SU!Pretty bold title, huh? Well, I’ve been a fan of WordPress for years. I’m an avid supporter of the robust and highly intuitive blogging platform and have contributed to the WordPress community over the past few years by launching a professional WordPress themes website, creating a useful plugin (Twitter ReTweet) for Twitter/WordPress integration, and advocating the use of WordPress to clients and friends alike.
That being said, here are 19 WordPress plugins – all compatible with the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1 as I write this post) – that every professional WordPress website should consider using. I’ve segmented the plugins into categories in an effort to make the list easier to digest.
Integral Admin Tools
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Google Analytics for WordPress
Not much needs to be said about Google Analytics for WordPress. It was created by the one-man WordPress plugin machine known as Yoast. It is by far the best Google Analytics WordPress plugin available. The ability to track all outgoing link clicks makes this plugin worth the install for that reason alone.
Author’s Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin Page | Google Analytics for WordPress on WordPress.org
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Exec-PHP
Depending on the nature of your website, this may not be necessary. However, if you plan on executing any PHP code within your WordPress posts or pages, this plugin will make that possible. Highly useful.
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WP-SpamFree
Hands down the most aggressively thorough WordPress spam-fighting plugin I’ve ever used. In my opinion, this plugin is superior to the Akismet plugin which comes bundled with WordPress. Unlike Akismet which requires you to obtain a WordPress.com API key before using the plugin, WP-SpamFree works out of the box.
Everyone should have this plugin installed on their website.
Author’s WP-SpamFree Plugin Page | WP-SpamFree on WordPress.org
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WP Security Scan
Per this plugin’s description, WP Security Scan:
Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
And it certainly does as advertised. If the security of your website is important to you, download this plugin (especially if you don’t have a firewall protecting your website).
Author’s WP Security Scan Plugin Page | WP Security Scan on WordPress.org
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Admin Management XTended
For WordPress power users (people who publish a high volume of posts/pages, use scheduled posting, rely heavily on categories and tags). This plugin provides a quick and streamlined solution to editing post and page information by eliminating the need to have to click the Edit link each time the user wants to make a change to a post/page’s information.
This plugin will save you a lot of time.
Author’s Admin Management XTended Plugin Page | Admin Management XTended on WordPress.org
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WP-DB-Backup
If you’re familiar with web development, then you know that your data is stored within a database. In case of a catastrophic failure, corrupted data, or an act of sabotage by a hacker, it’s always a good idea to have a backup of your database information. My company uses a hosting company (Rackspace) which automatically backs up both our files and databases on a daily basis. However, few hosting companies will include this service with their hosting packages unless you pay for it (sometimes they don’t even offer it).
If you can’t get your hosting company to backup your database information, then make sure you have a copy of WP-DB-Backup installed. A database backup should be created every few hours or every few days (depending on how often your WordPress website is updated).
Don’t skip database backups. You will regret it.
Author’s WP-DB-Backup Plugin Page | WP-DB-Backup on WordPress.org
Performance
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WP Super Cache
If your WordPress pages are slowly loading, WP Super Cache will probably help. This is an absolutely brilliant and extremely useful plugin for anyone interested in increasing the speed at which posts and pages are loaded on their WordPress website.
This plugin has the ability to create static HTML files so that, instead of performing several database queries each time a page is loaded, a page’s information is queried once and then saved as a static HTML file. Basically, the data is cached on the server.
And don’t worry – there is an option within the plugin which allows you to flush the cache each time a post or comment is published.
This plugin is highly recommended.
Author’s WP Super Cache Plugin Page | WP Super Cache on WordPress.org
Media
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Amazon S3 for WordPress
Does your WordPress website use a lot of images in posts? If so, Amazon S3 for WordPress is something that you should definitely consider using. This plugin sets up a seamless integration between an Amazon S3 account and the file upload component within WordPress. This is a great way to lighten the load on your web server and also cut down on bandwidth usage by allowing Amazon S3 to store your website’s media.
Highly recommended for people who use a lot of images in their posts.
Author’s Amazon S3 for WordPress Plugin Page | Amazon S3 for WordPress on WordPress.org
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All in One Video Pack
This is a highly versatile video plugin which has tons of great features. Here is a brief blurb from the plugin website on WordPress.org:
This is not just another video embed tool – it includes every functionality you might need for video and rich-media, including the ability to upload/record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor, enable video responses, manage and track your video content, create playlists and much more… And Kaltura covers all hosting and streaming costs for FREE up to 10GB.
In addition, you can upload, record from your webcam, and import all rich-media directly into your blog post.
Bottom line: If you use video for your blog, you should be using this great plugin.
Author’s All in One Video Pack Plugin Page | All in One Video Pack on WordPress.org
SEO
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All in One SEO Pack
There are tons of different SEO plugins available for WordPress. Having tested most of them, All in One SEO Pack gives you the most flexibility and options.
This plugin is highly recommended for anyone concerned about search engine optimization.
Author’s All in One SEO Pack Plugin Page | All in One SEO Pack on WordPress.org
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Robots Meta
Another extremely useful SEO plugin. This plugin gives you advanced control over the robots meta tag. Robots Meta has a long and detailed options page which allows you to take control over everything from the robots meta tag to nofollow tags.
This plugin is a great tool that can be used to help avoid duplicate content issues, sculpt Google PageRank, and much more.
Definitely worth the install if you’re concerned about fine-tuning your WordPress website’s SEO.
Author’s Robots Meta Plugin Page | Robots Meta on WordPress.org
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Google XML Sitemaps
Another extremely handy WordPress SEO plugin. XML sitemaps are very useful for SEO and for search engine page indexing in general as the sitemap(s) acts as a blueprint for your website’s content, making it easy for the search engines to crawl (and potentially index) all of the quality pages on your WordPress website.
Google XML Sitemaps will automatically generate an XML sitemap in a format supported by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. This plugin automatically pings the search engines you specify each time a new post is published.
Another highly recommended SEO plugin. Download it.
Author’s Google XML Sitemaps Plugin Page | Google XML Sitemaps on WordPress.org
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WordPress SEO Pager
This plugin benefits both visitors and search engine spiders.
Visitors don’t need to click through several Previous and Next links to get to the page they are looking for. One or two clicks and the user can easily navigate to the page he/she is looking for.
Search engine spiders can quickly crawl through the pages in your website by using paginated page links. The faster the search engine spiders can crawl through your site, the better.
Communication and Discussion
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Subscribe to Comments
Increase and amplify the discussion on your WordPress website by giving your visitors the ability to subscribe to a post’s comments. An e-mail will be sent to anyone who subscribes to the post, and it’s just as easy to unsubscribe to the comment notification e-mails as it is to subscribe to them.
By far one of the most popular and most useful WordPress plugins created to date. Get it now!
Author’s Subscribe to Comments Plugin Page | Subscribe to Comments on WordPress.org
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Contact Form 7
Taken directly from the plugin’s page on WordPress.org:
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.
Make it easy for your visitors, readers, and prospects to contact you. Install this plugin!
Author’s Contact Form 7 Plugin Page | Contact Form 7 on WordPress.org
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FD Feedburner Plugin
Another great plugin which allows you to monitor another useful metric on your website – RSS feed subscribers.
Simple and seamless integration between your WordPress website’s RSS feed and your Feedburner account. Simple, effective, and easy to configure.
Author’s FD Feedburner Plugin Plugin Page | FD Feedburner Plugin on WordPress.org
Social Media
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Twitter for WordPress
Twitter continues to grow in popularity, so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s here to stay. Twitter for WordPress gives you the ability to easily output your latest tweets on your WordPress website.
Increase your transparency by broadcasting to your visitors what you’re saying on Twitter!
Author’s Twitter for WordPress Plugin Page | Twitter for WordPress on WordPress.org
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Sociable
This plugin is a great all-in-one solution to social media bookmarking and sharing. This plugin has been around for a while, but continues to get better. It’s a very good alternative for people who don’t want to take the time to design their own custom social bookmarking spot before or after their posts.
Tip: Don’t go overboard with the number of bookmarking options you display under your posts. Also, it’s best to only display the Sociable bookmarks on single post pages. Doing so on a page that lists multiple posts looks pretty tacky and unprofessional. Use this plugin sparingly!
Advertising
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Advertising Manager
A very flexible WordPress advertising plugin. This is an all-in-one solution to advertising within WordPress. No matter what ad network you’re using, chances are this plugin supports it.
Taken directly from this plugin’s page on WordPress.org:
This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your Wordpress blog. It automatically recognizes many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.
Author’s Advertising Manager Plugin Page | Advertising Manager on WordPress.org
What’s Missing?
Are we missing any essential WordPress plugins for professional WordPress websites? If so, leave a comment below. If your suggested plugin proves to be useful, we will include it in our list and give you credit for the suggestion within the post.
I think that you should add Advanced Category Excluder as well, it is good for excluding things from the front page, the rss feed, the search results, and adds to robots.txt as well.
SeanJA – Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check it out.
Thanks – I knew I was forgetting something for my new blog – your post reminded me that I still needed a sitemap!
I also like Advanced Category Excluder. It’s not a plugin that you’ll use on every WP installation, but very handy in many situations. Also, I really like Contact Form 7, which you included in the post. It wasn’t one of the first contact form plugins I came across, but I like it the best. It’s simple but it still has some options for customization.
WP-Spamfree is one of the worst things you can do to your blog if you want comments. This plugin prevents a great many comments from ever being made. Despite the fact the author touts he can find nothing wrong with it and can’t duplicate the errors it gives far too many of us have had problems with it. Hell I used to tout this as the best spam plugin ever until I tried replying to a comment on my own blog, the first in weeks when prior to installing the plugin I was getting 10 or 20 a day. The plugin refused to let me post as a normal commentator. I then found I had this problem on about half the blogs I know that used the plugin. Not only does it screw with your comments it can also mess with many contact form plugins preventing people from even telling you your blog is screwed up.
WP-Spamfree is a menace and should be withdrawn from the wordpress archives. It causes far more harm than good. Akismet, combined with trackback validation and math spam protection or Bad Behavior when it doesn’t conflict with other plugins are far superior options.
As for what is missing I really like Joost’s Breadcrumbs and Minimum Comment Length. His enhanced contact form is very good too, but I have never compared it against Contact Form 7. Another fine admin plugin I think you are missing is WP-Optimize for database management/optimization. The best thing about WP-Optimize is for those of us who often live blog or take hours constructing a post, or often update posts if can get rid of all those post revisions cluttering your DB
In my opinion there are some serious issues with All in one SEO Pack and much prefer Headspace 2, and would say you are missing John’s Redirection from your list too. I also prefer Lester Chen’s WP-Pagenavi to any other pagination system, though WP Pagebar isn’t bad if that is your taste and want to play around graphically.
When it comes to comments there are two you are missing for Twitter fans. Tweet Comments which will send a tweet to @username to people who used their twitter email when their comment is replied to. The second is the Automatic Twitter Profile URI plugin. This will link comments to a person’s twitter account and when I comment on blogs using it I always get a boost in followers. As a nofollow blog commentluv and keywordluv would be useless to you. Of those only commentluv would have any value to the commentators, and only If they write good post titles.
When it comes to social media Sociable has the most options of what to add especially foreign/non-english networks, but most of the plugins of this nature are good. Share-this is nice if you want to take up less real estate. I thinke very blog should also have the retweet button, but integrate the code into their theme rather than using a plugin. Whatever social plugin you use if you don’t have a hard coded way to print the post and comments and email them directly make sure you get a social plugin like sociable and check those options.
When it comes to ads the latest version of Adrotate works very very well if you don’t use the ad wizard. Also make sure you follow the instructions on the website and not the readme file or you won’t get the plugin to work. This is the only plugin I have been able to do redirection of CPA banner ads on WPMU
Steven – I’ll have to check that Advanced Category Excluder out. I’ve never heard of it until yesterday.
Brad – Wow, thanks for the long list of suggestions. It looks like I’ve got some homework to do.
Personally, I’ve never had a problem with the WP-SpamFree plugin, so perhaps the plugin has been improved? Has anyone else had a problem with this plugin?
wp-spam free may actually be preventing the people having problems with your site from accessing your contact form too, which is one of the reasons it is so problematic. You simply have no way of knowing who is and isn’t having problems with it, because there is no way for them to tell you most of the time that the plugin doesn’t block. When the plugin works right it works, but when it doesn’t it there is more grief than you can believe. The upgrade hasn’t actually improved anything I have checked.
http://wordpress.org/tags/wp-spamfree
Plugins like this are any serious blogger needs multiple free ways to contact them.
Brad: I’m the author of the WP-SpamFree, and I’m sorry you had such a frustrating time with it. We have made a Troubleshooting Guide available and free tech support if anyone has any trouble or questions – it’s all clearly marked in the documentation. 99.99% of the time it’s a simple fix. Also, you reference that it’s impossible to know if a comment is missed, but the plugin has a logging mode you can turn on in the options to check what has been blocked (both comments and contact forms). I checked through our records, and we never received a Support Request from you (and we have a debug version that lets us receive all submissions so we wouldn’t have missed yours). Believe me I totally understand how frustrating it is when something seems not to work, but I also don’t think it’s too much to ask that you try at least to contact us for help before calling the plugin a “menace”.
Matt: Thanks for a great article and for mentioning WP-SpamFree.
Hey Scott, you’re quite welcome. Thank you for putting together such a great plugin! Personally, I wasn’t aware of the logging mode, and that makes this plugin all the better!
Matt: You’re welcome! Thanks again. Yeah, it was something people had been asking for for a while. I wanted to do it in a way that still kept spam out of the database, for a number of security reasons. Having the logging mode is also handy in troubleshooting. If you ever have suggestions or feedback – let me know. Most of the new features were user suggestions and requests. Keep up the great work with Chromatic. Have a great 4th of July weekend!
Hi. I was just wondering how you created your own Portfolio page on this blog. Did you just add the images in a post or are you using a Plugin? If the latter, can you tell me where I can download it as I’d like to do the same on my blog. Cheers.
Hi Jeremy. Which portfolio page are you talking about? Are you talking about the portfolio page on our website, or the portfolio images found in the right column of our blog?
Both. They just look nice and clean. Both have nice, ordered graphics.
Jeremy – Both the portfolio page on our website as well as the portfolio spot in the right column of our blog is custom. Glad you like them. Wish I could help more…
Great list, Matt.
I’m pretty new to the WP party, but am already using several of the plug-ins mentioned above. Our new WP website is *finally* going live later this week @ http://www.gomobileiq.com. As well as 7 of the 11 web apps mentioned in an earlier post. You should open up the title a bit, since all of these are applicable to any freelancer and especially people working a virtual office (like ourselves).
Check out Tom Slayer’s Custom Widgets (TS Custom Widgets)
http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/11/08/slayers-custom-widgets-v12-wordpress-plugin-finally-out/
=== From the author’s website ===
This plugin enables you to select which widgets appear on specific posts, pages, categories,author’s posts and tag pages. By default, all widgets appear wherever the sidebar is loaded within your theme. With this plugin, you can configure where widgets are displayed on a per post or per WP Template(Using conditional Tags) basis.
=== From the author’s website ===
This plug-in is brand spanking new (and therefore an untested recommendation), but the concept is solid and it’s received great reviews from other users. It should save considerable time instead of monkeying around with PHP code. And saves us the trouble of writing the same plug-in. I’ll using it for conditionally displaying where sign up offers appear on different pages/posts.
Thank you for plugins collection. Tell, how 2 create comment form similar like yours, with avatars and ‘reply’ button? Do you have some plugins?
Hi,
Please tell me how to downlaod and use (enable) the Most Popular Posts Wordpress plugin in my wordpress website
Naveen – The Most Popular Posts WordPress Plugin can be found at http://rmarsh.com/plugins/popular-posts-plugin/. Enable it by logging into the Admin section and Activating the plugin just like you would to any other plugin. You will need to read through the documentation to tweak it to your liking, though.
Matt, this is a terrific post. I use many of these plugins but did not know about some of them, like the Amazon S3 plugin or the “other” spam plugin. I just found your site and will return often. Very good site.–Tim
Tim – Glad you found the post useful, that’s why I wrote it!
Great post, i was looking for some of these quite some time.
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for this extensive list. I have a couple of blogs and had not thought much about the plug-ins until recently. One of my blogs was hacked and another was being inundated with spam. I have already installed a few of the plug-ins you suggested, but I will now go through your list more thoroughly and include others. Thanks again.
Those are great. I cant believe you didnt put the wordpress gravatars plugin… like EVERY blog should have this plugin. visuals are huge in creating a community on your page. great list, however!
Jonathan | retheme.net
Just a note that as of WordPress 2.7 (I think… in any case, a couple of versions ago), avatars/Gravatars are built in, no plugin needed.
Thank you for sharing this info..
I may have over looked it or not know what I was looking at but, do you have a wordpress plugin to put comment section on each page instead of them just being on the posts?
Wayne, no, I don’t. Any suggestions?
WordPress actually supports comments on pages as well as posts without a plugin, but most themes don’t.
If your theme doesn’t, and you’re feeling a little adventurous, you can copy and paste the code that calls the comment form from single.php into page.php.
If there’s interest in details, I can write a how-to post.
This post and comments are very informative to me.. but I have an issues with WordPress that I hope to find solution for:
I need to have the admin area in English while the user area is not !
Great list, you should add Pagemash (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagemash/) too to this list, great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus with ease and quickly
You’ve got some cool WP plugins here..I’ve been using some of them, some are new to me. Being new to WP, I find this site very helpful.
Thanks,
Peter
sitemap plugin saves lot of time .. which u end u forgetting ..
good lsit, they are other that you might want to review..
photogallary plugins are used on most sites nowadays …
thx
I really enjoyed reading you blog. I am always looking for new information because as the old saying goes “Knowledge is power”
Excellent post and exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!
I like subscribe to commtents and contact form 7. Make sure install the captcha too to block spams. Oh sociable is another great plugin. I have my own plugin too. Hana Code Insert It enables you to insert (html,javascript…) code into a post. So basically you can input AdSense, Html FORM, Paypal donation link, etc
Thanks for the great recommendation about WP-DB-Backup – I would never have found it without your post.
It looks like a great bunch of plugins. I will have to try a few of these. Plugins can be a bad thing though also. I recently tried one plugin that kept making tweets on twitter to plug the authors products.
Truely informative. I was thinking of reviewing good plugins and blog it to my websites. Thanks for narrowing it down to the good ones. Thanks.
I use Keywordluv, Commentluv, and sport a Do-Follow plugin. I feel it’s a good trade-off for the interaction, and as I read on another blog recently, any blog that has all three is pure gold!
I really like the information you have given us. Thank you. I also own a blog that talks about free blog plugins and I will definitly be posting a link to your site at all my blogs. Your information would be helpful to my members. Thanks, Jeff