WordPress Plugins are the tools used to either implement any additional functionality or customize the look and feel of the blog or site. These are mostly simple plug and play types which can be implemented and configured almost immediately. Using plugins saves you the time and effort required to implement any additional functionality and serve as an alternative to manual coding. Moreover, since many bloggers or website owners are mostly non-techies and have little or no knowledge about the programming languages, these plugins just come to their rescue. Based on my personal research and extensive usage, I have made a list of around 15 wordpress plugins which are not only a must for every blog but are highly recommended as well by the bloggers community. Another best part is that these are all Free, that means, any one can download and use them whenever they want without paying anything. I have listed them all down here based on the objective each one of these wordpress plugins serve in making your blog better than the rest. I have also given the download path for these plugin so that you can straight away download and install them on your blog. These 15 best wordpress plugins caters to all the possible areas of any blog – for example, header, post content, sidebar, sharing and following, SEO, Navigation, RSS feed, blog monetization, blog performance and images.
Also check out the wordpress plugin for preventing content theft.
Dynamic Headers – Most recommended WordPress Plugin for managing header
Dynamic headers is one of the most recommended wordpress plugins to manage the header image and logo. Using Dynamic headers plugin, you can not only add and manage header logo and image but you can also have a different header image for different page or post. So using Dynamic headers wordpress plugin enables you to go beyond using just one site-wide header. This allows you to use any kind of image file or even .swf flash file.
Akismet – WordPress Plugin to Prevent Spam
If your blog allows comment, then Akismet is a must and most recommended wordpress plugin to prevent comment SPAMs. Akismet uses web service to identify a spam and mark and move it to a separate SPAM folder. You may requires to register and use a Akismet API key for this plugin to work. Akismet also allows you to keep comment status history for you to see and verify later as a admin.
Enhanced WP Contact Form WordPress Plugin
Enhanced WP contact form is a must wordpress plugin to add the contact form functionality to a website or blog. Using Enhanced WP contact form enables you to track the visitor referral information as well. It has an inbuilt spam protection and a user can even send a copy of the message to him/herself.
Share and Follow – Plugin to add Social networking, Bookmarking buttons
Share and Follow wordpress plugin is very useful and features rich wordpress plugin to add your favourite social networking sites’ and bookmarking sites’ buttons to your blog. This will help your blog visitors to share and bookmark all the interesting content. Using Share and Follow, you can add buttons to share on Facebook, twitter, Stumble, Digg and many more. With Share and Follow, you can add buttons as a floating tab on either side of screen, as a widget on the sidebar or even below or tops of the post/page. There are different customization features available as well.
Smart 404 – Protect from 404 Not Found Errors
Smart 404 is a great wordpress plugin to save your visitors from 404 Not Found errors. As a webmaster, you must be knowing how frustrating is to lose the website visitors because of 404 Not Found errors which happens because of non-existent content. But with Smart 404, you won’t have to worry about losing any more visitors and website users will have a great browsing experience. Smart 404 works in a way that whenever a user reaches on to a non-existent page or information, this plugin redirects him/her to an alternative relevant page.
Most Popular Tags Plugin
Most Popular Tags is a WordPress plugin that enables you to display your website or blog’s most popular tags or categories as a sidebar widget. The plugin takes advantage of the new Widget API introduced in WordPress 2.8, allowing multiple instances of the same widget, each with it’s own unique configuration. You can specify how many tags/categories to show, the size of the smallest and largest ones, which unit and format to use as well as advanced ordering options.
WP-PageNavi – WordPress Plugin for Customizable Post Navigation
WP-PageNavi is a wordpress plugin which you will need if you want to replace the standard page navigation with more advanced and customizable page navigation for your blog posts. With WP-PageNavi, you can even customize the look and feel of the page navigation links/buttons.
Quick Adsense – Blog Monetization WordPress Plugin
Quick Adsense is a interesting and most recommended wordpress plugin to monetize your blog traffic with adsense and other advertisements networks. Using Quick Adsense, you can manage your ads code in a much better way and can place ads anywhere within a post or page.
GoCodes – WordPress Plugin to Hide Affiliate Links with Shortcut URLS
GoCodes is a wordpress plugin to make the long URLs short so as to make them look better. Its quite useful when it comes to hiding the affiliate links. We all know that affiliate links are generally very long and look bad. With GoCodes, you can get an alternative shortcut URL which you can use instead of long affiliate links URLs.
W3 Total Cache (Improve Performance and Page Load time, Caching Page, CDN)
W3 Total Cache is one of the best wordpress plugin to improve the performance of site or blog by caching page, browser, objects, database, Minification of scripts, Content Delivery Network support.
WP Smush.it (Images Optimization WordPress Plugin)
WP Smush.it is an image optimization wordpress plugin. Using this plugin enables you to compress the uploaded images automatically and hence improve the site performance and reduce the page load time quite significantly.
WP Optimize (Performance Improvement WordPress Plugin)
WP Optimize is another wordpress plugin which can help you to improve the performance of your blog and reduce the page load time. WP Optimize does this by cleaning and optimizing the database tables. It even removes spam comments, post revisions and un-approved comments quite easily and hence making your blog load faster than before.
RSS Footer Plugin
RSS Footer is a wordpress plugin to add any customized text /link at the beginning or end of posts in the RSS feeds. You can use RSS Footer to add just any text and/or link for example, to convey any message to readers or make any recommendation. It is quite useful and used by many bloggers to add a link to their own blog so that if any site scrapping site tries to misuse your RSS feed and publish your articles on their site, your blog link automatically gets added.
All in One SEO Pack (Search Engine Optimization Plugin)
All in One SEO pack is a great wordpress plugin to do search engine optimization of your blog. You all know the importance of SEO for any blog or website. A blog or site not properly search engine optimized can make you lose lots of website traffic and visitors and hence reduce the revenue and money that you can make from your site. All in One SEO pack helps to manage and optimize the titles, meta tags, keywords etc. so as to make the blog or site fully search engine optimized.
Insights (Plugin to interlink blog posts and pages and improve productivity)
Insights is a plugin that helps you to improve your productivity by allowing you to link to other blog posts quickly and easily. Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time quality of your posts.
Insights performs following functions in real-time:
- Interlink your posts
- Insert Flickr images
- Insert Youtube videos
- Search Wikipedia
- Search Google
- Search Google News
- Google Blog Search
- Google Book Search
- Insert a Google Map
Google XML Sitemap
Google XML sitemap is a wordpress plugin to automatically generate XML sitemap for better and faster indexing by search engines. Using Google XML sitemaps, you can quickly and easily generate the sitemap for your blog and site and can even customize the update frequency. Once generates, you can get the link to your site’s XML sitemap and can use it to submit it to Google webmaster tools or anywhere else.
Also check out the new wordpress themes 2012.
Download Links for Most Recommended and Best WordPress Plugins
You can use the links mentioned in the below table to download any of the above wordpress plugin. Alternatively, you can also install any of these wordpress plugin directly from the wordpress admin dashboard from – Plugins –> Add New .
Area Impacted / Plugin Tag | WordPress Plugin Name | Plugin Download Path |
| Header | Dynamic Headers | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dynamic-headers/ |
| Blog Spam Protection | Akismet | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/ |
| Blog Owner Contact | Enhanced WP Contact Form | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/enhanced-wordpress-contactform/ |
| Social Media | Share and Follow | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-and-follow/ |
| Blog 404 Error /SEO | Smart 404 | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-404/ |
| Blog Navigation | Most Popular Tags | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/most-popular-tags/ |
| Blog Navigation | WP-PageNavi | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/ |
| Blog Monetization | Quick Adsense | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-adsense/ |
| Blog Monetization | GoCodes | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gocodes/ |
| Blog Performance | W3 Total Cache | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ |
| Blog Performance | WP Smush.it | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/ |
| Blog Performance/ Database Optimization | WP-Optimize | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-optimize/ |
| Blog RSS Feed | RSS Footer | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rss-footer/ |
| SEO | All in One SEO Pack | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ |
| SEO | Insights | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/insights/ |
| SEO | Google XML Sitemaps | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ |
Above mentioned plugins will bring all the functionality you would have desired in your blog. However, it is totally up to you if to use all the above plugins or use only a few of them. Please do remember, however, plugin do need and use resources for themselves and may impact the performance and page load time, specially if you are using too many of them. So, if you ever feel a drastic slow down in performance due to any plugin, do consider disabling the same.
Do you know that you can reduce the number of plugins required by using already SEO optimized most famous thesis theme.
Do share if you know of any more best and recommended wordpress plugin that help you save time, effort and money to implement any desired functionality.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You have listed useful plugins here but i man looking for an plugin that used to give a good look to H1 -H6 tags . I think shoutmeloud is using such plugin in their artical heading . What is is the name of that plugin and how can I also make my post attractive like that
Yes, thanx for reminding about this. You can use Thesis Style Box plugin for this purpose.
Hey there! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a collection of volunteers and starting a new project in a community in the same niche. Your blog provided us useful information to work on. You have done a outstanding job!