WordPress is easily the best and most robust blogging platform available today. Part of the reason for the success and “staple” status of WordPress is due to the availability of thousands of plugins that can take your blogging experience from novice to pro overnight.
Thanks to the WordPress community, there has probably been a plugin (or 6) developed for nearly every problem/situation/need that has ever arisen when it comes to using WordPress.I’ve decided to assemble and organize a list of 101 WordPress plugins that can help take you from a rookie blogger to a professional one in no time at all. Taking advantage of some of the awesome plugins that are available can really make a difference in how you blog and can boost productivity and efficiency instantly. I hope you enjoy the list below, and at one point in time, I think I’ve used every single one of these. Have fun!
SEO WordPress Plugins
1. All in One SEO Pack — By far the gold standard of SEO plugins, “All in One” provides a multitude of easy to understand options to get your blog up to par SEO wise. 99% of WordPress users will agree when I say this an absolute must have when it comes to plugins. With over 2 million downloads and growing, you can’t go wrong.
2. SEO Title Tag — Although the plugin above can control title tags on your WordPress blog, this plugin is an outstanding solution to optimize and customize every title tag on your blog.
3. HeadSpace2 SEO — This handy dandy SEO plugin will allow you to customize meta-data for nearly every aspect of your blog including posts, pages, categories, home page, search pages, author pages, and even 404 pages. This a super alternative to All in One SEO Pack, just not quite as popular.
4. SEO Smart Links — A great little plugin that will allow you to automatically link specific phrases and keywords in your posts and comments with corresponding pages on your blog. This one is very handy to have and a great compliment to All in One SEO Pack.
5. Platinum SEO Pack — Another good competitor for All in One SEO Pack, this one will do a lot of the same stuff, and allow you to control 301 redirects for permalink changes, control nofollow, noindex attributes, and more.
6. SEO Friendly Images — A lifesaver for that pesky and annoying alt tag (for images) that you always seem to forget to add. Alt tags can make a difference in your search results, and it’s important to optimize each and every image on your blog. This plugin will make that process a lot easier.
7. SEO Slugs — This a great utility SEO plugin that removes words like “the”, “a”, “in”, and related words from your post slugs, which will help improve SEO performance. Some might argue that it doesn’t matter, but why not play it safe and build the most SEO friendly post slugs possible?
8. SEO Watcher — A fairly new plugin, this one claims to watch your daily Google rankings for up to 3 keywords and 3 URL’s inside your WordPress platform. Not a bad idea, but I personally haven’t tested this one yet. Try it and let us know what you think.
9. Meta Robots Plugin — For an easy solution to adding meta robot tags to your pages in WordPress, this the plugin for you. It provides a whole host of capabilities, from preventing the indexing of subpages to your homepage, to nofollowing outbound links on your home page.
10. SEO Blogroll — A very cool plugin that allows you to take control over the “links” widget in WordPress and slap a nofollow attribute on links in your blogroll. Why? Because your blogroll is shown on every page of your blog, needlessly “leaking” pagerank from every page on your blog to external sites that you link to.
11. SEO Tag Cloud — Whether you love or hate tag clouds, they’re only useful for your visitors and not for SEO purposes, unless you use this plugin. This awesome plugin will display a tag cloud using HTML markup, which of course is SEO friendly.
12. Simple Tags — Tagging your posts, whether you know it or not, can play a HUGE part in how your posts are indexed and the type of traffic you drive into your blog. Most people don’t know how to properly tag a post, as easy as it is. This plugin will suggest tags to use for each post that you write, and it’s a wonderful plugin!
13. Redirection — This plugin is more of a utility plugin to manage different redirects and stuff like that, but as you know, properly managing redirects and error pages plays a huge part in your SEO efforts, so the more organized you can be, the better your blog will perform. This plugin will support Apache and WordPress based redirections.
14. Nofollow Case by Case — This plugin will allow you to eliminate the nofollow attribute from specific comments, and/or allow you to nofollow specific comments. This a good way to reward regular contributors and keep the spamming noobs away.
15. Google XML Sitemap Generator — This will be tagged as a must have plugin for any WordPress blog. Anyone who wants to take advantage of every aspect of SEO for their blog, including making Google happy by submitting proper sitemaps, should use this plugin on their blog. It’s easy to implement and is a bazooka in your plugin arsenal.
Analytical WordPress Plugins
16. Google Analyticator — This plugin makes it easy for you to enable GA logging on your WordPress blog. Will also show visitor stats and track all links on pages.
17. Ultimate Google Analytics — Just like the plugin above, this will allow any WordPress blogger to add Javascript GA code to each page on your blog without the need to edit your template and potentially screw up your code.
18. Blog Metrics — A simple plugin that allows you to see average number of posts per month per author, average number of words per post, and some other cool information about your blog that you might want to have handy.
19. Search Meter — A real gem of a plugin, Search Meter allows you to find out exactly what people are searching for on your blog. If you have a search box enabled on your blog, you can gain some valuable insight from the data that this plugin will produce. Find out what your visitors are searching for the most, and give them more of it!
20. Google Analytics For WordPress — A hugely popular plugin, this awesome tool will track all sorts of analytical information such as Adsense clicks, image search queries, outbound links, links within comments, and other helpful data that you might want to have.
21. StatPress — One of my personal favorites, this plugin will provide real-time analytical information of your blog within your WordPress back-end. It will show you who is coming to your blog, how long they stay, how they got there, and so much more. I will not set up a blog without this plugin — it’s that good.
22. WordPress.com Stats — One of the heavy hitters in the stats plugin world, this one will show you a multitude of information about your visitors that you’ll probably want to know. This plugin does require an API key from WordPress, which can be obtained from WordPress.com.
23. Feedburner Feed Stats — If you’re lazy like most of us bloggers, you want the ability to check all of your stats in one central place (like when you’re logged into WordPress). This plugin will show you your Feeburner feed stats from your WP admin interface. This another must have plugin if you have a sizeable amount of subscribers.
24. Popularity Contest — Have you ever wanted to know which posts are the most popular on your blog? This plugin gives a weighting to each post based on several different factors and ranks them in a nice list of most popular posts. This a nice one to have for visitors to find your best articles, which of course in turn will make them even more popular!
25. StatBadge — A simple plugin that displays different metrics in your sidebar like Alexa ranking, number of comments, Pagerank, and related data that you can show off to your visitors (and to yourself).
Anti-Spam WordPress Plugins
26. Akismet — This one is a no-brainer. Akismet is the gold standard in spam fighting WordPress plugins. It is one of two plugins included in the default WordPress installation, so that should tell you something right there. Every blog should have this enabled, without a doubt!
27. Bad Behavior — This anti-spam plugin will block link spam with a PHP-based system. This awesome plugin is like a personal bodyguard for your blog, and will stop spammers dead in their tracks.
28. Spam Karma 2.3 — Although this plugin is no longer being supported or developed, it’s still very much worthy of mentioning on this list. I’ve used Spam Karma for years, and have rarely had a spam comment get by without SK shooting it down. Get it while it’s still available!
29. Email Spam Protection — This spam fighter will convert email addresses (such as yours) that are posted on your blog to an un-scrapeable JavaScript one. A simple plugin, but useful if you drop your email address a lot.
30. Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam — I only added this one because it appears that it gets a lot of downloads, so something must be good with it! This just appears to be another anti-spam plugin for your WordPress blog, so it doesn’t hurt to mention it.
Social Media WordPress Plugins
32. Add to Any — This plugin will allow you to add a cool widget which will make it easy for your readers to bookmark your posts to all the big social bookmarking/social media sites. There are quite a few of these types of plugins, but this one of the more popular ones.
33. Social Bookmarking RELOADED — This another plugin that will allow your visitors to bookmark your articles to a multitude of social bookmarking sites.
34. Twitter Tools — This plugin will allow you to seamlessly integrate your blog and your Twitter account which will help drive traffic to your blog from your Twitter updates.
35. Twitter For WordPress — For a quick and easy way to show your latest tweets on your WordPress blog, this the plugin to use. It’s easy to install and a must have if you maintain an active Twitter timeline.
36. flickrRSS for WordPress — One of the hottest flickr plugins ever, this will allow you to pull in photos from any flickr RSS feed right into your blog. This can be customized and made to look extremely nice, providing a perfect way to show off your photog skills to your readers!
37. Add To Facebook — This a simple plugin that adds a footer link which will allow you and your visitors to add your post to their Facebook page.
38. Facebook Dashboard Widget — Wow, finally another lazy blogger developed a solution for us WordPress bloggers to check our Facebook data within WordPress! Install this and save yourself from having to visit Facebook.com several times per day.
39. Sociable — Easily my favorite bookmarking plugin, Sociable is good at updating information and will easily and attractively allow your readers to bookmark your articles across many different sites.
40. FriendFeed Comments — Great plugin for FriendFeed fans that will allow you to integrate Friendfeed information on your blog.
41. Follow Me Plugin — This convenient plugin will give your readers a chance to follow all of your social media profiles from one easy place. This one is great if you maintain an active presence across various social media sites.
42. Tweetmeme — This a hugely popular plugin that will put a little “retweet” button in your blog posts (like you see for the posts on this blog) which easily allows readers to quickly retweet your post. Obviously, it helps to increase the chance of a post going viral on Twitter, which will lead to a boost in traffic and exposure. This a must have, in my opinion.
43. LinkedIn hResume — This interesting plugin (which I haven’t tried) claims that it will pull the hResume microformat block from your LinkedIn page right into any page in your WordPress blog.
44. WP Greet Box — This incredibly useful plugin will actually greet users with a custom reminder depending on how they arrived to your blog. (Example, if they came from Twitter, it will remind them to follow you on Twitter and to retweet the post.) Awesome plugin to say the least.
Internet Marketing WordPress Plugins
45. Adsense Manager — This plugin will make it easy to add Adsense advertising into your blog posts, and allow you to determine when they will and will not appear. Great for anyone that likes to run ads to make a little extra cash.
46. All in One Adsense and YPN — Another popular plugin that allows you to manage all aspects of adding in Adsense and Yahoo! ads into your blog. The ad code is dynamically inserted, so it requires no manual work.
47. Split Test Plugin — A very unique plugin that allows you to show two different versions of a particular post, and see which one generates more clicks. This would be good for those that promote affiliate products in WordPress posts.
48. Affiliate Link Cloaker — For those of you that include Amazon affiliate links or whatever site you like to promote, you know that usually affiliate links are pretty nasty looking. This link cloaker will change that, and also help prevent affiliate link hijacking.
49. WP-Affiliate — Another great link cloaking plugin that is quite popular.
50. Random/Rotating Ads — This plugin will make it extremely easy for you to show and/or rotate a variety of ads (Adsense, affiliate ads, banners, flash, etc…) using widgets or in your template files for your blog. This seems like a very convenient plugin for the “make money online” crowd.
51. CafePress Plugin — This plugin allows you to easily integrate any of CafePress.com’s millions of products and customize the layout of them for your visitors. For those that promote CafePress products, this a very good plugin.
Contact Form WordPress Plugins
52. Contact Form 7 — One of many contact form plugins for WordPress. This one is easy to work with and will get the job done. This just seems to be the more popular choice.
53. WP Contact Form — You can drop this form into any page or post on your WordPress blog. Very easy to use.
54. WP Contact Form III — This contact form is simple, secure, and easy to customize.
55. Enhanced WP Contact Form — This plugin is simple, good against spam, and gives the user an option to copy him/herself on the form submission.
Video Related WordPress Plugins
56. Viper’s Video Quicktags — This an extremely popular WordPress plugin that will make it easy for any blogger to quickly insert video from sites like YouTube, Google Video, and more. This typically considered a must have for your WordPress blog.
57. Smart YouTube — Again, this a plugin that makes it easy to insert YouTube videos into your post, comments, and even your RSS feeds. This supports the playback of HQ (high quality) videos as well.
58. Lightview Plus — If you’d like to overlay videos/images into a lightbox format, this the plugin to use.
59. WP-SWFObject — For all of you flash freaks, or for those that need the ability to add flash movies into their blog, this plugin was created solely for that purpose.
60. Embedded Video — Another popular plugin that allows you to easily add video to your WordPress posts or pages.
61. WordPress Video Plugin — Hard to get creative for the description, as it does the same thing as most of the video plugins above. This one seems to support quite a few video sites though, so that could be a plus!
62. Interactive Video Plugin — This one is unique in the fact that it allows you to record/import/upload videos directly into your post and edit and remix with an online video editor. I haven’t used this one, but thought it was unique enough to add to this section.
Various Utility WordPress Plugins
63. WP-UserOnline — This a really cool plugin that will add a widget to your sidebar that shows how many users are on your site in real-time. It’s great to watch when a post gets stumbled or bookmarked, the user count rises immediately!
64. Close Old Posts — This a great plugin because as your posts get older and gain PageRank from Google, spammers will target them like crazy to try and get their links posted without you knowing it. This plugin allows the automatic closing of old posts for a time that you specify.
65. Super Archives — This plugin will take your current archive setup and inject it with steroids. Details can be found on their page.
66. WP Super Cache — This almost an essential plugin these days with all of the social bookmarking sites out there. What this does is prevent your site from going down after getting popular on any of the big social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. It makes your blog run faster and more efficient as well.
67. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin — As the title says, this plugin will show related posts under your posts. This has several benefits including better SEO, and driving up pageviews as visitors are encouraged to check out the related posts.
68. WP-Table — This a handy plugin that will easily allow you to create tables for your posts in a fixed table format.
69. Subscribe To Comments — This a very popular plugin that you’ve probably seen on many blogs. It provides a little check box for visitors to check if they want updates on a particular comment string.
70. WordPress Automatic Upgrade — Tired of seeing that “you need to update your version of WordPress” message in your WP interface? Well, install this one-click upgrade plugin and it will upgrade you to the latest and greatest version of WordPress.
71. KB Robots.txt — If you want total control over your robots.txt information, then you’ll need this plugin.
72. NextGen Gallery — Any plugin that makes it to the “most popular” category on WordPress.com is worthy of mentioning, especially this one. This plugin is a fully integrated image gallery with a flash slideshow option. You’ll see this on MANY blogs.
73. Global Translator — A lot of bloggers forget that not everyone in the world speaks/understands English. This translator has the capability to translate your posts into 34 different languages, which will surely please most of your visitors.
74. WP-PageNavi — This plugin is built into a lot of premium themes, and for good reason. It enhances your page navigation for your blog, making it easier for readers to advance through your posts with ease.
75. Comment Relish — One of my favorite plugins, this sends a custom email to a reader after the first time they comment on your blog. A FANTASTIC way to get them to subscribe, or even buy something. Easy way to do some shameless plugging.
76. Paypal Donate — Not afraid to beg for money? This plugin will allow you to panhandle straight from your blog. Highly recommended for homeless bloggers.
77. WP-Polls — The time will come in your blogging career where you want to poll your readers on something. Readers typically love polls, and to manage the whole process, this the plugin you’ll need to use.
78. WP e-Commerce — This plugin will give you the ability to transform your WP blog into an attractive shopping cart enabled, e-commerce solution. This a great plugin if you sell products or services online.
79. FeedWordPress — With this RSS aggregation plugin, you can pull in feeds of your choice right to your blog. This makes a great way to showcase feeds from popular blogs in your niche, or perhaps other blogs that you own.
80. Front Page Excluded Categories — If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to exclude certain categories on your blog’s home page, this an easy way to accomplish that.
81. WP-DB-Backup — If you’ve ever lost access to your db or if something has ever crashed on your where you lost all your blog’s information, you’ll appreciate this plugin beyond words. This should be included as a default plugin for every WordPress installation.
82. Broken Link Checker — A great utility plugin that will automatically check your blog for broken links and notify you if any are found. This a very handy plugin to have installed.
83. Advertising Manager — Another ad management program that is really popular, as it recognizes ads from a wide variety of networks (Google Adsense, AdBrite, CrispAds, Chitika, etc…).
84. WP-PostViews — If you’re like me and need an ego inflation every once in a while, adding this plugin to your blog will show how many views each post on your blog has received.
85. WordPress Mobile Edition — This should be on every bloggers list, as the amount of mobile internet users increases by the day, you need to make sure your blog is accessible by all the iPhone and Blackberry freaks out there. This sector could make up a noticeable percentage of your users, so keep them happy by installing this.
86. Search Everything — This another plugin that will enhance the ability of your WordPress search box on your blog.
87. Disable WordPress Plugin Updates — If you’re like most bloggers, you’ll agree when I tell you that the plugin updates messages are quite annoying. This awesome plugin will get rid of that problem for you.
88. Events Calendar — If you need an enhanced version of the default WP calendar widget, then you’ll want to check out this plugin. It allows for the integration of a high organized calendar to post events and related items.
89. Exec-PHP — Sometimes you’ll find that you need to add PHP code (for certain widgets and such) straight into a post or page. By default, you can’t do this, but with Exec-PHP, you can.
90. CommenLuv — This another plugin that you’ll see on many, many blogs. What it does is reward your readers when they comment by linking back to their latest blog posts, recent tweets or digs, which they can choose from when they submit a comment on your blog. It encourages more commenting, and is a win-win situation for you and the reader.
91. Wp-o-Matic — For all of you wannabe spam bloggers out there, WP-o-Matic allows you to create blog posts out of specified RSS feeds.
92. WP Super Edit — If you’re not satisfied with the default WYSIWYG WP editor, this an enhanced version that will give you a bit more control and more options when editing a post.
93. Scissors — This a great image handling plugin that will make it possible for you to rotate, crop, and resize images right inside WordPress. This can boost efficiency by allowing you to bypass the time it takes to edit an image before posting it.
94. Role Manager — This plugin will allow you to handle different user levels and allow a more detailed set of user permissions for each user. This great if you have a blog that has multiple contributors with multiple roles.
95. Time Zone — No matter what, it seems that even though you set your timezone correctly in the WP admin interface, it’s still an hour off. This can be quite annoying when scheduling posts for the future. This because WP doesn’t recognize DST (daylight savings time). This plugin will fix that little annoying problem.
96. WP Ultimate Gamer’s Pack — If you have a need for your users to be able to view your site with their Wii’s, DS-Lite’s, or PSP’s, then you need this plugin to make that happen.
97. No WWW plugin — For SEO purposes, it’s essential that you have everyone going to the same post URL, and if you don’t have this plugin enabled, some people might arrive to the WWW version of your post, and some the non WWW version. This plugin will make sure everyone arrives at the right one.
98. Mihdan: Ajax Edit Comments — If you’ve ever left a comment on a blog with a humiliating typo or error, you’ll have wished that the blog had this cool plugin enabled. This plugin will allow your users to quickly edit a comment after submitting it. Trust me, they’ll love this option.
99. Lifestream — This another popular plugin that will display your social networking feeds and images on your blog in the sidebar or in widget format.
100. Old Post Promoter — This a fantastic plugin that will help promote those golden oldies you have in your archives. This will lead to more pageviews and return readers. Very clever and very useful plugin to say the least.
101. Author Image — For those bloggers that like to show off their pretty faces (who doesn’t? lol), use this plugin to display author images in posts and on pages in your blog. This actually a great way to boost brand exposure.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this massive list of WordPress plugins as much as I did. Just by writing this article, I actually picked up a few awesome plugins that I hadn’t really explored before (and now I’m glad I have). If you have any suggestions for great plugins that I may have left out, then by all means let me know in the comments below.
