I’m categorizing Jetpack as the most essential plugin as there’s no replacement for them. All the other plugins that are listed here have an alternative but there’s no alternative plugin for Jetpack as it features over 25 modules to manage almost all aspects of your blog.
1. Jetpack by WordPress.com
Jetpack is a super-plugin that brings the power of WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. You need a WordPress.com account to enjoy all the features of this plugin. It’s a must-have with over 25 unique features to turbocharge your blog like Free Content Delivery Network (CDN), Analytics, Social Comment System, Contact Form, Mobile Theme, and a ton of other features.
It enables you to connect your self-hosted blog to your WordPress.com account so that you can enjoy almost all the power features normally available to WordPress.com users. Jetpack is a must have plugin for all WordPress blogs and that’s exactly the reason why it’s featured as one of the best plugins of all time. Some of the features of Jetpack include quick stats of your blog, notifications, social sharing, social comment system, comment subscriptions, proof reading, contact form, etc.
Comments
Try a new Comment System or improve the performance of the default WordPress Comment System.
2. Disqus Comment System
Disqus Comment System replaces the default WordPress comment system with a hosted system powered by Disqus.com. It’s the hottest comment system in the blogosphere as it increases the readership of blogs. The problem with WordPress comment system is spam. Period. But Disqus is a hosted platform that features full spam filtering, blacklists and whitelists. Moreover, the commenters are required to login before commenting. So, if you’re using Disqus Comment System then you don’t need any other WordPress comment plugins. That’s why more and more blogs are replacing the WordPress comment system with Disqus.
3. Akismet
Akismet is an essential plugin for any WordPress blog that uses the default comment system by WordPress.org. It checks all the comments and trackbacks using their web service for spam and moves them to your blog’s “Spam” folder. And hey, if your comments are always marked as spam by Akismet when you leave comments on other blogs, then you can use the tip mentioned in this article so that you’ll never miss a backlink.
Add-ons
Apart from Akismet, you can also install SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam or Captcha or Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin adds a CAPTCHA to your WordPress forms, Captcha protects your blog from spammers by using math logic and the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin adds a checkbox below your comment forms so that your users will be able to post the comment only if it’s checked.
Alternative(s): Antispam Bee
4. CommentLuv
CommentLuv rewards your readers by placing a link to their latest blog post automatically at the end of their comment. It’s a good way to encourage your readers to leave regular comments and discover new content. It also helps to reduce the bounce rate of your blog as your readers come back to leave another comment.
Web Analytics
See where your visitors are coming from and what they’re doing….
5. Google Analyticator
Google Analyticator adds the required JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics on your blog so you don’t have to edit the template files. It also includes several widgets for showing Google Analytics data on your blog or in your WordPress dashboard. Apart from that, Google Analyticator has the following additional features: Link Tracking, Event Tracking, Site Speed Tracking, Disable Admin Page Visits, etc.
WordPress Optimization
And it’s time to optimize your WordPress blog for a great User Experience.
6. WordPress SEO
WordPress SEO by Yoast is perhaps the only SEO plugin that you’ll ever need. It’s the ultimate plugin for WordPress that allows us to optimize almost all the SEO aspects of our blog.
If you have enabled this plugin then you can eliminate several other plugins like – Google XML Sitemaps, Page Links To, Robots Meta, RSS Footer, Breadcrumbs, and your other Social meta-tag generators and SEO plugins.
Some of the features offered by WordPress SEO plugin are:
It checks whether a page is search engine optimized or not.
It enables XML Sitemaps, Breadcrumbs, RSS Optimization.
It lets you edit your .htaccess and robots.txt file from within WordPress dashboard.
It allows you to no-follow or no-index pages.
It allows you to define a canonical URL.
It allows you to redirect a page to any other page.
It offers Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ integration.
It’s multi-site compatible.
…and many other features.
Alternative(s): All In One SEO Pack
You can try All In One SEO Pack if you don’t want all the advanced features offered by the WordPress SEO plugin. I guess most people prefer this plugin over WordPress SEO and that could be the reason why this plugin has over 17 million downloads.
7. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is the best WordPress plugin to increase the performance of your WordPress blog. It’s designed to increase the page speed of your blog thereby improving the user experience. You can use a tool like YSlow or PageSpeed Insights to compare the performance of your pages before and after installing this plugin.
Alternative(s): WP Super Cache
8. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize allows you to optimize and clean up your WordPress database without phpMyAdmin.
9. WP Smush.it
WP Smush.it reduces image file sizes and improves the performance your pages by using the Yahoo! Smush.it API within WordPress. It follows the best practices by Yahoo for speeding up your blog.
10. PuSHPress
PuSHPress adds PubSubHubbub support to your WordPress site, with a built in hub. So it will send the updates to your PuSH subscribers directly from WordPress. PubSubHubbub is the new standard by Google to let people and search engines know in real-time when your blog is updated and is a must have plugin to fight content scrapers. You can learn more about PubSubHubbub here.
Alternative(s): PubSubHubbub
11. WPtouch
WPtouch is a mobile plugin that automatically enables a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors of your blog. It allows you to customize the appearance of your mobile theme without modifying the original code. And yeah, the visitors can always switch to the desktop version in one-click.
12. WordPress Related Posts
WordPress Related Posts by Zemanta generates and shows a list of related posts with optional thumbnails and different styles to your readers. It also shows real-time page views, clicks, and the click-through ratio (CTR) in your WordPress dashboard. You can even customize the related posts that will be shown so as to improve the SEO and user experience.
Add-ons
You can also try Outbrain, a hosted Related Posts plugin, that automatically shows your best content with thumbnails at the end of the pages to send your readers to other interesting content on your blog. As you can see, I’m using both WordPress Related Posts & Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain shows recommended posts at the end of each blog post while Zemanta shows related posts on the sidebar.
Alternative(s): Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), nrelate Related Content
13. Popular Widget
Popular Widget shows the most commented or most viewed posts with thumbnails in a tabbed widget.
Alternative(s): WordPress Popular Posts, Most And Least Read Posts Widget
Security
Secure your WordPress blog, now!
14. Better WP Security
Better WP Security is one of the most popular WordPress security plugin with over 1.5 million downloads. You can improve the security of your blog in one-click as it will turn on all the basic features of the plugin automatically without activating any features that may interfere with your other plugins or themes or content. What’s more? It also takes regular backup of your database (if it’s enabled by you).
Alternative(s): Wordfence Security
15. Limit Login Attempts
Limit Login Attempts limits the rate of login attempts for each IP address and it’s fully customizable.
Add-ons
You can also try Google Authenticator, an advanced plugin that enables two-factor authentication using the Google Authenticator app for Android/iPhone/Blackberry. If there’s any problem, you can disable the two-step authentication by simply deleting the plugin directory using FTP.
Backup
They say “The most expensive backup is the one you never did!” and it says everything.
16. BackWPup
BackWPup is one of the most popular backup plugin for WordPress with over 1 million downloads. It allows you to backup your complete WordPress installation to an external service like Dropbox, FTP, Amazon S3, Windows Azure, SugarSync, etc. Additional features include: Database Backup, WordPress XML Export, Database Optimization, Database Repair, File Backup, etc.
Alternative(s): WP-DBManager, WordPress Backup To Dropbox
Monetize
17. Ad Injection
Ad Injection allows you to add any ads into the WordPress posts, pages, or sidebar. You can add the ad codes directly, set the types of pages where you want ads to appear and it will inject ads to those pages. The plugin settings also allow you to set ad placement options like: you can show ads only to search engine visitors, block IP addresses, maximum ads per page, etc.
Add-ons
You can also try the new Google Publisher Plugin which is the first official plugin by Google for WordPress. With Google Publisher Plugin, it’s super easy to add AdSense codes anywhere on your blog without adding any codes or modifying the template files. What’s more? You can also verify your blog with Google Webmaster Tools with just one-click.
Alternative(s): AdRotate, AdSense Manager
Social Media
Let your readers follow you or spread the word…
18. Shareaholic
Shareaholic is one of the most popular social sharing plugin for WordPress with over 2 million downloads. You can add attractive social sharing buttons and related posts widget to your posts, pages, or index. You can show the social buttons as a top bar or as classic buttons aligned horizontally. Wait, it also shows social analytics so that you can track the most popular pages, referral information, etc.
Alternative(s): Sociable
19. Digg Digg
Digg Digg is a floating share bar by Buffer that adds all the popular social sharing buttons (Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, Google+, Pinterest, Pocket, etc.) to your blog.
Alternative(s): Slick Social Share Buttons, Sharebar, Scrolling Social Sharebar
20. Simple Social Icons
Simple Social Icons is an awesome plugin to show your social media icons that links to your various social media profiles. You can select the profile, customize icon colors, and can even adjust alignment.
21. Pinterest Pin It Button For Images
Pinterest Pin It Button For Images adds a “Pin It” button over the images so that your users can pin your images to Pinterest in one-click. It’s an essential plugin if your blog has a lot of interesting images. For example, Recipe blogs, Travel blogs, etc.
Newsletters / Lead Generation
Start sending newsletters, show your Call To Action banner, or let your visitors e-mail you…
22. MailPoet Newsletters
MailPoet Newsletters allows you to create newsletters, post notifications, auto-responders and helps you manage all your subscribers. You can easily drop your posts, images, social icons in your newsletters and can even customize fonts and colors.
23. WP Hello Bar
WP Hello Bar adds a horizontal toolbar at the top of your blog. You can show a custom message and a call to action button to your visitors so as to get their immediate attention. Go create your Hello Bar here.
24. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is the best contact form plugin with over 14 million downloads. It can manage multiple contact forms and you can customize the form the way you want. Contact Form 7 supports AJAX powered submission and you can install this plugin to enable CAPTCHA or can depend upon its in-built spam filtering powered by Akismet.
Create Tables
Want to create a beautiful pricing table or a comparison table in your blog? Try
25. Pricing Table Ready
Pricing Table Ready allows you to create CSS pricing tables or comparison tables in an easy way. You can create and manage the pricing tables from your WordPress dashboard and can show on any page/post. It comes with 5 different styles to choose from.
Alternative(s): Price Table | Pricing Table
26. TablePress
TablePress allows you to create and manage custom tables. It’s different from the pricing tables as it adds valuable functions for your visitors – like sorting column entries, search function, etc. and absolutely no coding skills are required.
Miscellaneous / Random
These are not must-have plugins but you may need them at times. Hence you can definitely give them a try if it sounds interesting.
27. SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images automatically adds the “ALT” and “TITLE” attributes to your images so that your images will be SEOed and will get more traffic from image search engines.
28. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin with over 9 million downloads. It allows you to upload and manage image galleries with powerful features like batch upload, albums, thumbnail creation, sorting, etc.
29. Lightbox Plus ColorBox
Lightbox Plus ColorBox allows users to view larger versions of your images, simple slide shows, videos and content – all in an overlay.
30. Simple URLs
Simple URLs is a complete URL management plugin that allows you create, manage, and even track external links on your blog. It uses custom post types and permanent 301 redirects to avoid performance issues.
31. Redirection
Redirection helps you to manage 301 redirections and track 404 errors. It’s quite useful if you’re changing the directory of your WordPress installation or if you’re migrating to another domain name.
32. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker checks your blog (posts, pages, comments) for broken links and missing images and notifies you via email or on the dashboard if any are found.
33. WP Google Fonts
WP Google Fonts plugin allows you to add fonts from the Google Font Directory to your WordPress theme. Google Fonts is a free font directory by Google.
34. WP-PageNavi
WP-PageNavi adds a better and more advanced paging navigation to your blog.
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