One of the things that separates WordPress from other blogging software out there is the fact that it is open source, and the benefits that go along with being open source. If you aren’t very good at coding, or good with PHP in particular, then the WordPress community has come to the rescue with WordPress plugins, which will allow just about anyone to easily add additional functionality to their blog. With the free WordPress plugins that various authors write and contribute from around the globe, WordPress has gained a lot of flexibility, causing it to be more attractive to potential bloggers.
As this site is dedicated to WordPress, I thought it would be a good idea to have a featured post dedicated to the best WordPress plugins available. This post is a constant work in progress, and will continue to be updated as I feature more plugins on this website. After each plugin, you should find a quick description, as well as a link to the full review. I have also broken the plugins down into categories for easy reference.
Premium WordPress Plugins
- Advertising -
- Billboard + Rotating Images – Two Premium WordPress plugins that allow you to easily add images like advertisements, photos, featured homes and social icons to your widget-ready sidebars and feature areas.
- OIO Publisher – Complete plugin that removes all hassle for bloggers who manage advertising. Automates banners, text links, paid reviews, and collects the money for you. [Full Review]
- Affiliates -
- Auction Thumbs – Plugin that allows you to easily integrate eBay Partner Network ads into your WordPress Blog. [Full Review]
- PHP Bay Pro – Premium plugin that integrates eBay auction ads into your WordPress blog. [Full Review]
- WP Affiliate Pro – Allows you to manage your affiliate links from within your WordPress dashboard. Also allows you to mask links and a number of other features. [Full Review]
- WP Ninja Affiliate – Similar to WP Affiliate Pro plugin, but provides some additional features including multiple keywords and caching. [Full Review]
- Maintenance -
- Backup Buddy – All-in-one solution for backups, restoration, and migration. The single backup file created by the plugin can be used with the importer script to quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or even migrate to a new host with different settings. Whether you’re an end user or a developer, this plugin is sure to bring you peace of mind and added safety in the event of data loss.
- Gravity Forms – Premium WordPress plugin which allows you to build a completely custom contact form for your WordPress websites/blogs.
- SEO -
- Scribe SEO – Incredible full featured WordPress plugin which analyzes your posts and offers tips for improving search engine optimization. [Full Review]
- WP SEO Sniper – Extreme SEO plugin designed to give people conscious of SEO full control over their blogs from the WordPress dashboard. Significant upgrade to the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin. [Full Review]
- Video -
- My Video Poster – Premium plugin that automatically publishes any videos you upload to YouTube on your WordPress website/blog.
- Websites -
- WP Review Engine – Theme and plugin combination that allows you to create a fully featured website which makes it easy to provide information on a range of products, include thumbnail images, and link out the products. Ideal for affiliate websites/blogs.
- WP Review Site - Simply activate theme and plugin to create a full-featured review website. No additional work needed, allowing you to make a number of these sites quickly! [Full Review]
Free WordPress Plugins
- Admin Tools -
- Gamer’s Pack – Makes your blog viewable using the Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, and PSP gaming systems. [Full Review]
- GoCodes – Easily create redirects from your WordPress Dashboard that point anywhere. Great for hiding affiliate links. [Full Review]
- Google Sitemap – Creates a fully-compliant sitemap for search engines. [Full Review]
- Greet Box – Identifies where traffic is being referred from and displays the appropriate welcome message to them, encouraging to subscribe to your feed, Digg or Stumble your posts, etc. [Full Review]
- In Series – Allows you to easily group a series of posts into a series. [Full Review]
- MobilePress – Optimizes your WordPress blog for mobile phones including the popular iPhone. [Full Review]
- No Self Ping – Prevents your blog from sending pingbacks internally to your other posts. [Full Review]
- WP-o-Matic – Allows users to collect feeds and auto-generate posts on your blog. [Full Review]
- WordPress Backup – Plugin that backups up your WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, images, and other non-database stuff. Works with WP-DB Manager. [Full Review]
- WP-DB Manager – Plugin that gives you full control over your WordPress database backups. Works with the WordPress Backup plugin. [Full Review]
- WP Sticky – Allows users to feature a post at the top of their homepage for a day or permanently. [Full Review]
- WP-Super Cache – Creates a cache of your posts to avoid server load. Great for surviving a Digg. [Full Review]
- Advertising -
- Chitika Premium Ads – Plugin that allows you to easily integrate Chitika premium ads into your WordPress blog. [Full Review]
- Got Banners – Plugin allows you to randomize your advertising banners. Ideal for 125×125 banners. [Full Review]
- Max Banner Ads – Plugin that lets you control your advertising from the WordPress dashboard. Also allows you to rotate multiple advertisements in a single spot. [Full Review]
- Show125 – Plugin that specializes in managing your 125×125 block advertisements. [Full Review]
- Shylock AdSense – Allows you to easily insert Google AdSense code into your WordPress blog. [Full Review]
- Authors -
- Author Exposed – Adds a full featured display of the authors profile. Great for multi-author blogs. [Full Review]
- Role Manager Plugin – Allows you to control the various WordPress user roles can and cannot do. [Full Review]
- Comments -
- CubePoints – CubePoints allows you to choose a certain amount of points for each comment posted by a certain commentator. You can offer premium content, allow readers to purchase merchandise or maybe even an advertisement for your blog with a certain amount of points. [Full Review]
- Keyword Luv – Adds an extra field to your comments where people can enter their website so they don’t add their website’s name in the name field for SEO anchor text purposes. [Full Review]
- Liz Comment Count – Displays a comment count in a similar fashion to the Feedburner feed count widget. [Full Review]
- MyAvatars – Automatically inserts the commentators MyBlogLog avatar next to their comment using the e-mail address provided. If unavailable, it will attempt to pull the bloggers Gravatar. [Full Review]
- Show Top Commentators – Allows you to display your top commentators automatically in a place of your choosing. Great for encouraging comments. [Full Review]
- Smilies Themer – Plugin that offers a variety of smilies styles to place in the comments section of your blog. [Full Review]
- Subscribe to Comments – Allows readers to receive e-mail notifications when a follow up comment is left. [Full Review]
- Domaining -
- Domain Name Portfolio – This plugin automatically creates a page in WordPress that domainers can use to display their domain portfolio. Everything is controlled from the dashboard. [Full Review]
- Downloads -
- Download Manager – Plugin that allows you to manage your downloads from the WordPress dashboard. [Full Review]
- Feeds -
- Add Related Posts To Your Feed – Will automatically add related posts to your blog’s feed. [Full Review]
- FeedCount – Allows you to display a numerical version of your Feedburner feed count without using the Feedburner chicklet. [Full Review]
- Feed Footer – Allows you to use HTML to add a custom footer to your blog’s feed. Plugin also supports randomizing up to 10 different footers. [Full Review]
- RSS Footer – Basic plugin that allows you to easily add copyright notice, etc. [Full Review]
- Forums -
- RS Discuss – Plugin that allows you to easily integrate a forum into your existing WordPress blog. [Full Review]
- Maintenance -
- Server Buddy – ServerBuddy tests server configuration to look for problems with hosting configuration and determine compatibility with various WordPress themes and plugins. Additionally it provides easy to understand explanations of various server settings and generates reports and samples of what to ask your hosting provider if a problem is found with any server configuration that needs fixed. ServerBuddy is designed to be extremely powerful but still provide information in an easy to understand way for even a novice.
- WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Allows you to easily upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest version. **No longer needed in WordPress 2.7+**[Full Review]
- Miscellaneous -
- Best Posts Summary – Automatically generates a daily, weekly, or monthly review post. Includes both post titles and brief descriptions. [Full Review]
- BreadCrumb Navigation XT – Allows you to provide your readers with additional blog navigation. [Full Review]
- Get Firefox Banner – Shows a banner to IE6 and IE7 web browser users recommending they switch to Firefox. Great for blogs whose WordPress theme is optimized for Firefox. [Full Review]
- Popularity Contest – Monitors your website traffic and gives you reports on your popular posts. Plugin is fully customizable allowing you to set the values used to calculate your posts popularity. [Full Review]
- WP-eCommerce – Plugin that allows you to create an online shop on your WordPress blog [Full Review]
- WP-Email – Allows you to add an “Email This!” button to your WordPress blog. [Full Review]
- WP-Submission – Creates a submission page then places all submissions into a post draft. Ideal for group writing projects. [Full Review]
- Related Posts -
- Related Posts – Uses keywords in your post URL’s to display a designated number of related posts. [Full Review]
- Related Posts by Category – Uses category to locate and display related posts. [Full Review]
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – Currently the ultimate/best related posts plugin available for WordPress users. Includes related posts for your feed! [Full Review]
- SEO –
- All-in-One SEO Pack – The Ultimate SEO WordPress plugin. Allows you to set your homepage meta information and automatically generate custom meta information for your individual posts. [Full Review]
- Permalink Redirect – Creates a 301 Redirect to avoid duplicate content penalties with search engines. Also includes a Feedburner redirect. [Full Review]
- Tags -
- Better Tags Manager – Allows you to better manage your tags, as well as convert your categories to tags. [Full Review]
- Recommended Tags – Looks at your post’s content and recommends tags. Includes additional features. [Full Review]
- Video -
- All-in-One Video Pack – All-in-One Video Pack 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, etc. [Full Review]
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is WordPress enthusiast who took his passion for WordPress to the next level back in 2007 by launching WPHacks.com as a place to share hacks and review WordPress-related products. You can learn more about him by following his personal tweets here.
I am looking forward to using the ScribeSEO tool with my wordpress site. Thanks. 
Thanks a Lot. It was really very helpful for me :) 
How to make the posts section of the WP static? 
reaally excelent job. thanks 
Thanks I have been trying to figure this out for awhile now. I knew it wasn't that hard I ...
Thanks for your effort. Nice work. Keep posting such thing. 
wow~~thx!!!
Thanks for the good article!!
I’m bookmarked your plugins informations.
Thanks
Thank you
You forgot one that I use on my site: TreeMagic Cypress by AmbientWebs. Basically it allows you to double-click any word on your site and get a drop-down list. From the list, you can select the definition for the word, search it on Google, or any other query that you can possibly think of.
Thanks for these plugins
Great list of plugin.
Here is another list that I have found extremely useful
http://creeva.com/2008/05/20/what-wordpress-plugins-do-i-use/
Hi,
I just write a new plugin WP Widget Cache, which can cache the output of your blog widgets. You can treat it as a plus to WP Super cache, especially when Google is crawling your site. As your site has a lot of widgets, so I think it will significantly reduce the server usage.
Will you please have a try, and add it to this list. Thanks very much.
Here’s the plugin url:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-widget-cache/
Wow. Its a cool information. Thanks for this.
Great resource! Thought you might also like Kaltura’s All in One Video Pack. 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… Check it out and download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-video-pack/ Showcase your blog, see examples and pictures of the plugin and get support in our forum: http://community.kaltura.org/viewforum.php?f=4
I just added this post to my delicious account. I love it!
this is fantastic list.
i will have to install some of them as I haven’t tried before.
thank you very much
My I recommend my own plugin to this list? I might be a bit biased, but I think it could be very useful to people. I’d love to hear your opinion of it or even a review…
http://www.warkensoft.com/products/amazonfeed-wordpress-plugin/
I have my own list of plugins:
The Best WordPress Plugins for Blogging Newbies
http://loymeetsworld.com/2008/12/18/the-best-wordpress-plugins-for-blogging-newbies/
Check it out!
I use Headspace2 for SEO. Is it All-in-One SEO Pack plugin or WP SEO Sniper better than Headspace2. I have read many opinions that Headspace2 is the best for SEO in WordPress.
Regards,
Nice list. I have also just released my first WordPress plugin. It is the Addmarx Dropdown and can be found at http://www.addmarx.com/wordpress_plugin.php . It combines 4 features into one button to place on your blog. It allows readers to share, bookmark, email or link to a post or page. Hope you find it helpful.
Thanks!
thats a very great list of wp plugins every wp blogger should bookmark, l thanks for u to post it.
Thanks for the great wordpress plugins! This is a great collection of plugins.
thanks a lot! the info is so useful!
Hi awesome post! But where are the spam filters?
Maybe you should make another list. Would really like to hear which plugins would be the best plugins now, since there are many new and interesting ones out there.
great list , nice variety of plug ins for everyone ! thnx =)
Nice work collecting this list. Very helpful.
hey – good job
thanks for sharing
This is awesome. I will definitely install several of these packages. Thanks for posting this and saving med the time collecting the information my self.
I am using the one-way link building SEO plugin from IBL Builder, its doing wonders for my google rankings. Download link is at the top of the page:
http://www.iblbuilder.com
How about better search plugins? The basic WordPress search sucks, and needs improvement a lot. There are plenty of options, but of course I think mine is the best =) Relevanssi features:
- improved matching, best hits first
- custom post excerpts that show the part of the document where the hit was made
- highlighting of search terms in results
- you can index posts, pages or both
- it’s possible to add custom fields to the index
- search can be limited to a certain categories or tags
- categories and tags can be excluded from search
- phrase searching
The plugin is very much alive and kicking, and under constant development.
Thanks for the information..nice collection
This is a great post, and I hate to “piggy-back”, but I just published a piece that shares the plugins that we’ve been using as professional bloggers for three years. A few of the 7 we discuss include FeedburnerFeedsmith, WordPress.com Stats, and Google XML Sitemaps.
You can find the post here: http://alwayswordpress.com/blogging/7-best-wordpress-plugins-that-are-a-...
Thanks!
Some plugin not support wp 2.8
Hey Kyle I think you should include WPreview Engine in the above list as it has so many features for creating niche review sites.
Hi,
Nice list and I definitely agree with a lot of your recommendations. I’d like to suggest mine for inclusion though!
I’ve written a plugin for WordPress that allows you to mobilize your WP blog by installing the plugin! It dynamically resizes all images to fit the handset perfectly, you can keep the same URLs from mobile to web and also style your mobile site so that it matches the look and feel of your website. You will have lost none of your brand identity that you might with other mobile plugins.
In addition, it works for every single handset in the world – even those that haven’t even left the labs!
It’s called the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress and the homepage can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wapple-architect/ – it’d be great to hear what you thought of it!
Wow that is the best complete list I ever seen!
Great List thanks some plugins I did not have will def be using on my blogs
Nice list of great plugins there!
thanks for sharing!
Its really great set of plugins. Good to find them on a single page thanks a lot for sharing.
Great collections of plugins at one place. No need to to search else where.
this looks great plugins, i just added Permalink Redirect plugin because i changed my premalink and google indexed my new links + old links redirect to new links
i dream by plugin as OIO Publisher but the most plugin looks like it is max banner ads but they put much links back to them in every ad spot.
Hey
How does one get their plugin on this list? I can provide affiliate service for my own and a fee to cover time reveiwing the plugin CSV 2 POST.
http://www.csv2post.com, CSV Import plugin, the best lol
Ryan
WOW .. what a resource this site is
If you’re an eBay affiliate, and you use WordPress (and who doesn’t), and you are battling to make any sense of your EPN reports now with the change over to the new QPC pricing model over there … then you may like the Piggybank plugin too.
Good profits to all.
Wow..what a list..Thanks!
I would also mention CJniche- http://wpnicheground.com -
for building product niche stores with WP and the CJ affiliate program, and better it is free.
i use it with phpbay and i am pretty happy with the results
Good luck!
2 new premium plugins have been released at munkyscripts.com.
great collection! but some of it still not compatible with 2.8
need to wait for the latest version release. hmm
great collection you have here… i’ve used some as well as bookmarked them!
Great list thanks, just finished building my wordpress site and am now searching for plugins!
Extremely helpful information. Thank you!
Thanks for this list…I used some of them…
Thanks for the list!
I suggest to use free PHP IDE Codelobster PHP Edition with special WordPress plug-in.
Great collections of plugins at one place. No need to to search else whe
Great list! Very useful, thanks!
Great list of plugins. A great many new to me.
Going to take a while to go through the list but I can already see a few there that will make life a lot easier.
Cheers,
Shane
Although I’ve got most of the plugins installed; it’s a nice comprehensive list nevertheless! Good work!
awesome, great list! WP-DB Plugin is a real time saver!
Hi, I found cool flash photo galleries plugin for WordPress. Named GRAND Flash Album Gallery – multi category flash skin based photo gallery with powerful admin. I used it in my blog. There are so many different settings. You can adjust the color scheme for your blog as you wish. There are many different skins. You can present your photo gallery in a wonderful way, there is a full-screen mode. This is a very cool plugin.
Great article, lots of great WordPress plug-ins available, think I might go for OIO Publisher – it looks good.
Wow, that’s great.. I never know there is a premium plugins available. Thanks for the information. Have a nice day.
As your site has a lot of widgets, so I think it will significantly reduce the server usage.
Hello
I use the following tool for making menus for my WP site and it works great
AllWebMenus WordPress Menu Addin:
http://www.likno.com/addins/wordpress-menu.html
hope it helps
T.
Do you have any experience with WP membership plugins? I am looking around for independent experience and testimonies about Wishlist and WP eMember, to name two of them.
Excellent list!
I use “AllWebMenus “WordPress Menu Addin/Plugin”. Very easy program for making my menus for blog. You can see: http://www.likno.com/addins/wordpress-menu.html
I suggest!
Sabrine from France
Bookmarked – wicked post thanks.
Didn’t see onlywire on there – that I think is the best for aff’s on anyone wanting to get out there.
If you know of any similar plugins – please tell!
Thanks.
Custom Query String, for me this plugin has been a revelation..
http://moshublog.com/2007/10/30/custom-query-string-reloaded-for-wordpress-23-with-tag-support/
Hello everyone, have just released a plugin that you might find interesting, please feel free to download it from our (yet to be designed) website: http://www.livegrounds.com/
LiveGrounds is a plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs, where the blogger and the blog’s visitors can interact live via a graphical interface. For the blogger, LiveGrounds is an easily moderated community/forum based on the blog. For the visitor, LiveGrounds allows for instant communication with other people, without having to log in or download any program.
Let me/us know if you have any questions or comments!
/CJ
Awesome resource! Thanks so much. I didn’t know there were so many premium WP themes.
Still one of the best and most essential plugins is Akismet. It gets rid of all the comment spam. Love it!
Thanks, i got it…
Thanks, great list for me, a WP newbie.
Nice plugins, I’m going to try some of the affiliate ones on my site.
Thank you for this list of plugins! I was getting tired of trying to throw out keywords/test plugins on our site. Most of what you have listed here is exactly the stuff I was looking for.
Really lot of info and it will be useful for my new site.
Unfortunately not all plug ins will work with the latest version 3.0 but I guess in time more will be made available.
Really great plugin but some want credit card
its a fantastic plugin for bloggers for comments.
WOW…thanks for the info and insight. Another tool for the belt…another thing to master.