Their are more than 19,000 WordPress plugins (with 285,962,575 downloads) in official WordPress directory and thousands are really useful but we can’t have even hundreds of WordPress plugins for our WordPress blogs. I am sharing 21 must have WordPress plugins that we use on our site. And a few which we used recently or which can be used as alternative. And the list is..
1. Yoast’s WordPress SEO: SEO is really important these days and so an SEO plugin is must have WordPress plugin, no doubt at all. yoast.com is one of the best WordPress SEO site which has great tutorials and some best plugins. But it does not means you should not use it on your public WordPress blog. We are using it and it satisfy our expectations.
2. WP-DBManager: This plugin not only optimize WordPress database but also provide free and easy way to create automatic or manual backups. The plugin have capability to send database backup file to our email.
3. WordPress Super Cache: Caching your webpages is good idea which reduces load of your web server and so increases your site performance.
4. Seo Slugs: Yoast’s SEO plugin provides almost all seo tools but do not optimize slug. Use SEO Slug to optimise your site urls by removing common words like and, or, but, have.
5. YARPP: Yet Another Related Post plugin (aka YARPP) is best plugin among any related post plugin. However it needs some amount of server resources but it is worth to try. After moving from Dreamhost to Hostgator we are continuously using it without any issue.
6. Ad Injection: It is a nice plugin that we use to show advertisements on our site. The plus point of this plugin is its continuous development and easy split or A/B testing.
7. Broken Link Checker: It is very useful WordPress plugins specially when you have a lot of posts. This plugin regularly check broken links in your WordPress. Broken links are not good for SEO and visitors both.
8. Limit Login Attempts: Put your WordPress in secure by preventing brute force login attempts. I don’t know why this is not an inbuilt feature in WordPress. You should must have this or similar plugin.
9. Akismet: Akismet is the best plugin to control over comment spam. This plugin is free for non-commercial blog. If your blog is ad-supported or have any sponsors link you have to pay $5/months per site. Go for TypePad antispam and reCaptcha, if you do not wish to pay.
10. Lightbox Pop: is good and can boost newsletter or other campaigns by 40%. It provides easy integration of lightbox pop form or window.
11. PuSHPress: We can easily integrate pubshubhubbub by installing PuSHPress.
12. Redirection: This is a really good plugin to track and mange url redirection. Additionally the plugin allows to track 404 visits to a wordpress blog. Definitely this plugin is most important plugin.
13. upPrev: This plugin may reduce bounce rate by at least 20% on a typical blog. The plugin adds a flyout at the bottom of a post or where you want which catches user attraction and visitors are most likely to click on that link.
14. WPtouch: You may ask when a lot of sites are looking for Responsive web design then why i am discussing about WPTouch plugin. Their is a reason behind it. Although responsive webdesign is good but a normal user can’t disable plugins or features of a site for mobile users. Responsive design keeps your theme design but loads the whole web page. So i believe using a separate theme or site is still better idea and WPTouch wins in this category.
15. Dean’s Permalinks Migration: Recently we have changed the permalink structure of this blog from /%category%/%post-name%/%post-id%/ to /%post-name%/. This caused a lot of 404 for all backlinks and search engine. In the result we might lose all our traffic. If we shouldsafely change WordPress permalink structure to keep visitors and SERP untouched.
16. Genesis Simple Hooks: This site is based on Genesis Framework and the plugin helps me to easily tweak the theme without breaking the site while testing. However the plugin is not active always but i use it regularly and install whenever i need it.
17. Author hReview: This plugin has been recently developed and really useful for product reviews. I have recently installed and love this one.
18. Digg Digg: However their is no big reason to have a plugin for Social Media sharing buttons and I have planned to remove the plugin and add custom codes for the same purpose. But, the plugin is still good and worth to try for most users who do not want to engage himself into coding.
Used earlier and still useful:
19. After the deadline: After the deadline is a good plugin for spell check and grammar check.
20. Contact form 7: Contact form is good for adding form feature in WordPress. Many people suggests for gravity form but this plugin can be used for free alternative of Gravity Forms. I do not suggest Gravity forms for only one reason “The price”. If you can afford Gravity form then go for if but I have used Contact form earlier and found it useful. You may also try Google Docs to create forms. I am using it correctly.
21. Disqus Comment System: Yes, Many people do not like to use this as comment system. But this is worth to try.
22. JetPack: Jetpack is developed by and this WordPress plugin offers a lot of feature which may be integrated without installing multiple plugins. I like this plugin for WordPress Stat and After the deadline functionality.
Well these must have WordPress plugin is the fulfill basic requirement of your blog. We will explore some more plugin soon.
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