25 Recommend WordPress Plugins

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As every WordPresss administrator knows, the basic features of WordPress are a bit limited to what you can do with the program. But, WordPress has a fix for this. There are aftermarket addons know has plugins that can be installed to help you with administering your WordPress site and make your life easier. WordPress plugins can do almost anything the programmers can imagine. You can install, add and remove plugins through the administrator panel under the plugin tab.

Below is a list of plugins that I use, or have used in the past. Just remember, the more plugins you have the slower your pages will load. All plugins gathered below are the WordPress plugins with a link to the plugin is followed by a copied description from the admin planel

All in One SEO Pack – This plugin takes some of the best SEO practices and puts them into one plugin.

Configuration Screen

Posting screen

All in One Webmaster – Single click sitemap submission to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. Add tracking codes for Google, Clicky, 103Bees analytics. It uses the wphead() and wpfooter() hooks built in to WordPress to add content to your header and/or footer.

CommentLuv – CommentLuv wordpress plugin helps give something back to every single commentator as well as entice them to come back and visit more often by automatically adding a titled link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. It’s done fantastically well with tens of thousands of comments every day receiving a little luv.

Clicky for Word Press – Intregrates Clicky Stats with WordPress

Cute Profiles – Cute Profiles adds all your Social Profile icons vertically on left or right side of your pages, which will remain visible all the time though the page is scrolled and without consuming the sidebar space. Check out my post on installing and configuring

Digg Digg – Integrate “Digg”,”Reddit”,”dZone”,”Yahoo Buzz”,”TweetMeme(twitter)”, “fbshare(facebook)”, “Polladium”, “StumbleUpon”, “Delicious” and “Sphinn” Into WordPress Content. I use Digg Digg instead of other plugins because, each plugin styles icons differently. With Digg Digg, all the icons are styled the same and you can choose where to place the icons.

DoFollow – Removes the NoFollow attribute that WordPress adds to comments

Easy Contacts – Easy Contact is a simple, semantic contact form that utilizes the Sandbox design patterns. Insert using [easy-contact].

Easy Contacts

FD Feedburner Plugin – Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed

Google Analyticator – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin

Google XLM Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

IntenseDebate – IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Full comment and account data sync between IntenseDebate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you! Another cool thing about IntenseDebate is all the plugin in options that you can add to the plugin through the IntenseDebate website. One of those plugins that I use is CommentLuv. So if you are having issues with the CommentLuv plugin working properly on your site, try out IntenseDebate. Another good thing about this plugin is when you add plugins to your IntenseDebate account; the plugins come from their site and not yours. This you keep your load times down a little.

IntenseDebate Comment Screen

Login LockDown – Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin

Populist – Track your blogs popularity posts on social bookmarking sites reddit, stumbleupon, del.icio.us and dig

Robots Meta – This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

Sexy Bookmarks – SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

Sexy Bookmarks

Top Commentators Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin

WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

WP-Blogengage – Adds a Blogengage vote button to your posts. If you want to join Blog Engage, you get an invitation from someone. If you would like one just ask by commenting and I will send you one.

WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more! Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins.

WP Security Scan – Perform security scan of WordPress installation.

WP Simple Adsense Insertion – A simple WordPress plugin that inserts Google Adsense into posts, pages, and sidebars.

What plugins are you using?