WordPress is the most widely used and adaptable content management system out there, but you’re probably going to want some plugins to make it just right for your needs.

 Remember though, the more plugins you install, the slower your site will be, so there’s a delicate balancing act between features and performance.


Must Use Plugins

  • Akismet – best guard against comment spam for WordPress blog!

Database and File Backup Plugins

  • BackUpWordPress – BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you.

  • WP Optimize

    Performs essential maintenance on the WordPress database – trimming down the size by removing post revisions, and optimizing the tables. Just useful to have around – or at least to install once a year when you’re tidying up.

  • CloudFlare

    Another quick fix for speed, CloudFlare is a free service which replaces your existing DNS, acting as both a firewall against malicious requests and caching certain content. It can be a little tricky to set up though as it requires modifying your domain settings (unless you’re hosted with Media Temple, in which case it’s one click away from your control panel).

  • BackWPup

    The best (and free) WordPress backup solution, but it can be picky about your server setup. If you can get it to play nicely, it includes email backups, Amazon S3, and Dropbox.
    Don’t forget that many dedicated WordPress hosting solutions will already include some kind of backup, or offer it as an inexpensive add-on – check with your host.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Install the all in one seo pack or the “WordPress SEO by Yoast” plugin (you don’t need to install both).
  • WordPress SEO by Yoast – Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. The SEO plugins listed above can also do the sitemap for you.

  • Redirection

    Monitors your site for 404 Not Found errors and presents you with an easy way to 301 Redirect them. Shouldn’t be needed for most sites, but if you’ve recently changed the site structure, deleted lots of posts, or find you’re otherwise getting reports of 404 errors from users, it might be worth seeing what this can do for you.

Blog Security Plugin

  • All In One WP Security & Firewall – The All In One WordPress Security and Firewall is the ultimate security plugin that will take your WordPress site’s security to a whole new level.
  • BulletProof Security – BulletProof security plugin offers website security protection against: XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection.

  • WordFence Security

    Completely free WordPress security suite – firewall, malware scanning, strong password enforcement, plugin and theme repairs. If you’ve had problems in the past or aren’t confident of where your theme or plugins come from, it’s worth giving your site a thorough scan. In most cases though, as long as you keep WordPress and plugins up to date (WordPress updates itself automatically now anyway), you probably won’t need this.

Blog Statistics Related

  • Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
  • WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This plugin requires a WordPress.com API key to function.

Caching Plugin

  • W3 Total Cache – The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. After you use the w3 total cache plugin you won’t go back to using WP Super Cache.
  • WP Super Cache – 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.

RSS Subscription Related

  • FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
  • Category Specific RSS Menu – A simple WordPress plugin to add category specific RSS subscription menu into your posts, pages, sidebars. Very handy when your blog covers multiple topic from non related subjects. This plugin was developed by me.

Contact Forms Related

  • Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
  • cforms – cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin.
  • WP Contact form – WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you.
  • Gravity Forms – Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building.

Social Networking

  • Sociable – Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
  • Share This – This is a very useful plugin that allows your visitors to share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

For Google Adsense

  • Google Adsense Plugin – Google AdSense Plugin allows you to set parameters of the ads displaying, such as format (text ad, image, text with an image or link), size, color of the elements in the ad block, rounded corners and the ad block position on the website.
  • Adsense-Deluxe – Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Capable of handling complex adsense management.

Photo Gallery Plugin

  • Simple Photo Gallery – If you are looking for an effective, reliable, yet simple to use photo gallery plugin, then check this gallery plugin out. I use it whenever I need a photo gallery plugin.
  • NextGen Gallery – The most popular WordPress gallery plugin and one of the most popular plugins of all time.

E-commerce, Paypal Donation and Payment

  • WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart – is a very easy to use plugin that allows you to sell products or services online in one click from your WordPress blog. Very useful when you want to sell eBooks or digital products from various posts and pages and need a WordPress Shopping Cart solution.
  • WP Easy Paypal Payment Accept – This is a very easy to use WordPress plugin to Accept donation or Paypal payment for a service or a product in one click. Handy when you are trying to put a customized payment widget on your site (you can add it to the sidebar or a page or a post of your blog).
  • WordPress eStore – This plugin provides a complete solution to sell products from your site. It is really good for selling digital products securely from your WordPress blog.
  • WordPress Donations Plugin – The WordPress Donations Plugin allows you to collect donation for a cause from your WordPress powered site.
  • PayPal for Digital Goods – This plugin allows you to use the PayPal for Digital Goods gateway to accept payment for digital goods. Provides inline checkout of digital goods.

Membership Plugin

  • Simple Membership Plugin – The simple membership plugin lets you protect your posts and pages so only your members (free or paid) can view the protected content.
  • WordPress eMember – WP eMember is a feature rich membership plugin that can turn your existing or new WordPress site into a powerful membership site.

Affiliate Related

  • WP Affiliate Platform – WordPress plugin for affiliate recruitment, management and tracking. This plugin lets you run your own affiliate campaign/program and allows you to reward (pay commission) your affiliates for referred sales.
  • WordPress Affiliate Link Manager – Allows you to automatically convert specific keywords from your blog posts and pages into your affiliate links. It also cloaks the affiliate links and gives it a prettier and shorter alias (good for affiliate marketers).

Other Very Useful Plugins

  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin –  This 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.

  • Download Monitor – This plugin is very useful for managing and tracking your digital file downloads. You can track which file is being downloaded how many times and who is downloading them.
  • Simple Tags – This is one of my favorite plugins. It makes my WordPress Tagging life so much easier. It helps with Auto completion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags.
  • Executable PHP Widget – Like the Text widget, but it will take PHP code as well. Very handy for inserting custom ‘php’, ‘html’, ‘javascript’ in the sidebar.
  • Crayon Syntax Highlighter – A plugin to highlight any code in your posts or pages. very handy if you use example codes in your Blog.
  • Mailpoet Newsletters – Send newsletters, post notifications or autoresponders from WordPress easily, and beautifully.
  • WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. Allows you to easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.
  • EWWW Image Optimizer – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically and losslessly optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.
  • WP Video Lightbox – The WordPress Video Lightbox plugin allows you to embed videos on a page using lightbox overlay display. This plugin can be used to display images, flash, YouTube, Vimeo, iFrame etc in a nice lightbox overlay.
  • Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
  • WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This plugin requires a WordPress.com API key to function.

Caching Plugin

  • W3 Total Cache – The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. After you use the w3 total cache plugin you won’t go back to using WP Super Cache.
  • WP Super Cache – 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.

  • Better WordPress Minify-Make no mistake, W3 Total Cache is a behemoth that can seem like it needs an engineering degree to set up correctly. If you don’t need to serve millions of pageviews a day, or perhaps can’t install W3 because your host disallows it (or handles caching themselves), you can still get the benefits of minification with this simple hands-off plugin. Simply install, and it will automatically figure out which JS and cSS files are being loaded, combine them into a single file, and minify. It’s simple – and it works.

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