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.
I am looking for a plugin that will serve the purpose of indexing my post instantly to GOOGLE. in google webmaster tool you have option to FETCH AS CRAWLER and once it is done it fetcht he page and gives an option to get it indexed almost within few hours. But there is limitation of 10 Fetches. Is there any plugin similar to this?
Any help will be appriciated.
Regards
Excellent round up of wordpress plugins. I’ve just been through the lot and will recommend these to my list. Thanks
Very impressive collection, quite a few I haven’t seen before, even after so many years blogging and searching for plugins, cheers.
Thanks a lot for the exhaustive list. I am particularly impressed by the Security plugins. My wp blogs hacked couple of times and I lost all my work but these will help me to take regular back ups and be safe!!
Thanx a lot for that great list of pluggins!! This would be of great help!!
Hi is there a plugin that,brings you the ability to create a wordpress , and auto post posts by pulling content from Amazon, Youtube and article directories,ect,ect
Hi !
may be you forgot this little bad boy :)
https://wordpress.org/plugins/category-icons-lite/
It’s a no-brainer version ! :)
you can also use disq.us for comment posting
Hi is there a plugin that,brings you the ability to create a wordpress , and auto post posts by pulling content from Amazon, Youtube and article directories,ect,ect
I love plugins! I would also recommend StatsPress and WP-Polls, once traffic is beginning to build up.
A new plugin I can’t w8 for it to be done
thanks for making a new plugin
the old plugin does not seem to be working all the way.
the woopra chat thing does nto seem to work on my WP
so I hope it works in the new plugin
The most SMS and Newsletter using Plugins i cannot suggest. On my blogs the most software dont work. There are some bugs but i cannot find them. But it doesnt matter because there are enough other usefull plugins … thousend of them. WordPress is a great thing.
Great list, it helped me out tremendously. Thanks for putting it together.
You have saved my time.Thanks for the list.
Best plugins…nice…we are looking to switch to wp for our site.
Great resource! But I agree with Sci-fi Si, how about an updated posting with a more current listing. You did a great job with this one, I am sure the next would be just as poplular!
Would like to recommend a tool I use for creating web menus for my WP site:
AllWebMenus WordPress Menu Addin:
https://www.likno.com/addins/wordpress-menu.html
You might want to give it a try.
Great read, to me the best wp plugin is the share it plugin because it allows users to share your content.
Very nice list! I was looking for something similar.. It helped me very well!
thanks..
I would like to have a WordPress Plugin I can use to create a WordPress blog page on my existing WP site in a format just like this page, but I’m literally overwhelmed by the number of plugins available. Maybe somebody could point me in the right direction??
Thanks for the article, I just built a blog with WordPress so your article is really help :)
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Headspace recommended.
Some great plugins there. I’ve just installed some of them onto my new blog. Looks like the Enforce www. Preference plugin is now a core part of wordpress.
Thanks for this list, but now we’re at the end of 2009 and no comments have been posted for nearly two years, do you have any plans on updating your list?
All the best
Si
Hi dude, I have a WordPress comment plugin or standalone Web application to record, save and listen audio comments/messages.
Voice-it allows you to record voice messages and send it to you or your friends by mail as mp3 attachments.
You can use it in your website, on facebook or download the widget for other platform.
Try it and send us your message, or send a voice messages to your friend! Isn’t easy?
I hope you enjoy it.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/voice-it-record-and-send-voice/
or
Best
Thanks for the essay.
Can I put this essay to my general content site?
Thank you so much again.
Hi,
Are you using the wordpress mobile edition on your blog? I’ve just tried browsing with a couple of phones and got the web version instead of mobile!
I’ve created a mobile plugin for wordpress that makes sure every device in the world works as well as retaining SEO, keeps the same URLS from web to mobile and makes sure your mobile site looks as good as the web theme.
Version 1.3 has just been released – here are a few of the features available:
– dynamic resizing of images
– commenting on mobile
– customize each and every element!
The homepage can be found here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wapple-architect/ – it’d be great to hear your feedback on it if you want to give it a go.
How about improving the WordPress search? My plugin Relevanssi makes the search work much better.
Very well written post however, I would recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section.
Keep up the good work.
Hey, Thank you so much for your awesome post. This really help us wordpress noobs finding quality plugins for our sites. Best wishes!
Neat list.
Thanks for sharing.
i require plugins for making photo-blog site and other users can upload images
kinldy suggest
This is a really great post! I could really use a good login plugin. The one I’m using takes each new subscriber directly to my admin page when they login, I want them to go directly to my site’s home page…how do I do that?
Great list!
Nice to know the various solutions to the spam problem. however, I don’t see SpamTask listed, which I use myself. got it yesterday, and think it works better than my akismet did. I had about 1 spam message averagely a day passing through Akismet, and it sometimes caught a friend of mine. SpamTask has so far worked without mistakes. catches all spambots.
I think it’s worth adding to the list.
This is a great resource – Bookmarked!
Thanks so much, cheers
Thank you for this list. It not only gives me some plugins I was not aware of but organises them also.
Very valuable.
Alex
I see that you have Podpress in your list, which hasn’t been updated in over a year. I’ve developed an alternative called Blubrry Powerpress podcasting plugin that supports the latest version of WordPress 2.7+. You can check it out here: http://www.blubrry.com/powerpress/. You can also install it directly from WordPress, simply search for “powerpress” in the plugin search box in your WordPress plugins install page.
Nice list but I miss the security plugins?
Many thanks for this expansive and extremely well organised list of quality WP plugins.
One query – anyone know of a plugin that lets you invite email subscriptions to your blog at the end of every post (ie: it appears automatically at the end of each post)?
Cheers!
One of the BEST WordPress related articles for all level of WordPress Blog Users.
Thanks for sharing this great article.
Thanks Amit. I am glad you liked it.
great list… Thanks for taking the time to compile, its going to be very helpful
Thanks for a great article ! I’ve got a favored list of plugins I use for most of my sites, but this has opened my eyes to other options.
you should try WP-SEO-Snipper plugin. It’s an awesome SEO plugin.
Great list! Found another new plugin Im gonna use right away.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Just found this through a thread on the Warrior Forum. My compliments on providing such a comprehensive list of WordPress plugins and also thanks to the commenters who added their own favorites.
I am a big fan of the WebPurify Profanity Filter plugin for wordress. https://www.webpurify.com/cms-integrations/wordpress/
Thank you for the excellent article. There’s quite a few plugins that I’ve never heard of that sound really interesting. I do have to say that the wordpress backup is a god send. Plus there’s also a wordpress upgrade plugin too that updates your wordpress software automatically.
You can never have enough plugins. Thanks for adding to my ever plugin-heavy WordPress installs…
Whew! 50 plug-ins! That’s just so many. When is it going to come to the point when somebody says, “Hey, here’s the world’s simplest template with all the automatic plugins you need and it will help you retain an audience?”