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 -Â 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 -Â 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.
Nice list 🙂 This list was one of the guides that helped me choose the best plugins
Being a newbie the list is very essential for me tnx mate for your effort…
All plugins are very good. But this list is too big, if all installed , the website may not afford the heavy load. youre not supposed to install ALL of them. Many offer duplicate functionality anyway. The point is to use this list to find the best plugins suitable to your site.
Awesome list here. Thanks a lot.
Such a great list, productivity is a goner now – I am going pour over these names for the next day 🙂
My personal favorites are Akismet, All-in-one SEO and ClickDesk for chat.
Thanks for the list! I been looking for some good plugins to add to my site.
Thanks again.
You can try Gravity Forms plugin:
http://www.gravityforms.com/
What’s a good contact form plugin that also has an auto-responder? I’ve downloaded a few but they seem to be outdated and glitchy. Do you know of any up-to-date plugins that are capable of doing this?
Thank you so much! It helps a lot. 🙂 Is there a need for firewall at all?
These were very helpful for me, just wanted to thank you.
@Ronald, This might be a possible solution for you:
https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-video-lightbox-plugin-display-videos-in-a-fancy-lightbox-overlay-2700
Any recommendation for video?
Great list of plugins have some of them but will now add some of the ones I’ve seen here, just added the ShareThis plugin love it
In the process of converting my website to wordpress and these are great tips!. thanks
Great article use most of them already although will try W3 Total Cache –
Great list of plugins .. nice work
Very comprehensive list, I have used or do use many of these.
I highly recommend BulletProofSecurity as a plugin that helps keep your WordPress site secure. Having been hacked a while back I have installed this and feel a lot happier. It has a lot of functionality that enables you to lock down your site, and can notify you if your core files have changed.
Thanks for the great list of plugins. I knew about most of them but there were certinaly some very useful ones I hadn’t heard if before that I am now useing. Thanks for the effort you pot into collating this list. Jason
thanks for share this great list of plugin
That’s really brilliant. Almost all of the much needed plugins in one post. I must say that some of the plugins mentioned here are very essential. Specially W3-total cache plugin, which I initially did not installed on my site. It helped to improve my site.
Best plugin list, I am totally with Barbara on Yoast SEO. It has my voite for favorite SEO plugin
I think this is the best plugin list I ever found, divided in categories so that I could scan the plugins easily according to my needs, thanks a lot. I found some and ready to install them.
Nice and complete list. Any body don’t need to search more on internet to search more plugins. You have provided almost all the must have plugins to run a wordpress blog. Thanks a lot for such a nice article.
Very nice collection I use many of these for my sites.
Very Informative Article..its all great lists of plugins….i have been wondering ….Lol because very new to these terms..Thanks and regards…keep it up
Great list. Got some ideas for the apps you have listed. Any suggestions for a simple plugin to manage ad banners? I would like for people to upload their ad and make a payment through Paypal directly.
wow…amazing info…really best tutorial wordpress…thanks for your tutorial..i like it
Nice collections. I realize that my blog is more useful because of plugins.. Thanks on your great post!!!
Till now I’m not using all in one seo plugins but now I think I must have that plugins for my site…! Thanks
Thanks for your valuable information.this content useful for my blog.
Excellent list! Some are outdated, but some should come standard with every WP install.
what a huge collection of plugins!!!!! very helpful………….. nice to know. i will use some of these plugins on my web blog.
Very solid list! Lot of work on this list. Thanks. I like GASP plugin for anti-spam and “Better WordPress Google XML Sitemap” plugin for sitemaps although the one you listed is def solid1
Thanks,
jupiter jim
Thank you for listing the best Word Press plugins. Most of them I use and enjoy. There are times when the odd plugin ceases to either function or it stops another plugin from operating properly. For instance most recently I was not able to post the html for links within my articles. Come to find out it was a testimonial plugin which was the problem. I deactivated the plugin and voila my links were restored.
Thanks again.
Chris
great list, i heard some of them but all of them are perfect
Executable PHP Widget – The one that I’m looking for. Perfect.
Many thanks for this 🙂
Thank you for the list.
Recommendations are one of the best ways to find plugins. The WordPress repository search is not good at finding results. With 17,000 plugins I’ve wondered why they didn’t do a better search.
Fortunately, there is a better search for the wordpress plugin repository at http://searchwordpressplugins.com There you can filter you results by rating and numbers of ratings and numbers of downloads as well as excluding broken plugins. It is a really good quick tool to make short lists of plugins.
Ciao,
Rex
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 would also defenately add: “Tweetblender” the perfect plugin for displaying tweets and constantly refreshing content!
that’s a nice list i seen about wp plug ins 🙂
thanks anyway
Thanks so much for this article! It saves me tons of time and heartache to know what plugins are useful and trusted.
Im using a lot of these but some of them i didn’t know existed. thanks ill be sure to check them out!
Don’t forget a really powerful plugin called: incoming search terms. It dynamically adds the terms people used to get to your page through Google. Let others do the finetuning for you! Thanks!
Here are some more free plugin resources that are useful.
WP Hide Post By Robert Mahfoud
Revision Control By Dion Hulse
Platinum SEO Pack By Rajesh – Techblissonline Dot Com
No Follower By de77.com
SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam By Mike Challis
Redirection By John Godley
Amin is the MAN. 2 years later he is still rocking hard with some high quality products!
and add these ones:
1) Ultimate SEO Plugin
2) Exploit Scanner for WP
3) contact form 7
4) yet another related posts plugin
5) Social Dropdown + Facebook Likes U
They are epic 😉
Thanks for this list of top WordPress plugins – a fine list, indeed. I must echo a previous comment and strongly recommend using the SEO Ultimate plugin – it’s fantastic!
WordPress is an incredible piece of work. Powerful and intuitive years ago, new versions are beyond what I ever would have desired. WordPress plus plugins can do just about anything you need it to. I strongly recommend WordPress not only for blogs but for standard websites, too. The price is right!
Stephen Frasier, Nashville SEO & Web Content
This is a great list of resources for wordpress users! I was thinking of migrating my blog to the wordpress platform and this wonderful list will definitely help me when I design and build my site!
Great list of plugins here, found a few that i’d not seen before, great recommendations! Thanks!
Even though most of it’s collective tools are available separately I’ve always used the All-in-one SEO pack of tools for every one of my Word Press installations. Other plugins may have all the features of this pack, and in some cases are more flexible or robust but I just prefer having the single control panel for my various SEO functions and I really like how the tools work seamlessly together.