25 Top WordPress Plugins You Should Know About

Clean and simple list of the plugins I use most often on my WordPress sites:

1. Google XML Sitemap Generator* — auto generates XML sitemap for your Google Webmaster Account: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
2. 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/
3. NextGen Gallery — organize and upload photos to your blog and display using thumbnails, image browser, or slideshow: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/
4. 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.
5. Google Analyticator* – provides great analytics and has dashboard stats: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyticator/
6. 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/
7. 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/
8. Akismet — filters spam comments from your blog. Must have wordpress.com user account to get Akismet key: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/
9. 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/
10. 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.
11. 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/
12. 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/
13. 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/
14. Limit Login Attempts — Use http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-lockdown/ OR http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-login-attempts/
15. Firewall — blocks unusual request to the DB:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-firewall/
16. 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.
17. 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/
    
18. 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/
19. 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/
    
20. Broken Link Checker* — checks for broken links throughout your site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/
21. 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)
22. 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/
23. 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/
24. Tiny MCE Advanced Editor — advanced toolbar for the TinyMCE editor: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/
25. 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