[Updated for WP 2.7!] Looking for the most popular and best wordpress plugins used by professional bloggers? After problogging on WordPress for over 2 years, and after developing some wordpress plugins myself, I present you my top favorite 50 Best WordPress Plugins for Power Blogging.
Top WordPress Plugins and Widgets
The wordpress plugins are arranged broadly by category of usage. As far as I know, all these plugins are compatible with the latest WordPress 2.5 version. Please feel free to suggest great plugins in comments that I can add to this list.
Image by Peregrino
Manage WordPress Comments
- Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
- WP AJAX Edit Comments – Allows users and admins to edit comments on a post inline using AJAX.
- Close Old Posts – Closes comments on old posts without any DB queries.
- WP Grins – allows you to put clickable smilies on your post and comments forms.
- Live Comment Preview – the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.
- Show Top Commentators – Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.
- CommentLuv – shows a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment.
- MyAvatars – shows MyBlogLog?s avatars in your comments
- Comment Relish – Sends a thank you e-mail to your first time commentators.
- Favatars – displays the favicon associated with the commenter?s website.
- Dofollow – lets you remove the nofollow attribute from your comments.
- OpenID Comments for WordPress – allows users to leave comments using their OpenID.
- Extended Comment Options – allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts.
- Get Recent Comments – displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.
Stop WordPress Spam
- Akismet – intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.
- Bad Behavior – is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.
- WP-Contact Form with Spam Protection – creates a contact form on your blog, through which your readers can contact you easily.
- Defensio is a spam filtering web service to block comment spam.
- Digital Fingerprint ? useful for detecting content theft.
Expert WordPress SEO
- Google XML Sitemaps Generator – creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.
- Permalink Redirect – replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry?s (or archive?s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.
- All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
- Head META Description – Insert HTML META description tags using post excerpts.
- Enforce www. Preference – will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.
- Broken Link Checker – monitors and notifies you for broken links on your blog.
- Quick META Keywords – will automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post based on categories under which the article is categorized.
Easy WordPress Navigation
- Related Entries – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Increase pageviews by providing targeted related content.
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry.
- WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced page navigation to WordPress, which is very useful for navigation on index and category pages.
- Evermore – Abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. Helpful to create expandable posts summaries in WordPress. Combine with Less that changes the (more?) link so it displays the entire post, not just the part after the “more”.
- Random Redirect – Allows you to create a link to a random post on your blog. Lets readers browse in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.
- WP-Cumulus – displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere
- Lightbox JS Plugin – used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.
- Homepage Excerpts – Gives flexibility to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.
- WordPress Mobile Edition – shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.
- 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.
- Extended Live Archive – implements a dynamic, AJAXified way of digging into the archives of a blog.
- Landing Sites – When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, it shows them related posts to their search on your blog.
- Clean Archives – designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion. It lists the Month / Year, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article, and the number of comments that have been made on each article.
- Custom Query String – set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website like categories, archives, or search results pages.
- KB Advanced RSS Widget – a wordpress widget that gives you complete control over how RSS feeds are parsed for your sidebar.
- Permalinks Migration Plugin – safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website or affecting your search engine rankings.
Interactive WordPress Posts
- Share This – lets your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.
- Sociable – automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
- WP-Email – Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
- WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
- Viper’s Video QuickTags – easy posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo etc.
WordPress Twiter Plugins
- TweetSuite -? integrates Twitter with your blog with server-side TweetBacks, ReTweet-This buttons, digg-like Tweet-This Button, automatic tweeting of new posts etc.
- WP Twitip ID – Lets users add their twitter username to the comment form
- Check out more top Twitter plugins
WordPress Database tools
- WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Back up your blog today.
- WP-Supercache – A modification of WP-Cache that produces static html files.
- DB-cache – another caching plugin which claims your site will work much faster and will use less disk space for cached files.
- WP-DBManager – Lets you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.
WordPress Admin Management Tools
- PodPress – adds lots of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.
- TinyMCE Advanced – adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, the WordPress wysiwyg editor. Adds over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row.
- Exec-PHP – allows php tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files.
- Photo Dropper – lets you add free photos (Flickr / Creative Commons) to your blog posts without leaving WordPress.
- WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
- Admin Drop Down Menu – eliminates the need for this double clicking on the Admin screens by allowing you to see the second level menu just by placing your mouse over a main menu.
- 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.
- Theme Test Drive – allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as an administrator, while visitors continue to see the default one.
WordPress Advertising
- Ad Rotator – Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file.
- 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. More Google Adsense WP plugins.
- Buy Me a Beer – allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal on pretext of buying a beer.
- WordPress BankRoll – offers to help you cut out the middleman by allowing advertisers to buy reviews directly on your blog.
WordPress Blog Translation
- Global Translator – Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.
- Translator Plugin Pro – provides automatic machine translation of your blog in 13+1 languages. Costs $30.
Enhance WordPress RSS Feeds
- FD Feedburner – Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com
- Simple Feed Copyright – adds a simple copyright notice to full text wordpress feeds.
- Add Related Posts to Your Feed – adds a list of Related Posts to your full text feed. Requires either UTW or Related Posts plugin installed and activated.
- RSS Signature – allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds.
Random WordPress Stuff
- Democracy – adds AJAX polling functionality to your WordPress blog.
- flickrRSS – allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your weblog.
If you liked this, you might like our wordpress articles. I know there are many great wordpress plugins out there I might have missed, please suggest them in comments, and I might add them here. This post is constantly updated.
This ET post has helped me more than the 2 hours of plugin research I did on other sites yesterday! Not joking at all. I love how the ET blog posts are so well-written. So many other WordPress related sites just want to get your hit on a search engine and don’t seem to care so much about the content quality.
nice finding! I use a similar plugin which is called WordPress Backup to Dropbox. As the name says, it actually only offers to backup to Dropbox which is what I am fine with.
I have set it up to run once a day and besides the database it backs up everything located in the blog’s folder and what I didn’t exclude from backups.
I think in the end it doesn’t matter what product you use to to backups, as long as they are done and stored at a safe place. Too many people just rely on the backups offered by their hosting service.