30 Essential WordPress Plugins

One of the most beneficial aspects of my blogging experience has been finding and exploring some of the many ridiculously useful WordPress Plugins available. Where there is a need, there’s a plugin. Today, I thought I’d share my take on the best WordPress Plugins available. The 30+ extensions below will help you get more social, increase your functionality, boost your SEO and so much more. There truly is a plugin for just about any situation.

Spam & Security Plugins

Akismet (4 Stars, 556 ratings)Filters Spam

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.

Social Plugins

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button (4 Stars, 518 ratings) Lets Readers Easily Share Your Posts

Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg and many more.

Digg Digg (4 Stars, 22 ratings) Adds Social Buttons

All-in-One social shared count / vote buttons – Digg, Reddit, dDone, Twitter, TweetMeme, Topsy, Yahoo Buzz, facebook share, facebook like, Polladium, etc. It makes all social shared count / vote buttons integration easy.

Fixed Social Buttons (5 Stars, 66 ratings) Adds Fixed Social Buttons

Let your visitors make your site popular by sharing your pages thanks to fixed social buttons. This plugin will add colorful and attractive social buttons on right side : twitter, facebook, myspace, reddit, delicious, technorati, digg, linkedin, flickr and rss feed buttons.

Sociable (4.25 Stars, 802 ratings) Adds Social Media Links to Your Posts

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!

Social Discussions (4.5 Stars, 15 ratings) Autoposts Your Blog Posts to 20+ Social Sites

Auto posts your blog on 20+ Social Networks. (2) Gives stats for your blog posts from Social Networks for the last 24 hours, 2-/7-/30-days.

Reader Engagement

CommentLuv (4.5 Stars, 38 ratings) Places Your Readers Latest Blog Post Link Under Their Comment

This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

Contact Form 7 (4 Stars, 710 ratings) Adds a Contact Form

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.

Meet Your Commenters (5 Stars, 7 ratings) Displays Your Commenters Web Page and Profiles on Your Dashboard

When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is leaving more information than you think. This plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network.

Subscription Options (4 Stars, 18 ratings)Adds RSS, Email, Twitter & Facebook Badges

The most common ways for people to subscribe to a blog and its content are through RSS, Email and Twitter. Facebook pages are increasing in usage too. This plugin places related subscription icons in a widget area and lets users enter their own feed or page URLs and select the colour of their icons. Its really simple but theres lots of power under the hood.

WP Greet Box (4.5 Stars, 140 ratings) Adds Greeting Messages Specific to the Referral Source

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (4 Stars, 177 ratings) Adds Related Posts Below Your Blog Posts

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.

Useful Utilities

After the Deadline (5 Stars, 28 ratings) Automatically Checks Spelling and Style.

After the Deadline uses artificial intelligence to check spelling, style, and grammar in WordPress.

Apture Plugin (4 Stars, 20 ratings) Lets You Add Books, Documents, Videos & More to Your Blog

Apture helps you add multimedia to your blog with one click. It’s used by popular sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, but we are giving it to you for FREE. With Apture, you can keep readers on your site and create more content in less time. Ever wanted to add Searches from Twitter or maybe link to that specific episode on Hulu of your favorite show? Well with Apture you can. Did we also mention it’s Free

Broken Link Checker (4 Stars, 163 ratings) Searches Your Blog for Broken Links

This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.

Guest Blogger (4 Stars, 15 ratings) Automates Guest Blog Posts

Simplifies finding a guest blogger, searching for an interesting post and creating a guest account. Adding expert articles becomes real easy.

NextGEN Gallery (4 Stars, 941 ratings) Image Gallery For Your Blog

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.

Organize Series (4 Stars, 32 ratings) Organizes Posts in a Series

The Organize Series WordPress Plugin helps with the organization and presentation of articles/posts you write as part of a series. It helps make it easier for readers of your blog to discover all the series you’ve written and also to easily find post that are part of the same series.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu (4.75 Stars, 851 ratings) Organizes Your Dashboard

All admin links available in a neat horizontal drop down menu. Saves lots of screen real estate!

Polldaddy Polls & Ratings (4 Stars, 83 ratings) Adds Polls to Your Blog

The PollDaddy Polls and Ratings plugin allows you to create and manage polls and ratings from within your WordPress dashboard. You can create polls, choose from 20 different styles for your polls, and view all results for your polls as they come in.

Pretty Link (4 Stars, 54 ratings) Creates Short Links From Your Blog

Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. Create short links suitable for Twitter using your own domain name!

WP-DB-Backup (4 Stars, 265 ratings) Backs up Your Database

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

WPtouch iPhone Theme (4.25 Stars, 176 ratings) Makes Your Blog Mobile Friendly

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and  effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices.

WP Super Cache (4 Stars, 523 ratings) Speed Up Your Blog Load Time

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.

Wibiya Toolbar (5 Stars, 4 ratings) Adds Functionality

Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars. Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Yoast Breadcrumbs (4.5 Stars, 52 ratings) Adds Breadcrumbs To Your Template

Easily add breadcrumbs to your template. If you’re using one of the supported WordPress frameworks, it’s as easy as enabling the plugin and checking the “Try to add automatically box”, if you’re not using one of those, adding it is as simple as adding one line of code to your template!

SEO Plugins

All in One SEO Pack (4 Stars, 774 ratings) Optimizes Your Blog for SEO

Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Google XML Sitemaps (4.5 Stars, 1655 ratings) Indexes Your Blog in Search Engines

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

HeadSpace2 SEO (4 Stars, 106 ratings) Optimizes Your Blog for SEO

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

Platinum SEO Pack (4 Stars, 64 ratings) Adds SEO to Your Blog

Platinum SEO Plugin offers Complete onsite SEO solution for your WordPress blog.Platinum SEO Plugin offers all the functionalities of All In One SEO.

SEO Smart Links (4.5 Stars, 59 ratings) Adds SEO to Your Blog

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.