer).

Other Very Useful Plugins

Simple Tags – This is one of my most favorite plugins. It makes my WordPress Tagging life so much easier. It helps with Auto completion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags.
Executable PHP Widget – Like the Text widget, but it will take PHP code as well. Very handy for inserting custom ‘php’, ‘html’, ‘javascript’ in the sidebar.
SyntaxHighlighter Plus – A plugin to highlight any code in your posts or pages. very handy if you use example codes in your Blog.
WordPress Newsletter subscription – Creates a simple form to collect subscription requests to newsletter software managed mailing lists.
WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. Allows you to easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.
No Self Pings – This plugin does exactly what the name suggests.
Exclude Pages – This plugin lets you manually exclude WordPress pages from the navigation menu. Comes in handy when you are trying to create hidden pages.
WP Smush.it – This WordPress plugin reduces image file size and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress. Everytime you upload an image to your media uploader this plugin will automatically compress the image without losing quality!

This page will be regularly updated to keep the plugin list up to date and relevant. Please suggest your favorite plugins through the comment area below so I can check them out and possibly add them to this useful plugins list. Don’t forget to checkout the Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Site article too.

Articles you may also like:

#1 by Barbara on February 13, 2011 - 12:23 am

I have now changed to WordPress SEO by Yoast You Should Review that plug-in
More control over on page SEO and many more benefits

Latest site using Yoast SEO Removing Cat Urine

#2 by Flowers on February 7, 2011 - 2:00 pm

Awesome post. Loved it.

#3 by admin on January 3, 2011 - 9:24 am

As long as you are keeping a backup of your DB you should be fine. No need to switch.

#4 by Claude Needham on January 2, 2011 - 11:52 pm

I use the wp-dbmanager database plugin. Was wondering if you could comment on your choice of WP-DB-Backup. Just wondering if they were about the same, or perhaps I should consider switching.

#5 by John Gamings on January 2, 2011 - 5:01 am

Nice list. One suggestion I would make is replacing the WP Database Backup with the plugin BackupBuddy, which is a really amazing plugin that can make an entire copy of a wordpress site in 30 seconds

#6 by classifieds on December 21, 2010 - 2:35 am

Great list of plugins. I think headspace is better than all in one seo. Thanks
.-= classifieds´s last blog ..Work at Home- No signup fees- Unlimited Income =-.

#7 by Robin on December 4, 2010 - 8:14 pm

I do agree with Mr. Quik.
That’s very cool, can record IP address that failed login.

#8 by DUB on December 4, 2010 - 6:23 am

Wow, I find all these plugins a little mind boggling. I will have to go through the list again. At the moment I use Askinet and all in one SEO and find them very helpful. I can also recommend Word press database backup as it works perfectly.
.-= DUB´s last blog ..The Best Beat Making Software =-.

#9 by Mr. Quik on November 30, 2010 - 12:24 pm

I had never heard of LoginLockdown and after doing a bit of Googling it seems to be a pretty great tool. Did you know that you can use it to record every IP address that has a failed login? It’s kinda cool. I’m new to the WordPress scene so I’m not sure why IP logging is needed, but it’s a great tool nonetheless.

#10 by admin on November 18, 2010 - 1:00 am

@Jim, glad to hear that

#11 by Jim on November 17, 2010 - 11:43 pm

Your team has great taste in plug-ins, I know cause I’m already using at least half of these on one site or another! Well done T&T, you are always on top of what’s best and available out there for developers like me. Thanks!

#12 by Chris Slinger on November 15, 2010 - 9:33 am

Again a great and informative post, I am off to add some plugins to my site!

#13 by Wood Carving Macedonia on November 2, 2010 - 8:54 pm

Great WP plug-ins list.
Using some of them, but also found few new that I may try.
Thanks for the suggestions!
.-= Wood Carving Macedonia´s last blog ..Wood Carving Articles- Useful Tips and Tricks for Wood Carvers =-.

#14 by Jason on August 8, 2010 - 4:12 pm

This is one of the best “must-have” plugin lists I’ve seen. Of course, that could be because I’m already using several of your suggestions! I am also planning on purchasing a couple of your premium plugins. Thanks for the great work! I also second the user above who mentioned Platinum SEO Pack, I think it’s fantastic. I also use Secure WordPress.

Keep up the good stuff.
.-= Jason´s last undefined ..If you register your site for free at =-.

#15 by e-businessmom on July 22, 2010 - 8:56 pm

Thanks mucho for this article. I use some of these plugins and I am grateful to you for this complete list. I will go back to my plugin manager to see what I need to install based on your list. Thanks again.

#16 by Alex Zagoumenov on July 21, 2010 - 3:19 am

Thanks for the article! I’ve been using HeadSpace as my SEO plugin of choice. I used it on a few properties including bi-lingual sites and it’s worked great for me. Thanks again for putting together the links. A lot of valuable plugins.
.-= Alex Zagoumenov´s last blog ..Online marketing- SEO and launching a new website =-.

#17 by admin on July 19, 2010 - 10:23 am

Thanks for the suggestion.. yeah NextGen gallery is the best wordpress gallery plugin in my opinion.

#18 by Iluminação LED on July 19, 2010 - 10:05 am

This is a very useful post. I wish to recommend a images gallery pluggin: is the NextGen Gallery. It automatically style, resize and manage images only or images galleries on WP blogs. It also add JavaScript effects, like “Lightbox” to the images.

#19 by Mathews@dedicated servers on July 12, 2010 - 11:59 am

I tried most the plugins above. But simple tags plugin makes my site down due to resources over usage on server. So i just lost the installation. there is another simple plugin called “search engine related posts” is a good one.

Please include this in your list.

Regards
Mathews

#20 by Wilsan on June 15, 2010 - 7:39 am

This is definitely one of the best list of most useful wordpress plugins to run a successful blog. I would like to add one simple but useful plugin which is the “page link to”. This plugin will enable a direct link of a wordpress page to another website.

#21 by CodeInDesign on June 15, 2010 - 1:35 am

Thank you for listing all these plugins.
I think you should add Headspace2 SEO at the list.
It could be compared with AIO and Platinum SEO.

#22 by John Media@dedicated server on June 8, 2010 - 7:40 am

Well I haven’t used WP yet but this is really helpful. I’m really looking for some hints that relates to WP because I would like to use WP to start my site and would surely use what plugins you recommended. Thanks

#23 by Elias on May 19, 2010 - 7:44 am

Found some new useful apps, thanks allot.
.-= Elias´s last blog ..Hotel workers who hate WOTIF.com =-.

#24 by Umesh on May 11, 2010 - 10:41 pm

Thank you very much for putting all these things together. We don’t have to go anywhere.

#25 by The Watermark Group on May 3, 2010 - 3:38 pm

I’ve been reading your posts. You have a really great website, and this is a great list of WordPress plugins.

Keep it up!

Cheers,

John
.-= The Watermark Group´s last blog ..Create Images With Rounded Corners with RoundPic =-.

#26 by Richard Cummings on April 22, 2010 - 3:34 pm

A very solid list of plug-ins. My fav would have to be the PHP plugin and something that I use with Google Sitemap which actually creates a sitemap page. It’s from Dagon Sitemap design.
.-= Richard Cummings´s last blog ..SEO: Keyword Competitive Analysis =-.

#27 by Softshare on February 10, 2010 - 8:26 pm

Very good collection of plug-ins. But instead of All in One SEO Pack can use Platinum SEO, it has more functions and settings

#28 by admin on November 3, 2009 - 12:59 am

The SEO friendly images plugin just adds the “alt” and “title” tag to your images which is good but It’s something you should always do manually when you use images on your blog for SEO purpose anyway (http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/?p=701).

I try not to use plugins for simple things that you can do easily by urself (otherwise the plugin list starts to get very big and don’t forget every plugin you use takes up resources on your blog and server)

#29 by Osama on November 2, 2009 - 11:06 pm

thank u for the good plugins list . Is seo friendly images plugin useful and important to wordpress images Or not ?
.-= Osama´s last blog ..Google Docs a free web based office suite =-.

#30 by tio sancho007 on July 25, 2009 - 2:46 pm

Great post very helpful.
Where did you get the Subscribe and Feed-burner buttons?

#31 by admin on July 23, 2009 - 11:38 pm

@Egor, Thanks, I updated the list.

#32 by Egor on July 23, 2009 - 8:59 pm

Nice post, thank you. I use almost all of these plugins. BTW you don’t really need SEO Title Tag if you use All-In-One SEO Pack. You can customize post title with All-In-One SEO Pack.

#33 by MaroDesign on June 12, 2009 - 11:04 am

Great post! I just added 2 more plugins to my site. Thanks!

#34 by Steve Patterson on May 27, 2009 - 2:51 am

Hey thanks for this list, I see a couple I will add!

#35 by Andrew Donaldson on April 9, 2009 - 5:23 pm

I was glad to see that I use most of the plugins you mention but a few new ones to me. I am looking forward to using the Executable PHP Widget, I’m sure i will be very useful.

#36 by Darren (Green Change) on February 18, 2009 - 9:45 pm

Nice roundup of useful feeds. I didn’t know about FeedSmith before – just installed it and it seems very good. Hopefully soon I’ll find out how many RSS readers I have!

#37 by Jamie on December 27, 2008 - 6:14 pm