WordPress Plugins
The WordPress Plugins featured on this page come highly recommended as some of the best and most stable that are available.
Critical Plugins:
These plugins are critical for ensuring that your WordPress blog is safe from spammers and email abusers.
Akismet
The default spam killer Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue.
To use it, you need a WordPress API key, which can be obtained on the WordPress website.
Spam Karma 2.2
Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is very flexible and you can add
additional plugins to extend its functions.
Bad Behavior
Bad Behavior is a plugin that identifies and blocks malicious activity, including blog/wiki spam, e-mail address harvesting, automated cracking attempts, and more.
Trackback Validator Plugin
The TrackBack Validator plugin for WordPress performs a simple but very effective test on all TrackBacks in order to stop spam.
Legitimate TrackBacks are sent by people commenting on your weblog, accompanied by a URL that points to that commentary. Spam TrackBacks are accompanied by a URL that points to a pay-per-click affiliate website or other irrelevant material. The Validator exploits this key difference:
Email Immunizer
Email Immunizer provides protection against automated email harvesters by converting email addresses and mailto links on your blog into numeric character references.
Referrer Bouncer
A simple plugin to bounce back referrer spam attempts.
Non Numeric Name
Comments submitted with user id containing numerals will be flagged as spam and silently discarded so you won't even see them.
Impostercide
This plugin prevents spoofing, which the practice creating multiple accounts to post comments. Impostercide checks name, email, and URL to detect multiple accounts.
Secure Form Mailer Plugin For Wordpress
This is a critical plugin if you want to add a contact form to your blog. It secures your contact form to prevent it from being used and abused to send spam emails from your email address.
Essential Plugins:
We've found these plugins to be essential for making WordPress much easier to use and maintain.
WordPress Database Backup
A plugin that makes it a lot easier to back up your WordPress database.
Ultimate Tag Warrior
Ultimate Tag Warrior allows you to add keyword tags several different ways.
From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.
Once you have the tags set up, you can have tags included at the top and bottom of your posts without making changes to themes. It does quite a bit more, visit the site to read about it.
Filosofo Home-Page Control
Filosofo Home-Page Control is a WordPress plugin that lets you set which page you want to be the “home” page. It comes pre-installed with the latest versions of WordPress, so hold off on installing it until you have checked to see if you have it already.
WP Cache
WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.
Widgets for WordPress
Widget
Widgets are plugins you can add to your WordPress blog to personalize your layout without knowing HTML.
By combining the Widget plugin and widget compatible themes, you can easily switch around the layout of the
your side bar, such as calendar, search, category and post without editing the code in your template.
Widget Compatible Themes
Blog Layouts
The default installation of WordPress always displays your newest post as the home page, the site navigation has default pages and your posts are organized on your site
in date order and category. These plugins allow you to change the layout defaults.
Fancy excerpt plugin
The fancy excerpt plugin for WordPress replaces the default automatic excerpt generator with a sentence aware excerpt generator.
Unfancy quote plugin
The unfancy quote plugin for WordPress lets you override WordPress' quote fancification. Curly quotes in the wrong direction and broken code because of curly quotes will be a thing of the past.
Angsuman’s Multi-Page
This plugin makes it possible to break up your WordPress article into multiple pages.
Page Link Manager
The Page Link Manager Plugin adds an administration panel that allows users to pick which page links are included in the site navigation.
Static Front Page
The static front page plugin lets you easily set a static page to be the front (home) page of a WordPress site, leaving the normal blog on a blog page.
Semiologic Theme and CMS (Content Management System)
The Semiologic theme is much more than a simple WordPress theme. It is an internet marketing website building framework that was designed with ease of use in mind.
The theme's collection of features are configurable by easy to use admininstration interfaces. And in the event where these don't cover your entire needs, the theme's pluginable nature allows for ultimate customizability.
Search Engine Plugins
WordPress is not optimized for the Search Engines when you first install it, nor is it easy to optimize. These plugins make it easy to set up your blog so that it is search engine friendly.
Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin
This plugin adds META tags to your WordPress blog. Its design is based on the assumption that the WordPress categories are used as tags, so it requires no user configuration in order to work. On the other hand, the latest versions include all those features a SEO-concerned publisher would need in order to have total control over those meta tags.
Jerome's Keywords
Jerome’s Keywords is a very good Wordpress plugin to manage keywords, here is a list of what you will be able to do with the plugin:
- add tags to each post (compatible with Technorati)
- implement a local tag system
- create a local tag cosmos
- add keywords to meta tags on the header
Tags in the Head
Tags in the Head is a WordPress plugin that allows you to customize the meta description's for various parts of your site. It works with
Jerome's Keywords and Ultimate Tag Warior to provide better meta tags for the search engines.
External links plugin
The external links plugin for WordPress lets you display outgoing links differently from internal links.
SEO Title Tag
SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site. Works with Ultimate Tag Warrior keywords system.
Ultimate Tag Warrior
Ultimate Tag Warrior allows you to add keyword tags several different ways.
From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.
Once you have the tags set up, you can have tags included at the top and bottom of your posts without making changes to themes. It does quite a bit more, visit the site to read about it.
Head META Description
Head Meta Description provides an automatic meta description tag for your blog, inserting a dynamic description depending on the page type.
It will insert an excerpt/content brief for post or page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else
Optimal Title
Optimal Title is a WordPress plugin that allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title
instead of having it appear first.
Angsuman’s Permanent Redirector
This plugin allows you to redirect (permanent redirect using HTTP status 301) any of your posts or pages to a different URL.
This enables you to transfer Google rank of your post or page (static page of WordPress) to a new page. Also the new page is displayed in search (Yahoo, Google, MSN etc.) results.
Dean’s Permalinks Migration
This plugin lets you change your permalinks without losing the traffic you’re already getting.
When a visitor or search engine spider visits your site old permalinks it redirects them to the new permalinks.
Google Sitemap Generator
This plugin generates a sitemap of your WordPress blog that is properly formatted for Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
Landing sites
When visitors are sent to your site from a search engine, they are looking for something specific.
This plugin brings them to a page that shows them posts that are related to their search. Works with many search engines.
Permalink Redirect
WordPress duplicates content, posting it under archives, posts, categories, etc. and gives each duplicated page a differently named URL.
even though it's really just the same pages being recatogorized. This plugin ensures that the search engine is fed the same page
under only one URL so it doesn't index duplicate content, which can be a problem in search engine rankings.
Bunny’s Technorati Tags
Bunny’s Technorati Tags provides you with template function to easily display and manage Technorati tags for your posts.
Business Oriented Plugins
These plugins make it possible for you to earn income with your WordPress blog by carrying ads, adding ecommerce, linking to merchant sites like Amazon and so on.
Ad Space
Ad Space makes it possible for you to manage advertisements on your WordPress blog. It supports inline ad units,
that go into your entries' content and location specific ad units, that go in predefined locations.
AdRotator
Randomly displays an advertisement from a list of advertisements specified in a text file at your chosen location.
Amazon Media Manager 1.5
The Amazon Media Manager lets you add items from Amazon's catalogue to your WordPress blog.
It keeps a list of things you've added so you can choose what to display, how to display it and more.
AdSense-Deluxe
AdSense-Deluxe is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress that allows you to quickly insert Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts,
and manage when and where those ads are displayed.
AdSense Beautifier
AdSense Beautifier is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to make your Adsense Ads look beautiful by placing images besides them. Adding images adjacent to Ads can help increase click through rate and therefore your earnings from advertisements on your blog.
Chitika eMiniMalls Sidebar widget
Add a Chitika eMiniMalls to your widget sidebar. Display Chitika's ads on your blog to earn revenue in their
in their eMiniMall format, which provides visitors with relevant content and comparative shopping information without even leaving your blog site.
Visit Chitka's Site for more information.
CafePress
This plugin allows you to choose any of the 59 million products that CafePress sells and put them in your sidebar, after your posts,
in your footer or on a full page. If you are a CafePress shopkeeper, you can choose to display only your products on your blog.
aLinks
aLinks takes a set of phrases you commonly use and turns them into links whenever you include them in a post.
You tag your key phrase and aLink turns them into links to Amazon, eBay, Clickbank or whatever you specify.
Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin
Password protect your blog, good for a subscription based blog or private family or company blog.
SmartRSS
Transform your blog into an automated posting tool by syndicating multiple RSS feeds.
e-Commerce lite
The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an easy to use fully featured shopping cart application
suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.
WP-Amazon
Add a link to Amazon products from your blog. The Amazon product catalog is available right from WordPress. This plugin will allow you to search Amazon as you compose your post or page entry.
Announce Yourself & Get Popular
Get connected to the Blogging community with these WordPress plugins.
Subscribe Me
This plugin makes it possible for your blog readers to subscribe to your blog, or add your blog to their RSS readers.
Digg This
Digg This detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically displays a link back to the digg post,
for people to digg your story.
Sociable
Submit your post to many popular social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save,
catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin adds links for your readers to
use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts.
Socialize-it
Your visitors can now bookmark your websites with all their favorite social bookmark services with the ease of a single click.
FeedSmith
Broadcast your feed on the FeedBurner network to get get more exposure for your blog.
This plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner.It detects every way to access your feeds
(e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner
feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your
main comments feed as well.
Better Feed
Better Feed is a plugin for Wordpress that allows you to enhance your feeds with several customisable features.
9 Rules
9 Rules is a blog network to help each other with popularity and traffic. The 9 Rules plugin will randomly display a new “rule”
on each page of your Wordpress dashboard, coloured using one of the eight colours found in the famous 9rules leaf.
Read more info about 9 Rules.
Email and Marketing
These plugins help you to manage email better, run a newsletter, add a poll, sign up subscribers and set your blog up to use Google's GMail services.
Site Navigation and Post
Help your visitors get around and find things on your blog much more easily with these plugins.
BH Category Dropdown Widget
This widget provides navigation to category pages via a dropdown selection box. The controls allow you to select EXACTLY which categories apear in the dropdown.
An Advanced Search plugin
This advanced Site search plugin uses a faster search method than the WordPress default, uses intelligent searching, and is customizable.
Automatic Site Map
This is human version site map of your posts, a user friendly archive of your posts. It is not a site map for search engines, it is for your visitors to quickly find posts on your blog.
It uses Wordpress PHP Exec Plugin.
Wordpress PHP Exec Plugin
This plugin lets you execute dynamic PHP code in posts. You need it to install the Automatic Site Map plugin.
Search Reloaded plugin
An enhanced search engine for WordPress.
Search Meter
Search Meter is a WordPress plugin that helps you keep your blog focused on what your visitors want to read. It does this by keeping track of what your visitors are searching for.
Breadcrumb
A breadcrumb is a navigation trail that leads from the user’s current location in your web site, back to the home page. This is useful for larger web sites that have deeply nested pages or sections in their site.
Simple Tagging
The Simple Tagging Plugin is based on Jerome’s Keywords plugin and can import all your tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior or Jerome's Keywords. It provides you with everything you need for tagging, including related tags and posts.
If you have problems with Jerome's or Ultimate Tag Warrior, try Simple Tagging. Here's a writeup from a blogger that switched to Simple Tagging successfully
WP-Print
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog's post/page.
Interactive Plugins
With these plugins, you can add a simple forum to your WordPress blog and present a calendar of events from the WordPress site. Add a translator plugin and your blog is multi-lingual.
WP-Polls
Adds a poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also add a poll into your WordPress's blog post/page. (See under the Scripts Section)
Event Calendars on the WordPress Codex
A list of calendars you can add to your WordPress Blog.
WP-Forum
Simple discussion forum plugin for WordPress. Witth support for different skins, 3 included by default, changeable from the WP admin interface.
XDForum
A WordPress plugin that adds a forum to your WordPress powered blog. It is similar in structure to phpBB and vBulletin but does not have all the enterprise features that they have that aren’t needed on a blog forum.
Wordpress Global Translator
Global Translator is a free and open source Wordpress Plugin which is able to dynamically translate your blog in the following thirteen different languages:
English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch.
Popularity Contest
This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given configurable point values to determine popularity.
Pictures, Video And Sound
Add some pizzazz to your WordPress blog with these audio-visual plugins. You can add an entire art gallery, play YouTube and Google videos, play your music and so on.
Lightbox2
Lightbox2 is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.
WPG2
WPG2 is a Wordpress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into the Wordpress Sidebar and Blog entries.
Gallery2 Image Chooser
Gallery2 Image Chooser allows you to choose an image from your Gallery2 photo albums by browsing thumbnails.
Flickr Related Images
An image grabber matches your Techmorati tag and finds three matching images from Flickr for your post.
Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player
This plugin makes any mp3 links (in post or page or any other location in your blog) playable directly on your webpage. In addition, your visitors will have the opportunity to easily tag and post the mp3 link to del.icio.us. This script is extremely lightweight, as is the flash movie that plays on demand. Must-have for podcasters or anyone who wants to allow blog visitors to play mp3 files on the website itself.
Audio Player
Once installed, this plugin allows you to insert mp3 audio files into your posts and pages.
Automatic WP Player 3.0
Automatic WP Player 3.0 is an MP3 player for WordPress with a number of features.
Cool Player
CoolPlayer 9 for WordPress allows you to play multimedia files in your blog. Supported in all the major browsers.
Media support: Google Video, Youtube Video, vSocial Video, ASF,
ASX, WM, WMA, WMV, WAX, WVX, OGG, APE, AVI, MID, MIDI, WAV, SWF, SPL, MP3, FLV,
RM, RMVB, RA, RV, RAM, SMIL, PDF, FDF, XFDF, XDP, XFD, MOV, QT, MQV, MPEG, MPG,
M1S, M1V, M1A, M75, M15, MP2, MPM, MPV, MPA, FLC, FLI, CEL, RTSP, RTS, 3GP,
3GPP, 3G2, 3GP2, SDV, AMC, MP4, SDP, GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, XPM.
YouTube Gallery Plugin
This plugin displays YouTube videos on your blog. Features include: local thumbnail caching, random thumbnail in your sidebar,
ability to display your entire video collection or favorites as a gallery, display a specific video in a post or on your sidebar.
Extreme Video Plugin 2.0 beta
Play You Tube, Google, FLV, Quick time MOV with
google full screen and Flash 7 Detection and pageless fullscreen javascript popups.
Video Blogger
This plugin allows for simple video blogging of content hosted by Google Video, YouTube, DailyMotion and vSocial. Requires Wordpress 2.0.
VideoPop
Add video popups to your posts and pages.
WP-Ploop
WordPress plugin to display .movs/.swfs inside your posts without opening a popUp or new Window.
WPvideo Insert flash videos from YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe to your post or pages. With options to display title, author, description and let users download the video using DownThisVideo
Podpress A podcasters dream plugin. | screenshot |
video tutorial
- Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and BitTorrent RSS)
- Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
- Podcast Download stats
- Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
- Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
- View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
- Control over where the player will display within your post and what it will look like.
- Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
- Supports unlimited number of media files.
- Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
- Preview image for videos
- Support for separate Category podcasts
- Audio Comments
Statistics
Keep track of how your blog is doing in terms of number of visitors, where they are coming from and what they like on your blog.
WP-Stats
Display your WordPress blog statistics. Ranging from general total statistics, some plugins statistics and top 10 statistics.
Google Analytics
The Google Analytics plugin for WordPress lets you easily add Google's web tracking script to your site.
The Mint
Mint is a web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint's flexible dashboard.
Slimstat
A simple web stats analyser based on ShortStat, but with many more features.
Admin Control Panel Skin
Some folks like to make their admin control panel look better, with a different navigation scheme. That's what these skins and plugins do.
WP Tiger Administration
An alternative dashboard for WordPress. Currently this design is compatible with Safari and Firefox. Until Internet Explorer complies with CSS2 specifications, this plugin will default back to the original WordPress administration design.
SpotMilk
Theme for the Wordpress Admin Panel.
Wordpress Admin Dashboard Replacement
This drop-in replacement provides you with a lean and mean WordPress Admin Dashboard, lots of essential goodies without the fluff and super-fast.
Administrative Plugins
These plugins make maintenance, backups and other routine tasks to manage your WordPress blog and keep it in good working order.
Maintenance Mode
This plugin for Wordpress 1.5.2, 2.0.x and 2.1 allows you to make your blog temporarily unavailable to your visitors with a custom message. It is still accessible by the administrators and logged in users.
Unavailable for Maintenance
This Plugin allows you to make your blog temporarily unavailable to your users (with custom message). It is still accessible by the administrators.
It belongs to the class of zero-configuration plugins. In other words even your grandmother can use it.
WP-DBManager
Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.
Smart Update Pinger
Smart Update Pinger replaces the built-in WordPress update ping functionality. Instead of always pinging when saving a post, the plugin only pings when the post has not previously been published. Edits of posts are "silent", in contrast with the default behaviour. Also, you can see a log for the latest pings, together with error messages (in the options page).
Frame buster plugin
The frame buster plugin for WordPress will thwart any attempt to load your site in a frame.
Add Copyrights To Your RSS
This plugin adds a copyright message to your feed items. No customization is required. This acts as a deterrant to feed-stealers (you heard the word first here) who unscrupulously and blatantly displays your full feed contents (often with their own advertisements) in their site(s) without your permission.
deUncategorize
Prevent Posts from Accidentally Appearing in the »Uncategorized« Category
Snapr
Snapr simply integrates WebSnapr-Script in your Wordpress blog.
Works with WebSnapr which lets you capture screenshots of (almost) any web page. Let your visitors to instantly visualize any web page before clicking. Increase site traffic, click-through rate and site stickiness.