17 Really Useful WordPress Plugins That Probably Are Essential
As we have already published a post few weeks ago about wordpress themes and plugins. This is another post about wordpress plugins. There are hundreds of wordpress plugins available on the internet. Some of them are very useful and some of them are only for sake of existence. But it’s totally up to you that how you can make your wordpress blog more strong and powerful using different plugins to give your blog readers an amazing and wonderful experience.
In this post, I tried to list down 17 Really Useful WordPress Plugins That Probably Are Essential for any blog. This list has few of the unlimited wordpress plugins introduction. I hope you will enjoy this.
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You may be interested in these older posts
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WP-GravatarWordpress Popular Posts is a sidebar widget to show the most popular posts in your blog. Many options has been included in it so you can customize it to your liking.
A Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also add tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links
Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page
WP reCAPTCHA is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. Instead of randomly generating useless characters which users grow tired of continuosly typing in, risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
AJAXed WordPress (aWP) is an extremely powerful plugin that harnesses the power of AJAX and WordPress to improve the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential of any WordPress based blog.
Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking for their feed while they type their comment and appends it once they submit.
cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page.
Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog.
Flexible Upload is a plugin for WordPress intended to extend WordPress basic upload functionality. It can Resize pictures at upload to the size you specify and optionally incrust a watermark signature in all pictures you upload.
Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all the rest. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.
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.
his plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. But thats not all, scroll down to see what else this plugin does for your site.
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date.
This plugin allows you to automatically post your new posts on the twitter website.
Easy AdSenser provides a very easy way to insert Google AdSense code into your existing blog posts. It gives you a widget to display ads in your sidebar, and another to show a Google Search box. Easy AdSenser is perhaps the first plugin that gives you a complete solution for managing everything AdSense-related.
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Comments
Good post, but if you’re going to submit something to Popurls, make sure you use proper grammar. You’re first few paragraphs are littered with mistakes.
Nevertheless, we all appreciate the info! Keep it up.
[...] Jan. 17th http://www.smashingapps.com20:58 h 17 Really Useful WordPress Plugins That Probably Are Essential 0 [...]
How about for sharing posts to digg, buzz, stumbleupon, reddit…? The other Add to Any plugin (for sharing) is even more essential imho:
Nice list, I will most certainly try the Ultimate Google Analytics and the Flexible Upload plugins.
Those are new to me, so thanks for sharing
Don’t forget Favorites Menu Manager… [Link] Don’t you think it would be useful to make the Favorite Actions dropdown menu actually contain *your* most-used pages in the admin?
/shameless self-promotion 
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Great list but I would add:
Feed Locations.
TwitMe (I prefer this Twitter plugin).
Wordpress Download Monitor
WP Widget Cache
Good job mate.
My top 9 are:
1. Broken Link Checker
2. WP Super Cache
3. WP Stats
4. Google XML Sitemaps
5. Smart Archives
6. Akismet
7. SEO Friendly Images
8. Lightview
9. Code Markup
[...] and powerful using different plugins to give your blog readers an amazing and wonderful experience.read more | digg [...]
Thanks for the list! The Yet Another Related Posts and Add to Any are just what I was looking for. Loading them up as I’m typing this.
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[...] list of plugins for WP certainly looks useful and I may well try one or two. However, I’m very reluctant to bloat up [...]
[...] 17 Really Useful WordPress Plugins That Probably Are Essential In this post, I tried to list down 17 Really Useful WordPress Plugins That Probably Are Essential for any blog. This list has few of the unlimited wordpress plugins introduction. I hope you will enjoy this.You are welcome to share if you know and want to share more Useful WordPress Plugins That Probably Are Essential and our readers/viewers may like. [...]
Wow this is an awful list. I don’t use any of this crap. And the wp-spamfree installed on here is bad news too. Having to turn on JS and cookies to leave a comment is pretty lame.
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Awesome. I just installed a few of them on my blog. Great post. I found you on digg…Your “DUGG”.. Take care!
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Great timing with this post, we are about to do a total redesign of our newspaper site using WordPress, and this is a handy list to have on-hand!
This plugin makes adding AdSense code into your blog as easy as you wished it was when you signed up for AdSense.
great list of plugins, a few I had never seen before and several I currently use on my blog, thanks for the list.
I have been looking at CommentLUV. What I really liked is how the link takes you to the commenter’s post but didn’t break the link with your page.
I am a big WordPress fan. I will be sending people to this post as a great plug in reference.
Thank you
Sheila
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great list of plugins, a few I had never seen before and several I currently use on my blog, thanks for the list.
Hate to say it, but aren;t a lot of these redundant in WordPress 2.7? Recent comments, and a new Ajax Dashboard, are implemented in the latest version.
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I’d say the google sitemaps (i believe yahoo has a similiar format), popularity contest and pagination plugins should be built into the core.
I have just started my first WordPress website (LookiLikey.com) and had a hard time trying to find plug ins that I needed. Thanks for colating this list as it has made developing my website much easier
Great list. One that I just found last night is WP-Syntax @ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-syntax/ which is great for those of us that have code in our blog postings. It colors the syntax of just about any programming language.
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please could you tell me how you got the nice compact digg and stumble apon links at the top onto your blog…did you use a plugin?
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Try WP-Stats-Dashboard, no more logging into your WordPress.com stats account. Displays directly on your dashboard.
Very Cool! I especially like the Twitme plugin. That can sure make you go viral very quickly.. Thanks for sharing these! Dave
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Nice list! I’m using several plugins from your list. But my TOP plugin ever is PHPMyVideoBlog, this plugin make video posts automatically! It’s perfect!!
Cheers!!
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What else does WP Avatar do? you said to scroll down. I looks like you don’t use WP Avatar or CommnetLuv…guess they aren’t that essential
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An – Thank you for this useful resource of Word Press Plug Ins. I installed a couple of your recommendations to one of my blogs. I appreciate your post and your blog overall.
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Very nice, thank you for these information and excellent work:) I found “NextGEN Gallery” awesome as well for image galleries and albums.
Thank you.
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You’re a gem. Thanks for the plug ins. Tiaras, wedding tiaras, bridal tiaras, princess tiaras, crystal tiaras, tiaras crowns
I found the rating tool really interesting, might use it on my site.
Check out this just found it; http://www.kinocreative.co.uk/resources/20-useful-wordpress-plugins/
It might help anyone out ?
If you find it useful twitter me at kinocreative
Here’s another one – A2 MP3 Player (http://www.flashstall.com/?component:7).
It might not be essential, but it’s pretty good.
First of all: I think it`s kinda incredible that people make their blog nofollow. Off course, if you`re site is good enough it will draw people anyway, but you will get heaps of traffic if you give the people something for visiting – like a link. And the comments you get doesn`t have to have poor quality just because of this. I would know, I have dofollow and commentluv on all my sites. Works like a charm. Man, I just luuuv commentluv and keywordluv!
I’m using WP for years and for me it’s the best cms ever been invented. My favourite plugin is All in one seo pack. I have also those on my blogs installed that I didn’t use now. For example, YARP plugin, that simply wasn’t working on several of my sites. May be the matter is in the settings, but I didn’t cope making everything to work, so I just deactivated it and replaced with Simple Tags, which I’ve found quite more useful and easy.
Hi, I found cool flash photo galleries plugin for WordPress. Named GRAND Flash Album Gallery – multi category flash skin based photo gallery with powerful admin. I used it in my blog. There are so many different settings. You can adjust the color scheme for your blog as you wish. There are many different skins. You can present your photo gallery in a wonderful way, there is a full-screen mode. This is a very cool plugin.
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Awesome. I just installed a few of them on my blog. Great post. I found you on digg…Your “DUGG”.. Take care!
My top 9 are:
1. Broken Link Checker
2. WP Super Cache
3. WP Stats
4. Google XML Sitemaps
5. Smart Archives
6. Akismet
7. SEO Friendly Images
8. Lightview
9. Code Markup
Would you let me translate and publish by giving feedback to your article in my own blog?
Best regards
Creating back links from commenting is a great tool. The best way to find these are to go an use googles operator for example: In the google search box enter the following: intext:”powered by wordpress” AND “KeywordLuv” OR “CommentLuv” this will pull out all blogs that provide the plugin and to filter out non blogs we incorporate the “powered by wordpress”
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For anybody looking for a forum plugin, Tal.ki Forums recently released a forum plugin for wordpress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/talki-embeddable-forums/
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I’d say the google sitemaps (i believe yahoo has a similiar format), popularity contest and pagination plugins should be built into the core.
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I’m not certain that I agree 100% with your blog post, but I did find it intriguing.
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This post is so great, but i have one thing to add up instead of wp super cache, try this one w3 total cache.. much powerful plugin.I already try super cache but didn’t work smoothly.
Nice list.
I found one nice wordpress gallery plugin I am using that on various websites and it works perfect.
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This is a helpful list but I am wondering why I didn’t find anything about the Read More plugin. Did you mention it and I missed it?
I found your site by searching for the words: read more plugin.
Any advise on Read More plugin?
Thanks
Viola
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I’ll definitely have to try out flexible upload – I’ve been looking for something like that for a long time. Great info!