Most Popular WordPress Plugins

1. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

2. All in One SEO Pack

Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

3. 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.

4. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.

5. Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

6. 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.

7. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and also add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings along with thumbs based ratings.

8. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

9. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Before I start writing the plugin I study all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums.

11. Sociable

Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! WordPress 2.6 or above is required, if you use an older version, please download this version, please keep in mind that version is not maintained.

13. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

14. Twitter for WordPress

Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

15. WordPress.com Stats

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

16. WP-PageNavi

All the information (general, changelog, installation, upgrade, usage) you need about this plugin can be found here: WP-PageNavi Readme. It is the exact same readme.html is included in the zip package.

17. Smart YouTube

All the information (general, changelog, installation, upgrade, usage) you need about this plugin can be found here: WP-PageNavi Readme. It is the exact same readme.html is included in the zip package.

18. Global Translator

The number of available translations will depend on your blog language and the translation engine you will chose to use.

19. WP-Polls

WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

20. WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

21. Simple Tags

Simple Tags is the successor of Simple Tagging Plugin This is THE perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8 tags.

22. WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam

An extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

23. WordPress Automatic upgrade

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

24. WP Security Scan

Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.passwords, file permissions, database, security, version hiding, WordPress admin protection/security, removes WP Generator META tag from core code.

25. flickrRSS

This plugin allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your site. It supports user, set, favorite, group and community photostreams. The plugin is relatively easy to setup and configure via an options panel. It also has support for an image cache located on your server.

26. Get Recent Comments

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date.

27. Maintenance Mode

Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

28. StatPress Reloaded

This plugin (a highly improved fork of StatPress) shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

29. OpenID

OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account.

30. HeadSpace2 SEO

HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site.

Found something missing in this post?

While compiling this stuff on this post, it’s possible that we miss some other great wordpress plugins. Do not hesitate to share it with us in Comments so that we can add instantly.