19 Must Have WordPress Plugins

Some examples of its additional features include; code inserter (for use with adding Google Analytics, Adsense section targeting etc) Webmaster verification assistant, Link Mask Generator, Robots.txt editor and there’s even an option for exporting your SEO Ultimate settings to a file so you can import later or use on another blog if you need to, along with support for importing post meta data from All In One SEO – and there’s more, well worth checking out, out of all the SEO plugins for WordPress, this is my favourite.


2. W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin
This WordPress plugin when fully configured can give at least 10x improvement in overall site performance and give you up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML. In A/B testing this great WordPress Plugin beats other optimisation plugins like WP Super Cache hands down in terms of page load time, and not only that but it has Amazon S3 & Cloudflare integration. This plugin is so good at performance optimization that it is trusted by sites such as mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com and many others.

3. Cbnet Ping Optimizer Plugin
Within your WordPress admin panel, if you click on the writing option within the settings tab, you will see at the bottom a section called Update Services, now each time you publish a post or update a post WordPress will ping the sites in this list. So if you update a post frequently, some of these services may blacklist your site, this handy plugin stops WordPress from pinging these services when you edit a post, but allows it to ping them when you first add the post, removing the possibility of being blacklisted as a spammer by those services.

4. TinyMCE Advanced WordPress Plugin
WordPress uses the standard version of TinyMCE as its WYSIWYG editor, this is the advanced version that will add 17 plugins to TinyMCE. These include: Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Advanced List, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Embed Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras.

When adding editing/adding a page or post, you may notice that not all of the extra formatting options are showing initially,  but there is a button just to the right hand side of the text formatting options that when on mouse over reads; “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink”. – Simply click this click this and it will reveal a second row of additional formatting options.

5. WPtouch Plugin
Once this WordPress plugin is installed and activated it will transform your blog into an iPhone application-style theme when it is viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and Blackberry Storm/Torch mobile devices. With web browsing via mobile devices this is an extremely important plugin to utilise, as it will provide fast and user-friendly browsing from the mobile devices mentioned and this will not affect your desktop theme in anyway. On top of that you can customise various aspects of its appearance within the admin panel and it will also display ads from Google Adsense which is very handy.

There is also a pro version of this plugin available that will add extra support for other ads such as Admob and custom ads, an iPad theme and an array of additional features.

6. Maintenance Mode WordPress Plugin
This nifty  WordPress plugin will add a splash page to your blog to let its visitors know that your WordPress blog is down for maintenance, it will also inform the visitor when the site will be accessible. The message is completely customisable and logged in administrators will get full access to the blog including the front-end.

7. Broken Link Checker Plugin
It can be quite frustrating for the reader of a page on your blog who has become engrossed in whatever article/post it is they are reading when they try clicking a link within your page and the site is broken. However this will always happen from time to time and can’t be avoided, but when you’ve been blogging for a while and you’ve amounted a sizable archive of posts and articles it would be impossible to check them all.

This plugin will monitor your pages, posts, blogroll and comments (and even custom fields if you like) and once it detects a broken link or missing image it will notify you by either email or the WordPress dashboard. You can edit links easily from within the plugin’s page without having to view the post or page that has the broken link – All in all, a very handy plugin indeed.

8. WP-DBManager Plugin
The worst thing that can happen for any blogger is to put your heart and soul into writing great posts and then then just lose it all, whether it’s down to your web host or something else. This great WordPress plugin makes it so easy to back up your WP database, and even optimise and repair it too. It supports backup scheduling and allows you to either download the backup file or email it to you. This plugin is a must have for anyone who is serious about using WordPress.

9. Yet Another Related Posts WordPress Plugin
Having a way of suggesting related articles on your site to your readers is always important, and there are a number of great WordPress plugins for this, although Yet Another Related Posts plugin (or YARPP as it’s sometimes referred to) is one of the most well known WordPress plugins for this task, and it works well and has some great features. You can select whether related pages or posts are listed by the plugin, and you get the option to disallow particular categories or tags from being used by the plugin, not only that but it will display the related posts in your RSS feeds or Atom feeds.

10. Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin
If you’re wanting a WordPress plugin that will allow you to add a contact form to your site this is going to be one of the best options. This is one of the most widely used WordPress plugins for contact forms, you can use it to set up multiple forms, that you can then customise. Contact Form 7 also supports Akismet spam filtering, CAPTCHA and Ajax powered submitting, all in all a very versatile and useful plugin.

11. Addthis WordPress Plugin
One of the best and most widely used social bookmarking plugins for WordPress, it gives you several options for the layout of your sharing buttons. In most cases the Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons will be focussed on along with the “Addthis” button which will give your blogs readers the ability to share your content on 295+ different sharing services.

You can then also sign up for a free Addthis account which will give you access to an analytics dashboard on the Addthis website, which will show you exactly how your content is being shared, for example – what services are being used to share your content, which pages are the most popular and how many clicks you are getting from when your content is shared.

Addthis is now one of the first services to support the Google +1 button.

12. WordPress Download Manager Plugin
If you’re offering content on your website for download, whether it be PDF’s, videos or audio, it’s always nice to know how many times it’s been downloaded. This cool WordPress plugin allows pages to be created with your files to download or embed a download in posts on your WordPress blog while giving you a download counter for each of your files within the admin panel.

13. Login Lockdown WordPress Plugin
This WordPress plugin will record the IP address and timestamp each time a failed login attempt is made. If 3 failed login attempts are made within 5 minutes then the login function is disabled for that range of IP addresses for 60 minutes, which will aid in preventing anyone using brute force to discover your password. The settings however are defaults and can be adjusted from within the plugins option page, any and all ranges of IP addresses that have been blocked can also be released by an administrator.

14. WP Security Scan Plugin
This is an interesting WP plugin, it will scan your installation of WordPress and offer you suggestions on how to improve security and remove vulnerabilities. There are some additional features that are set to be added to WP Security Scan in future releases which look like they will make it a lot more effective, one of them includes lockout & logging of incorrect login attempts, so it seems this will eventually do the job of the Login Lockdown plugin too, although there aren’t any dates for when this will be added at the time of writing this.

15. Disqus Comment System
This is a great WordPress plugin which is featured on a great number of blogs. It swaps out the standard WordPress commenting interface, for the Disqus interface, and utilises the Disqus API. When you first install this plugin It does involve signing up for a Disqus account, however this is very straight forward.

Just install the plugin and click on the comments section of your WordPress dashboard, then click on Disqus and once on that page you will be prompted for some login details, at this point just click the link to the right hand side to say you don’t already have an account and it will open the Disqus sign up page, once you follow the onscreen prompts return to the Disqus page within your WordPress dashboard and enter your login details, at this point you can choose to export your existing comments. This plugin is a great way of enabling your WordPress site to better develop as a community, you also have the option to allow users to login via Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google or OpenID and have a great deal of admin and moderation tools at your disposal.

16. WordPress Global Translator Plugin
This plugin will translate your webpage into a variety of the most widely spoken languages, while giving the option to utilise 4 different translation engines including Google Translations and Babel Fish. For a full list of languages supported please refer to the Global Translator plugin page.

17. FD Feedburner Plugin
This handy little plugin will redirect your blogs RSS Feed to Feedburner, you also can choose to redirect your comments feed. There’s nothing else really to this plugin, put your Feedburner URL in and you’re done. If you’re not familiar with Feedburner then I recommend you check it out, as it’s a great tool for optimising your RSS Feeds.

18. MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder Plugin
This WordPress plugin provides you with a smart-looking optin subscription form for your blog, it’s fully customisable and there are options for placement of the form almost anywhere within your blog not just within your sidebar as a widget. This plugin doesn’t come with optin form code, but there is a box where you can copy and paste your optin form code from your autoresponder or mailing list provider, such as Aweber for example. Please note, this plugin does require a onetime free registration to use.

19. WP Opt-in Plugin
A very straight forward opt in plugin for your WordPress site. WP Opt-in adds a very straight forward widget to your site, providing an email field and submit button, although you can customise the form header if you wish, add a footer to the form and select a URL to redirect to upon successful submission, you can however leave this blank for no redirect and it will show a standard success message. In addition you can customise the email that will be sent to users upon opt-in to your form.

Article by Bestpluginsforwp.com