Top WordPress Plugins
One of the things I love about WordPress as a blogging platform is how Plugins extend its functionality hundred fold. Just like how Firefox becomes more than a browser with its 1000’s of available extensions.
Searching for a good WordPress plugin in the WP Plugin directory can be like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. When I started out blogging, I just started finding the good plugins by asking the authors of blogs I frequented. Some talk about what they use and some bloggers would gladly tell you if you asked them nicely.
If you wonder what I use here in ShanKri-la, you don’t have to anymore. Here is a list of WordPress plugins that I have found and started using them in the months of blogging. I have tried to categorize it based on its utility.
This will be a continuously updated page so that it’ll serve as a reference for myself as well as to anyone else running a self-hosted WordPress blog. I recommend bookmarking this page and checking back for updates.
Admin
- 404 Error Log - Allows the blog administrator to track 404 pages generated by the blog. You can save the report in HTML and download it or choose to email it.
- Advanced Admin Menu - Offers drop down menu for the admin functions. Saves a ton of clicks to get to different options.
- BackupWordPress - A more comprehensive backup plugin that lets you backup database, files, and folders. Offers exclude list and more powerful options for a complete backup solution. In beta at the time of writing this post.
- Executable PHP Widget - Makes it easy to add PHP code snippets to your sidebar with this widget.
- OneClick Installer - Easily install themes or plugin with this right from the Admin Menu. No more FTPing. Also, available as a Firefox extension.
- Site Unavailable - When you are upgrading or performing maintenance, why let your readers or visitors see errors? You can instead show a custom message that your site is offline and will be back shortly.
- Who’s Linking to me - With Technorati’s link widget gone from WordPress admin panel, you can use this to display to your latest backlinks in your sidebar or a page of your choice.
- WordPress Automatic Upgrade - WPAU allows a user to automatically upgrade their WordPress installation.
Caution: Always do backup of WordPress files as well the database before your perform upgrades. - WordPress Database Backup - Every WordPress blog must be backed up with this plugin. You do not want to lose your hard work. Ever. Easy to configure and use. Schedule backups to run every night and email it to you. You could also backup anytime you need and download it.
- WP-ContactForm III - Adds a simple drop in form for users to contact you. Simple to use it in a post or a contact page. Great for starting blogs but if you start getting spam through this, there are other options with spam protection.
- WP-phpMyAdmin - Adds phpMyAdmin interface right in your WP Admin panel. No more logging into your host CPanel to get to it.
- WP View Subscriber Info - Generates a neat report of who has subscribed to comments of what posts. Requires the Subscribe to Comments 2.0 plugin. (Check the Comments category)
Ads
- AskApache Firefox Adsense - If you love Firefox, spread the love by showing a Firefox referral ad to your Windows readers who don’t use Firefox. For every download through your link, you make $1.00. Who said you can’t make money doing a good thing?
- Friends don’t let friends see ads - Your regular readers and folks who comment are your friends. Now, you can selectively not show them ads and just target the search traffic. Click over to find out all the other things it can do.
- Shylock Adsense - Helps you install Google Adsense codes without modifying your template code. Options to add different ad formats and specify where you want them to appear in your post. I love the option where you can choose to show a different format after a certain number of ads.
- Who Sees Ads -Another powerful ad management plugin like the previous one but with a control panel where you can set things like how old a post has to be to display ads, etc. I am still torn between the two but I have to use them both to find out which one I like better.
Comments
- AJAX Comments - Lets you post comments quickly without leaving or refreshing the page.
- Better Comments Manager - Gives you one place to view all comments by post and reply (supports threaded comments) right from the admin interface.
- Brian’s Latest Comments - Shows an overview of recent active articles and people who commented on them.
- Highlight Author Comments - Automatically applies a distinctive style to comments by post’s author.
- LinkLove - Start removing ‘rel=nofollow’ for commentators after they have a certain number (configurable - recommended 2 comments) of comments to give them some link love.
- Live Comment Preview - Lets your commentators see what they type as they type. A huge help for avoiding and correcting typos.
- MBLA - Seen those nice avatars by commentators names? This plugin pulls MyBlogLog profile pictures by email address and adds it by your comments.
- Show Top Commentators - Encourages feedback and comments by rewarding your top commentators with a link to their blog.
- Simple Recent Comments -
- Subscribe to Comments - Essential for any blog to allow your readers to easily follow comments they are interested in. Readers can opt in to get notification of new comments in the blog post by email. You can add a small opt in button at the bottom of the comment form.
- Tiny Emotions - Add smilies and emoticons to your RichText Editor.
- WP Grins - Add clickable smilies and emoticons on your post or comment forms. If you can’t remember the code, just click it to insert it.
Miscellaneous
- Democracy - A poll plugin with plenty of configurable options. Uses AJAX to load data, so it is quick and fun to use. You can configure polls with id’s in admin panel and easily embed them in posts or sidebar with just the id instead of messing with the code.
- SlashDigglicious - Another social bookmarking plugin that adds a series of icons at the end of a post. I like the looks of these icons better.
- StumbleCrumble - If you love sharing your StumbleUpon favorites with your readers, check this plugin out. You can customize the way the Stumble titles look in your sidebar.
- WP-Offline - Cache you entire blog with Google Reader for reading it offline. You can allow your readers to do that as well.
Performance
- iFrameWidgets - Do you have MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BlogRush or Bumpzee widgets that load very slow sometimes making your blog appear really slow to load? Use this excellent plugin that uses iFrame to load these widgets. In layman’s term, if the widget loads slow the rest of the page doesn’t wait for it and completes loading making your whole blog seems it’s on steroids compared to the rest.
- TabStat - Helps to monitor the status of your database tables and allows you to optimize them.
- WP-Cache - Speeds up your blog by caching posts and pages to serve them faster. A lot of options to fine tune to your needs. Check out this modified version as well that claims huge speed increase.
Post
- Antisocial - A great bookmarking plugin that adds easy bookmark icons (customizable in Options page) to the bottom of every post. If you have heard of Sociable plugin, this is the hacked version by AndyBeard. Adds nofollow on all plugin links making it very SEO-friendly.
- In Series - Making a series of posts is very easy now. Have some common posts, create a new series by connecting them together. Check out our Firefox Extensions Series for a sample.
- Pagebar - Adds an advanced page navigation for your WP blog. Shows you the total number of pages and you can easily to jump to pages.
- Random Redirect - Seen the ‘Feelin Lucky’ menu at the top of the page here? It’s like a ‘Stumble’ button for your blog letting your readers read random posts.
- RB Internal Links - Allows you to link to your own posts and pages without having to enter the entire URL.
- Simple Tags - Adds plenty of options to extending WordPress 2.3 tagging.
- SRG Clean Archives - Displays archive listings in a clean uniform way in a collapsible menu style. Either look at current month or look at all posts in your archive.
- What Would Seth Godin Do - This weirdly named plugin is simply awesome. It just detects new readers and displays a custom message. You can configure it and format it in HTML and choose to make it appear at the top or bottom of a post.
- WP-Post Views - Display how many times a post or page has been viewed. You can opt out of not tracking registered members.
- WP 2.3 Related Posts - I like this better than the other Related Posts plugin because this brings up posts based on tags of WordPress 2.3. If you consistently tag posts like I do, you might see better results with this one.
- WP Ajax Edit Comments - Allows your readers to edit their comments inline for a preset time limit. Typos can make even a genuine comment look silly. Implement this and your readers will love you for this. Very slick.
RSS Feeds
- Better Feeds - It gives you plenty of options to manage your feeds including adding footer notes and Related posts to every feed item.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith - Detects all your possible feeds in your blog and redirects to your FeedBurner feed address. No need to update your WordPress template code with your FeedBurner address every time you change your theme.
- Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers - Allows you to notify unconfirmed subscribers from FeedBurner email subscriptions. A lot of people sign up but forget to confirm the email sent by FeedBurner.
SEO
- All in One SEO Pack - Fastest way to get your blog optimized for SEO. Offers plenty of excellent options. A must have from the get go.
- AskApache Google 404 - Adds Intelligent SEO Ajax-powered Google Search to 404 pages. Try this link to see a 404 page here at ShanKri-la.
- Dean’s Permalink Migration - If you are changing your site wide Permalink structure, use this plugin to make it transparent. It’s transparent even to Google and doesn’t hurt your PageRank.
- Google XML Sitemaps - Generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog. Supported by Ask.com, Yahoo, MSN Search & Google.
- Homepage Excerpts - If you display full posts in your Homepage, you could be getting bad karma from Google for having duplicate content in your home page as well as the single post pages. But, a lot of readers prefer not to click through an excerpt to read a full post. This plugin helps strike a balance by making a customizable number of posts as full and the rest of it as an excerpt in the home page without tweaking your template.
Stats
- Counterize II - A great stats plugin that saves IP, timestamp, visited URI, referring URI and browser information. It shows unique hits, page views for the month as well last 24 hours in a graph. A very nice utility for the stats addicted.
- FireStats - Excellent stats plugin that quickly shows important stats. Also automatically adds the Country, Browser and OS information right by the Commentator’s name as you see in this blog.
- Google Analyticator - Enable Google Analytics code from with in Admin panel by entering Google Analytics UID. No need to add the JavaScript to your theme code.
- Local Analytics - This plugin brings the free Google Analytics right into your blog.
- Popularity Contest - Tracks popularity of posts by different metrics that you configure from a control panel. Makes it easy to add Most popular posts by month, all time, categories, etc.
- WordPress Stats - Tracks views, pageviews, referrers and clicks. It shows what people clicked on as well as search terms. You need a WordPress.com API key to activate this.
Styling
- ClassyBody - A very powerful plugin that hooks simple CSS classes to the body tag. You can modify the look and feel of every part of your site with these hooks very easily.
- File Icons - Adds icons to links via CSS.
- Link Indication - Adds class attributes to the links in your posts, pages and even in attributes so you can style them all differently.
- MyCSS - Preserve and maintain your CSS changes easily through theme version updates.
Plugin Usage Tips
- Make sure you backup your WordPress files, if a plugin requires you to modify a template file.
- While upgrading a plugin, most times it is best to delete or atleast rename the current plugin folder/file and then upload the new plugin code.
- Take the time atleast once a month to update your plugins to the newest versions.
- Don’t let your WordPress blog get bloated and uninstall plugins that you don’t need or use anymore.
I have done my best to make sure the links are correct but it is the nature of the web that they do change at times. Please report any broken links through comments or by Contact Us form.
I would love to find new and better WordPress plugins. Feel free to sound off in the comments if you know or have found a plugin that does a better job than the one listed here.
Help make this list a great reference for all the WordPress bloggers out there. If you really really found this list useful, you could also Stumble this post and help spread the word to other WordPress bloggers.
Top Stuff Series
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- 5 Great Ways to Use Google Alerts
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- 5 easy ways to read RSS feeds
- ShanKri-la’s Top 5 Firefox Extensions
- Ready for a Serious Windows Explorer Makeover?
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- Top Browser Bookmarklets
- Free High Quality Open Source Software In One Disc - OpenDisc
- Top Web Applications Best Suited for Mozilla Prism
Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!
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December 6th, 2007 at 9:21 am
K, Damn, now I’m going to have to spend a couple of hours going through this list, then another couple of hours playing with plugins!
Actually, I use a lot of them already, but there’s definitely a few which are new to me and which sound pretty good. Thanks for including IFrameWidgets by the way!
December 6th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Awesome Stuff. I got to see many new ones. Thank you very much.
December 6th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Stephen, thank you! I will soon add Dual Feeds as well as the FeedEntryHeader plugins as well after I try them. Glad to know you found some new ones..
Vinod! Thanks buddy. Enjoy and I’ll keep updating this post as I come across good ones.
December 6th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
That’s a great list buddy. Some of those I haven’t tried. I’ll be checking some of those out (yay new downloads haha).
December 6th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
December 6th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
That’s quite a list buddy. I like the way you have categorized the plugins makes it easier to find what you are looking for.
BTW thanks for mentioning two of my plugins
December 6th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Keith, thanks for the comments buddy! Your plugins are a must have for any blog! I am looking forward to more life-changing ones from you..
The list is rather long and I am going to periodically weed out stuff as I find new ones. Atleast once a month should keep it fresh.
I am also looking at using mootools ‘Accordion effect’ to make it easy to browse to different sections without having to scroll.
December 6th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Omg, I’m in heaven. So many hours spend searching through wp plugins, and here you’ve done it all for us. I think I was under the impression that too many plugins would make my site run slow, but yours is very fast–thanks for the info. You rock my plugin-o-sphere.
December 6th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Great list buddy . I have tried most of them but some are new for me too.
December 6th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Thanks for the link to my friends ads plugin! If you liked WP-Cache, then you’ll love WP Super Cache which takes the caching even further!
December 7th, 2007 at 8:34 am
thanks for mentioning my plugin “tabstat”.
but my reader like my “WUPE”.
December 7th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Great list, wordpress bloggers can use this as a reference for installing plugins. Stumbled.
December 7th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Ed, thats awesome! I have already achieved what I set out to do with this list!
I don’t run all 65+ in my blog but most of them. I have tried the ones I don’t use right now and I try to recommend plugins that I have experience with. Very glad that you enjoyed ths compilation.
Donncha, you are welcome. I have installed WP-Super Cache and ready to try it. It might replace WP-Cache in this list if my experience is positive with it. Thanks for the mention.
@Nirmal.. thanks buddy! Thanks for the kind words and the Stumble love!
December 7th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Great list! Also stumbled!
I’ve found plugins to be much like Firefox extensions. I have to evaluate each one and decide if I really need it or not. I don’t want to sacrifice to much performance.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I seriously thought I’d seen every plugin known to man. I was surprised to see a few on this list that I’d never heard of but wished I had. Great list.
December 8th, 2007 at 5:15 am
Hey buddy, if you want to keep my attention, you’re going to have to write posts with a little more meat on them, know what I’m sayin’? LOL
Stumbled!
December 9th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
@Kyle.. that’s very true! I try to highlight that point in every Firefox Extension post I do and the same goes for WordPress plugins. One can really go overboard with these tempting plugins! Appreciate the stumble.
@Jason.. that’s awesome you found some new plugins! Thanks for stopping by to comment.
@Mark.. point taken buddy! I will strive to better than this! Thanks for the stumble.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
That’s a great list mate
Thank you!
December 10th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Tremium, you are very welcome! Thanks for taking the time to comment and welcome to ShanKri-la!
December 13th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Great list. You could easily have made this into ten posts.
December 13th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Great list! thats a lot of wordpress plguins.
December 13th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
skarldad, that’s very true! I just wanted it all in one spot for easy reference for anyone looking for plugins. That’s something John Chow would do.
Matt, you are very welcome! I don’t recommend installing them all.. obviously!
Hope you found a few useful plugins.
December 14th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Comprehensive doesn’t begin to cover it!
I’ve seen most of them, but there’s another few gems in there I must try….
December 14th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Chris.. with your new theme I’m sure you’d find one or four plugins to use!
Since I made the list I already have half a dozen plugins I want to add to the list and remove some old ones! *hint* bookmark everyone!
December 15th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Excellent list of plugins! I now use FireStats plugin, love it really! Tried to add Live Comment Preview, but somehow I can’t get it work for me… Maybe it’s something with the theme, will try a bit later again, maybe those was just some internet gnomes. *LOL*
December 16th, 2007 at 3:38 am
Hi IngaOz, thank you! I think Firestats is worth just for the country, os & browser info it shows by commentators. Live Comment Preview has just ‘worked’ for me. But, I have been wanting to change the placement to above the comment form than below it. Hope you get it to work for you!
December 26th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Humm, I like the blog but you can also have a chance to monetize it and get some wordpress blog automatic content that will earn you some extra bucks a month while you sleep. Just A Tip !
Just also to tell you Happy Christmas to you
and all your subscribers !
December 31st, 2007 at 3:58 am
hanks for the GREAT post! Very useful
January 5th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Well I must say, I enjoyed reading your material.
January 5th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Hey great site, keep up the good work, sam
January 5th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Marilyn, that’s awesome and thanks for taking the time to leave a comment!
Sam, thanks for the encouraging words! Hope to you see you around.
January 5th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Mike, thanks for your wishes! Sorry somehow missed your comment there!
January 5th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
January 29th, 2008 at 5:05 am
How many visitors a day on your website is good enough to make decent money on good adsense?
Emil’s last blog post..What’s the importance of grammar today?
January 29th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Manele, sorry I missed replying to your comment! I love them both as well.
Emil, that’s a million dollar question and I am not sure if I am qualified enough to answer that. But, I can point to a more qualified source Blogger Unleashed’s article on Adsense and that’s who I turn to for advice on topics such as this.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Nice list of plugins buddy. Stumbled!
Fahad’s last blog post..Check Pagerank of all Internal Pages on your Site
February 4th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Thanks for the stumble and all the nice comments, Fahad!
K’s last blog post..Open Remember the Milk in Your Browser Sidebar
February 11th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Hey add me to your friends list on stumbleupon and I’ll do the same. The more friends we both have the more potancy our stumbles have http://threeseriesftw.stumbleupon.com/
February 29th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
many plugins never heard before. i think i will use some of them.
thanks for sharing your plugin list.
Lowongan Kerja’s last blog post..Career Opportunity in world class oil and gas company
February 29th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Hi Lowongon, thanks for stopping by and welcome to ShanKri-la! Glad you found the list useful and you have reminded me to update the list with some of my new finds!
K’s last blog post..Friday Fun: Star Wars by a 3 Year Old
March 7th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Great list! 10q
manele noi’s last blog post..Alexx & Loredana - Mii De Ganduri
March 17th, 2008 at 1:48 am
I have visited this site on many an occasion now but this post is the 1st one that I have ever commented on.
Congratulations on such a fine article and site I have found it very helpful and informative - I only wish that there were more out there like this one.
I never leave empty handed, sometimes I may even be a little disappointed that I may not agree with a post or reply that has been made. But hey! that is life and if every one agreed on the same thing what a boring old world we would live in.
Keep up the good work and cheers.
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 am
Shankrila great post you almost covered all the good plugins available.
i missed this post while finding plugins for my blog thats bad, this must be useful for many
March 22nd, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Really useful thanks for sharing,
Franca Richard’s last blog post..Worst Plane Crash In The World
April 27th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Thank you!!!!!!!!
May 9th, 2008 at 12:03 am
Very Nice! That is the best list I have every seen. I am going to have to do some serious digging and check out some of those plug ins. Thanks for all the hard work.
Jasons last blog post..Give Browser Specific CSS Files With PHP
May 9th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Jason, you’ve made my day and given me the motivation to update this list even cooler plugins I have found and started using. readers like you make this blog better every day. For that, thank you!
May 9th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
good plug-in
May 26th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I mean with all these over there, Wordpress has never been so so good. Thanks for the list.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Wow, thats quite the list of plugins. Thanks for taking the time and sharing them! Some I didnt know about on there.
is Commentluv and KeyWordLuv making the revised list??
BlogMeTheMoneys last blog post..Adsense Alternatives: Part 4 of 4
June 8th, 2008 at 9:55 am
thanks..
June 15th, 2008 at 6:27 am
Damn, that’s a huge list… I would add the redirection plugin to that list… It enables tracking of 404 errors and inline adding of right 301/302 redirections…
June 16th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Olivier, thanks for the comment. I will look into that plugin as it sounds very interesting.
June 16th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
thank you for your guide. i have downloaded lots of plugin for my 3 blogs.
willys last blog post..How to charger a nickel-based battery ?
June 17th, 2008 at 7:40 am
many plugins never heard before. i think i will use some of them.
thanks for sharing your plugin list.
June 17th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Wow, nice list. =P
There are a ton of plugins on this list I haven’t tried before.
Justin Briggss last blog post..Creative Social Marketing with MyBlogLog
June 18th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Justin, glad you like it. I will be updating this shortly with multitude of new plugins that are out now.
July 1st, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Great list of plugins. You should add Platinum SEO to the list.. It is created based on All in One SEO but it has a lot more to it. I just learned about Democracy so I will have to try that out this week. Looks nice and you know how I love AJAX!
Aarons last blog post..Going “Green” – Small Business Can Do Its Part
July 4th, 2008 at 12:44 am
That is a huge list! And I thought I was using a lot of plugins!
Since I switched to the Semiologic Pro Theme, I’ve been mostly using the included plugins (about 70) but have been slowly adding back any that I really missed.
WP2.5 looks like it will take care of some of the issues for which we needed plugins before.
Louises last blog post..Maryland Crab Cakes Recipe
July 4th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
already used some of them. mmm, I’ll try to spend more time researching on your list. thanks
WatchUOnlines last blog post..brian stokes mitchell
July 6th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Thanks for the plugins. They are really useful for beginners.