The following is a list of favorite WordPress plugins. They help make your publishing life a little easier. Some help with SEO. Some share your posts. Others protect you from spam.
When possible, the links on this page lead to the plugin’s page on the WordPress.org directory. The description of the plugin is in the author’s own words.
Be sure to do your own “due diligence” before installing any plugin on your website. Look at the ratings and read some of the reviews, before making your decision. Remember that the more plugins you have installed, the more likely the possibility of conflicts and upgrade issues, with WordPress and other plugins.
For example, you don’t need more than one SEO plugin, to help with your search engine rankings. Pick the best one that ultimately suits your needs, and stick with it.
Anti Spam Plugins
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. You’ll need an Akismet.com API key to use it. Details about the API are available on the download page.
Block Spam By Math
This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding a simple math question to it (“what is 4+3 ?”). This approach should give you 100% anti-spam protection to your sites.
SEO Plugins
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
All in One SEO Pack
Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
Sharing Plugins
Tell a Friend Widget
Tell-a-Friend makes it possible for your site visitors to share your content with their friends without directing them away from your site.
ShareThis
Used on over 1,000,000 sites, the ShareThis plugin allows users to share your content through email and 50+ social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Google Buzz.
Simple Facebook Connect
Simple Facebook Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Facebook Connect functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like.
Contact Forms & Email
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.
Admin Tools
WordPress Database Backup
WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.
Google Analytics for WordPress
Track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and page views.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.
Audio and Video Plugins
Smart YouTube
Smart Youtube is a WordPress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists in your post, comments and in RSS feed.
Specialty Plugins
Simple Press Forum
A feature rich, completely integrated and fully scalable forum plugin for WordPress. It packs the features of a standalone forum into a plugin – seamlessly turning your WordPress site into a community
Premium (Paid) Plugins
S3 Flowshield
This plugin protects your audio and video files stored on Amazon S3. You can prevent theft of your content and bandwidth. It includes video sitemaps and a commercial license to a professional video player.
Your Favorite Plugins ?
Tell us which WordPress plugins are your favorites and why. If we like them, we’ll include them here on this list, along with a hat tip to you. Please send us an email using the email address on the “Contact Us” page and let us know what you like. Thanks!