50 Best WordPress Plugins for Power Blogging
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.
Table of Contents
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.
- MyAvatars – shows MyBlogLogs avatars in your comments
- Comment Relish – Sends a thank you e-mail to your first time commentators.
- Favatars – displays the favicon associated with the commenters website.
- Dofollow – lets you remove the 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 archives) 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.
- 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.
Random WordPress Stuff
- Democracy – adds AJAX polling functionality to your WordPress blog.
- flickrRSS – allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your weblog.
I know there are many great wordpress plugins out there I might have missed, please suggest them in comments.
Great list. I’ve used many of these. Anyone have a good sitemap plugin, not for google purposes but to have a nice index or table of contents?
nice post. :) very helpful. I downloaded some of the plugins you mention and used it on my blog. thanks for sharing.
Do these plugins still work in WordPress 2.6.2?
Great list of powerful plugins which i hadn’t noticed earlier. I’ve download few of them and bookmarked this page.
Thanks for sharing this. Cheers.
This is an awesome post. Thanks for writing it. I just recently added a whole bunch of these plugins to my wordpress blog.
i came here just for a couple of plugins, and instead i picked up some good usage for other plugins that im going to start using on all my blogs. ive only recently just started blogging and still learning as i go.
thanks for helpful post..:)
John Braman
This is amazing, I was looking for a list of best plugin for wordpress and here it is.
Thanks for sharing the resource :)
wow… nice wordpress resource..
i particularly liked the Admin Management Plugins.
thanks for posting.
The URL for Bad Behavior is wrong.
Good Tutorial! But is there any plugin to add the tags for the blog post?
Hello,
A comprehensive and detailed plugin collection. Some of them I will into the limelight and most of them are known to me or I use these plug-ins already.
Ad Rotator look I need. Thanks for the tips.
Alex greetings …
hi very nice collection need plugin for for masking posts. The content which is hidden can only be seen by registered user.Please help me out thaks
Great list.
I’d like to add retaggr. The wordpress plugin adds context to your blog posts and comments by providing an easy way to understand your community. It does this by providing you with a retaggr card – which is an interesting way of showing who you are, guaging credibility etc. Proper explanation and details at retaggr.com.
Great plugins!! I specially like the Permalinks Migration Plugin. I was planning how to change my permalink structure but this plugin will help me a lot, thanks for sharing!
Hi there,
Know anyone which plugin to use if I want only a part of the article to be displayed? If someone want to read more there will be a “read more” link…
On my blog right now is displayed all of article content and I don’t want this…
I’m talking about the latest 10 articles displayed on the first page of my blog.
I’m using WordPress.
Can anyone help?
One of the best plugins index.Better than the WordPress plugins site itself.Thank You
Some good suggestions here. I just used Google XML Sitemaps Generator and it did a great job. I also like the idea of the Theme Test Drive.
Another couple of plugins for your list, to improve WordPress’s rubbish search facility:
Search Everything – search pages, not just posts.
Search Reloaded – lists search results by relevance.
Good work in this post , I’m really inspired by your post and blog. Well and im a lot from here.
WordPress rocks, but wordpress with power pluggins will add more ammo to your ammunitions.
You will be twice as much stronger.
Cheers.
You could add to your list the new Divva plugin for WordPress: DivvaFlip
DivvaFlip 1.0 : make your photos galleries more glamorous with a flipping engine on your WordPress blog.
A very cool website with quality photos. it’s fun , easy and it’s free : so enjoy !
would be nice if the send email plugin could open in a pop up window and look like the one on the guardian newspaper!!
Wow, this is even better than the previous post about plugins I found on your blog. I am pretty excited about checking some of these plugins out and getting them setup on my blog.
I am new to blogging and have 13 readers on my blog now. Man, I am impressed with the amount of readers you have…
I need a jukebox plugins for the WP 2.3.1 Anybody have or who can wirte it for me?
Thanks for this great list. Also, some of these plugins won’t be needed with WordPress 2.5+ including “Full Text Feed”.
Just found this through one of the del.icio.us RSS feeds, and I’ve subscribed!
I’ve viewed dozens of these lists and usually don’t find anything new at all. You not only had some wordpress plugins I’d never heard of that do things I don’t currently have any solution for – but the way you categorized them and described them made it much easier to decide which ones I needed to download.
thanks – a great resource!
I would recommend my plugin, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin as an alternative to the Related Entries plugin. My new plugin does not require any SQL query or any tampering with theme files, and limits the number of related entries produced by a “relatedness” threshold rather than an arbitrary number of posts. Let me know if you have any questions!
mitcho
I just recently converted my site to WordPress and this will really help me save time searching for all the great plugins. Thanks!
I would also add WordPress automatic upgrade. It is a life saver on updating wordpress. I never used the upgrade plug-in that you mentioned.
I also like better comments manager too because I hate going back and responding to commenters in a particular post. With this plug-in you can enter right there in the comment section of wordpress.
One thing I have found,the more plug-ins the slower the site. Has anyone else found this too? Plus I need a popular article sidebar plug-in for Wp 2.3.2. I just want my most popular read article to show up on a side bar. Simple.
Any suggestions. I tried Alex King’s popularity plug-in. I want something that just shows up on the sidebar. Anna http://www.green-talk.com
What a great list! I’ve just started my blog, and this is just what I needed to find today. Thanks!
Great post with a great list of WordPress Plugins. I’m starting a new blog and now I have a great list of plugins to use. Thanks
You missed forum plugins… Best one is over at:
Simple Forum.
And now there’s a new forum plugin to the market:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/talki-embeddable-forums/#stats
great post to let every one know on one place what to choose rather than search for each one
You’ve saved me a ton of time by compiling and sharing this list. A couple of these plugins are going really helpful additions. Thank you!
The first plugin I now install on a new blog is “PlugInstaller”. Gets me out of ftp mode.
Thanks for this great list! I just finished installing the math comment spam plugin and am looking at a couple others to add as well. I’ve linked to this post on my site, this is valuable information!
This is an awesome list. Most of the plugins that I’m using are on this list. There are many more I could use, especially the RSS-related ones.
Great job :)
Great list, a lot to learn.
Somebody, please, explain why can’t I see at the WP Admin Page for Plugins the plugin I’ve uploaded to FTP? I can’t see it, I can’t activate it. Do I have to chmod anywhere?
Great list of add-ons, I just recently migrated by custom blog to WordPress so I’m in the business of finding random plugins right now. I’m trying not to get too carried away with features.
I have seen some sites that have entirely too many options that make everything a little confusing when all you want to do is read the post.
waw… there are so many useful plugins, thanks for the info.
Very finest Plugin Index.
If is so much importent.
goood Luck NN
I love plugins! I would also recommend StatsPress and WP-Polls, once traffic is beginning to build up. Both can be used to gain insight into your readers. Thanks for your list, which includes a number that are new to me. Especially like your brief description for each one — very helpful.
I’m interesting in a plugin to serve geo located ads. Any idea ?
A fantastic list which is well worth bookmarking!
My Favs are:-
– All in one SE
– Google XML sitemap
Jamie
I believe the best plugin for inserting adsense into posts is the “All in One Adsense and YPN” plugin:
http://linewbie.com/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-adsense-and-ypn
Thanks a lot for this list. I never knew the existence of Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin…
Hope you will make more list like this one in future.
– Abdul Rahman
Timeless post, it is going to my bookmarks… keep rocking!
additions
Trackback Validator – *extremely* valuable – highly underutilized
http://seclab.cs.rice.edu/projects/
WordPress PDA – makes simple mobile phone site
https://www.imthi.com/wp-pda
attribtuion link welcomed :)
WordPress rocks, but wordpress with power pluggins will add more ammo to your ammunitions.
You will be twice as much stronger.
Cheers.
Respect, thanks and tausend Dank!
This plug-ins are really very helpful for high-quality content management!
Im writing the same article about Joomla CMS extentions, which are helpful for easy and semiautomated Joomla Blogging. There are not many plattforms, which give so much extentions and freedom on publishing methods as WordPress and Joomla CMS.
I second the suggestion of Custom Query String. Great list though. Very helpful.
Custom Query String – set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website like categories, archives, or search results pages.