78 Great WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

We have rated, ranked and categorized some of the best and most popular WordPress plugins to use on your blogs. These are sorted below by functionality so you can pick and choose which ones you think will enhance your blog.

Keep in mind the more plugins you add, the more “bloat” there is to your code and having extremely high amounts of plugins can slow down your page load times.

We don’t recommend installing all the plugins on this list, simply use this list as a tool to find ones that are most applicable to what you want to do. If you find you are not using a plugin, you should deactivate it so that it doesn’t negatively affect your site speed.

 

Plugins which enhance SEO (search engine optimization):

• Yoast SEO – The best SEO plugin you need for analysis and on page optimization of your site
• Broken Link Checker – A plugin for WordPress that checks your posts for broken links, and lets you know if any are found.
• Quick META Keywords – The Quick META Keywords WordPress Plugin will automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post on your wordpress blog. The keywords will be derived from the categories under which the article is categorized.
• SEO Friendly Images – automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes

• Robots Meta – the easiest way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages
• Redirection – helps you manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have
• SEO smart links – SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

 

Plugins which Help Fight Spam:

• Akismet – Akismet is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again. Great tool, comes built in on wordpress but you need a wordpress.com API to activate it (free and takes 1 minute)
• Bad Behavior – Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
• Comment Timeout – closes comments on old posts on your blog. It takes into account ongoing discussions by allowing you to keep comments open for longer if you have recently had any comments. Keep in mind this also may close out useful conversation as well.

Plugins which encourage Comments:

• Commentluv – This plugin will automatically show a link to a commentators last blog post inside their comment.
• Comment Relish – is developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before. The message dispatched to the user is defined within the plugin’s preferences. Numerous tags have been integrated to allow for information to be included in the message easily (I.E.: timestamp, author name, comment, ETC.).
• Top Commentators Plugin – Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.
• KeywordLuv – Reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their website, giving them improved anchor text.

Other Comment Related Plugins:

• WP-Gravatar – This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments.
• Edit Comments XT Plugin – A simple WordPress plugin that allows commentators to edit their own comments.
• Comment Karma – A plugin that allows users to rate or moderate other users comments. You can click thumbs up or down, and it will give them a positive or negative number.
• Highlight Author Comments – Highlight Author Comments automatically displays comments made by a post’s author in a distinctive style with no need to edit your template files.
• Comment Relish – Sends a customized email to first time commentators on your blog.
• WP Grins – provides clickable smilies for both the post form in the admin interface and the comments form.
• Riffly Webcam Video Comments – Bring some spice to your page by allowing audio / video comments.

Administrative and Stats Plugins

• Ozh? Admin Drop Down Menu – The lazy and the productive will love it, all admin links available in a neat horizontal CSS driven drop down menu.
• Ajaxed WordPress – An extremely powerful plugin that harnesses the power of AJAX and WordPress to improve the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential of any WordPress based blog.
• pageMash – Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output.
• MyFTP WordPress Plugin – Manage files on your server from within WordPress. WordPress administrators no longer need to rely on using a stand alone FTP client to edit, delete, upload and create files and folders.
• TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, WordPress? WYSIWYG editor
• Dashboard Editor – This plugin allows you to add whatever you want to the WordPress dashboard through PHP and HTML
• Manageable – A WordPress plugin that allows for inline editing of the date, title, author, categories, tags, status and more on both posts and pages without leaving the ?Manage? admin sections
• One Click Plugin Updater – Let’s you easily update and install plugins, with a single click.
• WordPress.com Stats – provides statistics about your visitors. Requires wordpress.com API key.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.
• Maintenance Mode Plugin – Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

Database Plugins

• WP-DB-Backup – Plugin allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables.
• WP Super Cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Blog Monetization Plugins

• OIO Publisher – Sell ad space on your own website without any middle men!  Makes collecting payments from advertisers a breeze!
• AdSense-Deluxe – AdSense-Deluxe is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.
• Buy Me a Beer – allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal. The plugin is widget enabled.
• AdRotator – A plugin which lets you easily rotate between different ads specified in a text file.
• WP125 – A 125×125 ad management solution for WordPress
• Link Cloaking plugin – allows you to cloak affiliate links on your site so they link within your own site and then redirect out to the affiliate link
• WP marketer – Manage all of your affiliate links and conversions without having to use multiple tools to set up ads in posts and landing pages, manage your inventory and track results. Now you can manage your online marketing with greater control and ease of use than ever before.

Image, Audio and Video Related Plugins

• NextGEN Gallery – A full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option
• Featured Content Gallery – Featured Content Gallery creates an automated, fully customizable rotating image gallery anywhere within your WordPress site. Note: not compatible with WordPress 2.8.
• Flickr Gallery – allows you to quickly and easily incorporate your Flickr photos into your WordPress pages and posts.
• Audio Player – allows you to insert mp3 audio files into your posts and pages
• Smart YouTube – allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists in your post, comments and in RSS feed.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags – easily embed videos from sites like youtube, metacefe, dailymotion etc.

Post, Category and Tag related Plugins

• Popularity Contest – Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular
• WP-PostViews – Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.
• Simple Tags – The perfect tool to manage perfectly your WP tags
• sCategory Permalink – Plugin allows to select category which will be used to generate permalink on post edit page.
• Exec-PHP – Executes PHP code in the excerpt and the content portion of your posts and pages. Configurable execution of PHP code in text widgets (for WordPress 2.2 or higher)

Navigation Related plugins

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – displays a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site
• Custom Query String ? lets you set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website.
• Pixopoint Multi-level Navigation Plugin – The plugin generates the code necessary to create a horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu.
• Yoast Breadcrumbs – This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

Social Bookmarking and Twitter Plugins

• Sociable – Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
• Lifestream – Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.
• ShareThis – lets your visitors add your post to various social bookmarking sites. Note: not compatible with WordPress 2.8
• Add To Any ? Helps readers share, save, and bookmark your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and all the rest
• Digg This – automatically displays a digg this button in posts.
• Twitter Tools – creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.
• WP-Email ? Allows people to send your WordPress blog’s post to a friend.
• TweetMeme Button – integrates the TweetMeme button which easily allows your blog to be retweeted
• WP Twitip ID ? Adds a field for twitter user names in the comment form
• Wordbook – This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook “Boxes” tab will show your most recent blog posts.

Miscellaneous Plugins

• WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog
• Contact Form 7 – A simple but flexible contact form plugin
• Global Translator ? automatically translates your blog into 41 languages.

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