Best WordPress Plugins – Some of My Favorites
Having worked with WordPress for about as long as the system has been around, I have seen a lot of great plugins come and go. But over the years I have come to really like certain plugins over others, and find that I am often looking to the same few plugins to achieve the results that I need. So I have compiled a list below of some of my favorite WordPress plugins… While this list is not meant to be a complete list of the best WordPress plugins available, it is a decent starting point.
What are your favorite WordPress plugins? Post yours with links in the comments section below.
Exec-PHP
The Exec-PHP plugin executes php code in your posts, pages and text widgets.
Google Analytics for WordPress
Track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.
WP Maintenance Mode
Adds a splash page to your site that lets visitors know your site is down for maintenance. Full access to the back- & front-end is optional.
Social Profiles Widget
This plugin/widget allows you to insert icon links to your social profiles in any widgetized area.
YouTube White Label Shortcode
A simple shortcode to embed white label YouTube videos using the latest iframe HTML5 embed.
Simple Lightbox
A simple, themeable, and customizable Lightbox for WordPress
Widget Logic
Widget Logic lets you control on which pages widgets appear. It uses any of WP's conditional tags.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Yoast's all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
Simple Facebook Connect
Makes it easy for your site to use Facebook Connect, in a wholly modular way.
Twitter Tools
Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
Category Posts Widget
Adds a widget that shows the most recent posts in a single category.
Sociable
Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
WP Super Edit
Get control of the WordPress wysiwyg visual editor and add some functionality with more buttons and custom TinyMCE plugins.
Simple 301 Redirects
Simple 301 Redirects provides an easy method of redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web.
Disqus Comment System
The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus.
Google Fonts
The WP Google Fonts plugin allows you to easily add fonts from the Google Font Directory to your WordPress theme.
Contact Form 7
Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.
Easy Nivo Slider
Adds Nivo Slider to a post/page with no coding. Builds sliders from a post images, featured images in posts, or from NextGen galleries.
Easing Slider
The Easing Slider is an image slider plugin for WordPress which uses the jQuery Easing plugin.
Content Slider by SlideDeck
Create SlideDecks on your WordPress blogging platform. Manage SlideDeck content and insert them into templates and posts.
WordPress Multilingual Plugin
WPML makes it easy to build multilingual sites and run them. It’s powerful enough for corporate sites, yet simple for blogs.
WP Super Cache
A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.
Duplicate Post
Creates a copy of a post or page.
19 Comments On This Topic
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August 18, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Hey Zach,
Thanks for that handy plugin list.
I came across one that’s handy when you need to change themes. It’s called Theme Test Drive by Vladimir Prelovac and it allows you test drive and try on themes, without affecting what visitors to your site see. They still see the official current theme.
The bonus is you can try on a theme and figure out if you’ll be able to customize it and work with it. Also, you can immediately see how it looks and if it suits your brand.
Louise
September 10, 2011 at 8:20 pm
This is a really handy plugin list, thanks Zach, a few of my favourites on here and a few I haven’t seen, Exec-PHP looks like it could be extremely useful though, going to take it for a spin, cheers.
October 5, 2011 at 1:26 pm
I’ve been using WordPress for several years – I’m a big fan. That makes it very easy to run a blog (or site) and it keeps getting better. One advantage of WordPress is the ability to add their own plugins to enhance the functionality of your site.
January 11, 2012 at 12:54 am
Those are all great plugins but I use one called
EZmobilesitegenerator which allows me to created mobile sites from
scratch for clients. I have control of the look and colors. Mobile is
definitely where everything is moving.
February 21, 2012 at 8:33 am
Good to see I’ve actually got a fair few of the plugins on this list.
February 22, 2012 at 9:58 am
Its a interesting blog and you information good one to read ,I come here from the Google while searching for some good article.
Thanks for this post.
February 26, 2012 at 7:34 pm
Those are really great and useful plugin’s. I wanted to download these and I had many tried to find them but finally I got here, so I would thanks to you for this post.
February 26, 2012 at 10:56 pm
I’m always looking for ideas for what plugins for my blog. Some of
these look like they’d be useful to me. .All these ideas are very beneficial for all who are new in blogging and are much not aware about it..
February 29, 2012 at 4:00 am
Those are really excellent and useful plugin’s. I desired to obtain these and I had many tried to discover them but lastly I got here, so I would thanks to you for this publish.
March 14, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Those are my favorites plugins too but I never new it had a plugin for WP Maintenance??? …
Web Design and Web
Development
March 22, 2012 at 5:22 am
Good Job, I am glad I read this post of yours. You have wonderfully listed all the best WordPress plugins. I always use Disqus comment pulgin and social profile widget plugin. However, I will try out others as well.
March 28, 2012 at 7:25 pm
Having a good word press plug in will be very useful when doing an seo campaign. specially when optimizing a website, you need to have good plug in for you to be able to do some task easily. in my opinion, i want to have akismet plug in for my blog commenting job, it;s very helpful to me because it will prevent from being spam when posting comments on a blog.
April 4, 2012 at 1:56 am
Yes these are useful wordpress plugin’s. I have used some of them in my blog. Thanks for nice information about them.
May 15, 2012 at 1:20 am
Using this kind of WordPress plugins is very enough to have a beautiful output in your work. Thank you for sharing this to us. Your threads is very useful and I get many ideas and techniques on how should I start my upcoming business using those WordPress plugins.
May 20, 2012 at 7:38 am
WordPress plug-ins in seo is the best thing that will have to consider when you have a campaign on your website. I think these listed plug-ins were all useful in seo especially for blogging. some WordPress plug-ins are useful for blogging because through this plug-ins you can easily manage your blogs and remove lots of spam.
June 14, 2012 at 5:09 am
Great job, i am really glad to see this wonderful blog, thanks a lot for the share, keep sharing please!
June 19, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Hello Zach. I found your site the other day and would like first say you have a very well-designed, well-executed site with a lot of good information. While itself this is worth commenting on, this is not why I am leaving this comment. I noticed the first plugin you suggest is ExecPHP.
July 5, 2012 at 3:16 am
It is great work i like it thanks allot for posting!
July 12, 2012 at 10:02 am
LOGOS ARE VERY USEFUL FOR BUISENSS WHICH HELP TO INCREASE THE BUISENESS.