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.
Comment Spam Prevention
- Akismet – Best guard against comment spam for WordPress blog!
Database and File Backup Plugins
- BackWPup – BackWPup will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you.
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. Install the all in one seo pack or the “WordPress SEO by Yoast” plugin (you don’t need to install both).
Blog Security Plugin
- All In One WP Security & Firewall – The All In One WordPress Security and Firewall is the ultimate security plugin that will take your WordPress site’s security to a whole new level.
- BulletProof Security – BulletProof security plugin offers website security protection against: XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection.
- Wordfence Security – The Wordfence WordPress security plugin provides free enterprise-class WordPress security.
Blog Statistics Related
- Google Analytics Dashboard – Displays Google Analytics reports in your WordPress Dashboard. Inserts the latest Google Analytics tracking code in your pages.
- Google Analytics – Enables Google Analytics on all pages. This one seems to be simple and does the job. However, the developer doesn’t seem to be very responsive.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin used to be really good but since the original developer sold this plugin, it has gone downhill (many users have reported to us that it doesn’t work well anymore). So I would recommend you to use one of the other alternatives listed above.
- WP Statistics – A comprehensive plugin for your WordPress visitor statistics (doesn’t use Google Analytics).
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.
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.
- Contact Form – The Contact Form plugin allows you to implement a feedback form to a web-page or a post in no time.
- Gravity Forms – Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building.
RSS Subscription Related
- 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.
Social Networking
- Social Media and Share Icons – Social media plugin which adds social media icons to your website with tons of customization features
- Sassy Social Share – This is a useful plugin that allows your visitors to share a post/page with others.
- 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.
- Google Adsense Plugin – Google AdSense Plugin allows you to set parameters of the ads displaying, such as format (text ad, image, text with an image or link), size, color of the elements in the ad block, rounded corners and the ad block position on the website.
- Google Adsense – The AdSense Plugin enables you to easily use Google’s products – including Webmaster Tools – with your WordPress site.
Photo Gallery Plugin
- NextGen Gallery – The most popular WordPress photo gallery plugin.
- Gallery – Gallery is an advanced plugin with a list of tools and options for adding and editing images for different views.
E-commerce, Paypal, Stripe, Donation and Payment Related
- 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.
- Stripe Payments – A simple and lightweight plugin to accept payment on your site (for a product or service) via the Stripe payment gateway.
- 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 payment widget on your site (you can add it to the sidebar or a page or a post of your blog).
- WordPress eStore – This plugin provides a complete solution to sell products from your site. It is really good for selling digital products securely from your WordPress blog.
- WordPress Donations Widget Plugin – The WordPress Donations Widget Plugin allows you to collect donation for a cause from your WordPress powered site.
- WP Express Checkout – This plugin allows you to use the PayPal Express Checkout Gateway to accept payment for goods and services. Provides and overlay checkout experience for fast and easy checkout.
Membership Plugin
- Simple Membership Plugin – The simple membership plugin lets you protect your posts and pages so only your members (free or paid) can view the protected content.
- WP eMember – WP eMember is a feature rich membership plugin that can turn your existing or new WordPress site into a powerful membership site.
Affiliates Management
- 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.
Software License Management
- Software License Manager – This plugin allows you to create a software license management solution for your web applications (WordPress plugins, Themes, PHP based membership script etc.)
Other Very Useful Plugins
- Download Monitor – This plugin is very useful for managing and tracking your digital file downloads. You can track which file is being downloaded how many times and who is downloading them.
- 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.
- Crayon Syntax Highlighter – A plugin to highlight any code in your posts or pages. very handy if you use example codes in your Blog.
- Mailpoet Newsletters – Send newsletters, post notifications or autoresponders from WordPress easily, and beautifully.
- 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.
- EWWW Image Optimizer – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically and losslessly optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.
- WP Video Lightbox – The WordPress Video Lightbox plugin allows you to embed videos on a page using lightbox overlay display. This plugin can be used to display images, flash, YouTube, Vimeo, iFrame etc in a nice lightbox overlay.
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.
@karan, it really depends on your preference and what you want to do. I personally use cForms.
I am still confused between cforms and wp contact form . Which according to you is the best?
A 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!
Thanks for sharing this list!
I’d recommend you take a look at SEO Ultimate, it beats all in one SEO hands down in terms of features.
hey thanks for the list! i am already using some of the plugins, and will try the others you listed here.
please add all in one seo to your list of best wordpress plugins i really love that plugin so much.
Another useful plugin you “must install” is the GT Translator, which translate the blog/ site by selecting the language on a menu or flame.
Thanks for the share mate. Loved all the plugins that you have mentioned, very useful ones .
I have to say that everytime I see a top wordpress plugin post, Akisment, Wp Cache, and the WP Database back up are always on that list, and I use them on every blog, great must haves.
hey thanks for the list! i am already using some of the plugins, and will try the others you listed here.
g8 effort and ya this list is really helpful..
Great Share. Thanks for the list, Will use few of them. Keep sharing stuff like this.
All in One SEO Pack and Akismet are the best plugins ever. Nowadays most of the blogs can not live without them.
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
Awesome post. Loved it.
As long as you are keeping a backup of your DB you should be fine. No need to switch.
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.
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
Great list of plugins. I think headspace is better than all in one seo. Thanks
I do agree with Mr. Quik.
That’s very cool, can record IP address that failed login.
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.
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.
@Jim, glad to hear that 🙂
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!
Again a great and informative post, I am off to add some plugins to my site!
Great WP plug-ins list.
Using some of them, but also found few new that I may try.
Thanks for the suggestions!
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the suggestion.. yeah NextGen gallery is the best wordpress gallery plugin in my opinion.
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.
Hi
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
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.
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.
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
Found some new useful apps, thanks allot.
Thank you very much for putting all these things together. We don’t have to go anywhere.
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
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.
Very good collection of plug-ins. But instead of All in One SEO Pack can use Platinum SEO, it has more functions and settings
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 (https://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)
thank u for the good plugins list . Is seo friendly images plugin useful and important to wordpress images Or not ?
Great post very helpful.
Where did you get the Subscribe and Feed-burner buttons?
@Egor, Thanks, I updated the list.
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.
Great post! I just added 2 more plugins to my site. Thanks!
Hey thanks for this list, I see a couple I will add!
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.
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!
Hey! I like your page 🙂 This is a good and useful WP plugin list. I need to start using the DB backup plugin.