Clean and simple list of the plugins I use most often on my WordPress sites:
- Google XML Sitemap Generator* — auto generates XML sitemap for your Google Webmaster Account: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
- All in One SEO Pack* — allows easy and full control over title and meta description and keywords for each page and post: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
- NextGen Gallery — organize and upload photos to your blog and display using thumbnails, image browser, or slideshow: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/
- Cforms — create a variety of web forms using this robust and easy-to-configure form plugin: http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin – The only thing I don’t like about cforms is that it can’t be auto-updated, which makes doing updates quite a hassle. I have been now using Gravity Forms for most of the sites I’m working on. It’s not free, but it’s very easy to use. What I don’t like is the big ugly captcha that Gravity Forms uses, so sometimes, I’ll create a simple math problem in a validated field instead. Gravity forms can be integrated with Paypal and has a lot of other options not in cforms. Click here to check out Gravity Forms.
- Google Analyticator* – provides great analytics and has dashboard stats: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyticator/
- Sharing: Add to Any — Automatically puts a sharing link on every post and page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-to-any/ OR Sexy Bookmarks — http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sexybookmarks/
- W3 Total Cache — creates html pages of site and stores on server to speed up load time of site content: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
- Akismet — filters spam comments from your blog. Must have wordpress.com user account to get Akismet key: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/
- FD Feedburner — routes your blog feed subscriptions through Google Feedburner. Allows users to subscribe to feed via email and provides stats tracking: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-plugin/
- Viper’s Video Quicktags — Button in toolbar of editor allows you to quickly and easily embed videos in your blog posts from a variety of video portals including YouTube:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/ – An alternative is the VidEmbed plugin by iThemes. It works with MP4 whereas Viper’s does not. It also supports most of the same video portals as Viper’s. It’s not free ($20) but well worth the hassle free effectiveness. - Page Navigation — creates numbered list at bottom of index and category pages to allow people to better navigation through numerous posts: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/
- Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting — PowerPress offers full iTunes support, the Update iTunes Listing feature, web audio/video media players and more:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/powerpress/ - Dagon Sitemap Generator Plus — generates a customized sitemap for visitors to the site. He does not appear to be keeping the plugin up to date on wordpress.org, so get it directly from his site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dagon-design-sitemap-generator-plus/
- Limit Login Attempts — Use http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-lockdown/ OR http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-login-attempts/
- Firewall — blocks unusual request to the DB:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-firewall/
- WP DB Backup* — makes it easy to create a backup of the entire database or repair your database without having to login to your PHP MyAdmin to do so: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/ – Also, I can’t recommend highly enough BackupBuddy. It backs up not only the database, but also the entire FTP directory, allowing you to have a complete backup that can be stored on the cloud at scheduled intervals. BackupBuddy also is the best tool for quickly and seemlessly migrating sites to either new servers, new domains, or simply restoring to the same.
- Wenderhost subpages widget —after flexi-pages stopped working properly with subpages, I finally found a good alternative. This subpages widget has many options for displaying subpages only on the parent and child pages. It’s fabulous! http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wenderhost-subpages-widget/
- Category Posts — Shows posts within a certain category in the sidebar: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-posts/and Extended Categories — great widgets for determining which categories display in the sidebar and how: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/extended-categories-widget/
- Widget Entries and Custom Sidebars – These two plugins by the same author rock. They allow you to customize text widgets using a visual editor via a custom post type called “Widgets.” It’s so helpful to not have to code html by hand in a text widget: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-entries/ and the custom sidebars plugin is a huge timesaver — easily create alternate widget areas/sidebars that can be used on each page or post as needed: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-sidebars/
- Broken Link Checker* — checks for broken links throughout your site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/
- My Page Order — very handy interface for easily ordering pages: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/ (also check out My Link Order for ordering your links)
- Twitter: Twitter Tools — automatically generate tweets from your posts http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/; Twitter Widget Pro — Great Twitter widget with customizable CSS. I like this widget better than the widget that comes with Twitter Tools because of the way it looks: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-widget-pro/
- Exclude Pages* — so helpful for excluding certain pages from navigation (such as privacy policy and sitemap) without having to edit the template file: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/
- Tiny MCE Advanced Editor — advanced toolbar for the TinyMCE editor: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/
- Custom Field Template — adds the default custom fields on the Write Post/Page with a gui interface: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-field-template/
* These are “must-have” plugins for every WordPress install for SEO and practical purposes
Hey, if you like “My Page Order” you may also like my plugin CMS Tree Page View. I think it’s a strong competitor!
Check it out here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cms-tree-page-view/
Hi Par,
I’ll definitely check that out! I know that the My Page Order plugin conflicts with the Shopp plugin I use on some sites. I’ve also been looking for a good plugin for sidebar page management. The Flexipages widget used to be awesome, but since it was updated, it doesn’t work the same as it used to.
Angela
[...] 25 Most Popular WordPress Plugins You Should Know About – http://askwpgirl.com/25-top-wordpress-plugins-you-should-know-about/ [...]
Howdy please forgive my errors, I am using Google translate so I might understand something wrong. I found your blog on Google “25 Top WordPress Plugins You Should Know About | Free WordPress Website Help | Ask WP Girl | Boulder, Colorado” was about close to what I was looking for, but after scanning through your blog post I still was not able discover straight-forward answer to my question and this is driving me psyho. I love your website and think it is absolutely helpful but I think you could make it even better if you fine-tune your internal blog search to make it easier for searchers to locate posts within your website. You can get this done by adding wordpress plugin… As far as I can remember it is called advanced search it has a lot of valuable features like searching pages, search comments. Thank you I hope you have a productive day
Hi Mohammed,
Thank you for mentioning the Search Everything plugin. That is really a great plugin, and I install it on sites where it is necessary to be able to search Tags, custom posts, custom taxonomies, and more, that the regular WordPress search does not search. Here’s the link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything/. Thanks again for mentioning that. It really should be part of this list.
Angela
I’ve got three sites all running on WP and installed this plugin as soon as I found out about it, it makes work so much easier and is definitely in my top 10 WP plugins around
[...] 25 Most Popular WordPress Plugins You Should Know About – http://askwpgirl.com/25-top-wordpress-plugins-you-should-know-about/ [...]
[...] Following is a list of my most frequently used plugins. Let me know your favorites! Be sure to also see my post at Ask WordPress Girl of 25 WordPress Plugins You Should Know About. [...]
I was looking on this list to see if you have StatPress. I was using and liking it and all of a sudden I noticed that this plugin has just stopped working and the website does not exist. Saw some talk about the girl who created this having “vanished”. Any info on this plugin? Thanks!
Hi Judy,
I have never used StatPress, because I use Google Analytics on all my sites. Google Analytics is really the way to go for analyzing site visits. To use Google Analytics, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an analytics account. You will then be given a code to put on your website. Install the WordPress plugin called Google Analyticator mentioned in this post and insert the UA code into the plugin settings. You may need to click the link in the Google Analytics interface to be sure tracking is occurring after you do this. You’ll have great stats information in the WordPress dashboard and even deeper, drill down info on the Google Analytics site.
I think you had missed All in one Webmasters plugin and WP PageNAvi Plugin
I’ll check out the All in One Webmasters plugin. Agreed that I should definitely include WP Pagenavi — that should be built into WordPress, but alas, since it’s not, it should be on my list. Thanks for writing!
Some of your plugins are new for me. Your list is informative. Thanks for mentioning Jetpack plugin. You have missed an important plugin that is WPtouch. It has become one of the best and popular plugin to generate the mobile traffic. I have also used Akisme for the spam protection but I think G.A.S.P is way better than Akisme for this purpose.
Thanks! That’s very helpful. WPtouch is nice but I think creating responsive web design is a better idea, because then you can see the page content as well as posts. The responsive themes I’m using today are by ThemeBlvd and available at ThemeForest: http://askwpgirl.com/go/themeblvd.php
Akismet of course. I’ll check out GASP. Thanks!
If we are using google adsense, WPtouch will not be good one.. you must use responsive designs for better performance .. Check out my new technology blog http://www.labinspiration.com for your reference..
Good collection of useful plugins. I am going to use the – Viper’s Video Quicktags.Thank You.
I like Viper’s a lot. It’s very useful.
I should add that WordPress now supports video embedding without a plugin. Simply type:
[embed]http://vimeo.com/36873964[/embed]
And the video will be embedded. Same with youtube.com. Read more about WordPress embeddeing here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds
Hi Angela- I so love your two lists of plugins, particularly b/c I am so new to all this. I have been searching your two lists of plugins and the web to find an easy (read – plugin, not code) way to jump from one part of the page to another or to jump from one page within my site to another… but haven’t come across anything that seems to do this readily (and as far as I can tell, it isn’t a ready feature in WP?).
Do you have a good plugin suggestion for that? Thanks so much (and THANK YOU for your help with my website!). Seems like Tiny MCE Advanced Editor might do that — but it seems like that might be overkill (but easier editing of text, etc. in WP might be nice)
I’d greatly appreciate any thoughts, Eva
Hi Eva,
WordPress has this functionality built in. You do not need the Tiny MCE Advanced editor to hyperlink to other pages. You just highlight the text you want to hyperlink and click the Link button in the Visual Editor toolbar and choose an existing page on the site to link to. Here is a good overview of the Visual Editor functionality: http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/
Hi Angela- thanks for the reply, I appreciate it (and love a clearer explanation of the text editing features). However, I may not have explained well what I am looking for: I KNOW how to link to another page either on my own website or an external site.
I do NOT KNOW how to insert “anchor points” that would allow the following: how to click on, say, the 3rd of the FAQs (I may have a list of 10) and then JUMP FURTHER DOWN on the SAME page to that particular FAQ (where the answer is), or how to jump from the current page I am on to A PARTICULAR SECTION on another page within my website (NOT just to the top). I thought this was referred to as jumping to specific places within a page/website and that “anchor points” are generally used for that. IF I can use the “regular link” function for that, please let me know how! Any thoughts on this would be so greatly appreciated as several of my pages are quite long and I would love for folks to be able to “jump” to the particular section they would like! Eva
Hi again — after doing more searching and re-examining the link you gave me, I am even more certain that “anchors” to jump to specific place on a page (as in the common FAQ situation), does not seem to have a ready solution (and it seems even the tinyMCE advanced editor may not be very straightforward in allowing this). If you could just let me know if there is anything “easy” to use out there that I have not found, I’d so greatly appreciate it (if there is not, I’ll just wait with all of that until some later time). I am sure I am not the only one looking to be able to do this — easily! Thanks! Eva
Hi Eva,
Yes, the TinyMCE Advanced editor does allow you to create anchors on the page. Create the page anchors using the Anchor button, then to link to the that anchor for the top of the page, for example, highlight the text you want to link from and click the normal Link button in the toolbar. Remove the http:// and type #anchor where the word “anchor” is the name of the anchor you want to link to.
Great list. Got some ideas for the apps you have listed. Any suggestions for a simple plugin to manage ad banners? I would like for people to upload their ad and make a payment through Paypal directly.
I don’t know if anything that does that. Though, you could enable Paypal payments and file upload via a Gravity Forms form. My affiliate link to gravity forms is: http://askwpgirl.com/go/gravityforms.php It’s a very robuts forms plugin. You would need to manually place their ad on the site, though.
An old post, still worth reading as many of these are very much relevant.
Wanted to suggest you to check our Engageya plugin as well http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cross-promotion-content-recommendations/
It shows related posts, co-promotes related posts on similar websites, exchanges readers within the network, promotes FB pages and has great layouts to use.
Looking forward to hearing/reading your thoughts
Dagon Sitemap Generator Plus doesn’t seem like it is available anymore. Do they offer another good sitemap generator for your users to easily navigate your website?