Blogging has become a general term for most of the people, a great source of earning and popularity if it’s done in meaningful way. When we talk about blogging, the first thing comes up into mind is – WordPress, the most famous CMS (content management system) to the date. Great user support and easy to use platform with support of lots of plugins and themes make it endorsable. With the popularity, competition rises as well, but you will surly beneficiate because of it.
WordPress plugins are handy PHP code files developed for doing specific task and implement features like caching, speed up site performance, for attractive image gallery etc. Some of the plugins are essential for you to use to boost the overall performance of your WordPress site. This is the topic we are going to cover today, top 25 WordPress plugins which must be installed with your WordPress site to get the maximum from it. There are plugins for various purposes including to aid caching and image optimization, SEO, anti-spam, commenting, content-sharing, bookmarking and so on.
Quick Cache (Speed Without Compromise)
If you care about the speed of your site, Quick Cache is one of those plugins that you absolutely MUST have installed. Quick Cache takes a real-time snapshot ( building a cache ) of every Page, Post, Category, Link, etc.
Download from here
WP Super Cache
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.
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All In One SEO Pack
Google Analytics support, Support for Custom Post Types, Advanced Canonical URLs, Fine tune Page Navigational Links, Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality, ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites.
Download from here
Google XML Sitemaps
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.
Download from here
Robots Meta
There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.
Download from here
SEO Ultimate
This all-in-one SEO plugin gives you control over title tags, noindex, meta tags, slugs, canonical, autolinks, 404 errors, rich snippets, and more.
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SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images improving traffic from search engines.
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Akismet
Akismet filters out your comment and track-back spam for you, so that you can focus more on managing other important things. It runs on autopilot and provides 24-hour protection.
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AntiSpam Bee
Anonymous and independent antispam solution. Detect comment and trackback spam. Includes statistics and notifications.
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Login LockDown
Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.
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WP-ReCaptcha
reCAPTCHA is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University, then acquired by Google which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. Instead of randomly generating useless characters which users grow tired of continuosly typing in, risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach.
Download from here
CommentLuv (Free/Premium)
Comment Luv helps you to increase comments and traffic to your blog and also gives the opportunity to your blog of going viral in Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. It also reduces spam, shows stats of links being clicked, allows commentors to use their name in comments, and many more.
Download from here
Facebook Comments For WordPress
This plugin integrates the Facebook commenting system (new, old or both) right into your website. If a reader is logged into Facebook while viewing any comment-enabled page or post, they’ll be able to leave a comment using their Facebook profile.
Download from here
IntenseDebate
IntenseDebate is a commenting system that has features such as innovative discussion tools that can make conversations more fun and increase reader engagement.
Download from here
Livefyre
Livefyre is the best real-time conversation platform on the web. Replace your outdated comment system and change the way people interact with content on your site.
Download from here
OpenID
OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID.
Download from here
WP Ajax Edit Comments
Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.
Download from here
AddThis
Get more traffic back to your site by installing the AddThis WordPress plugin. With AddThis, your users can promote your content by sharing to 330 of the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and MySpace).
Download from here
ShareThis
The ShareThis plugin seamlessly enables users to share your content through Email,Facebook,Twitter, Google +1, Like, Send and many more.
Download from here
Sociable
Sociable Skyscraper is the ultimate advanced and feature-packed plugin for setting up a rating system on your WordPress blog. This plugin allows you to set up different rating systems for posts, pages and comments with a great degree of customization. Sociable Skyscraper’s list of features is smart, extensive and ever-growing.
Download from here
Clicky (Free/Premium)
Integrates the Clicky (from getClicky.com) web analytics service into your blog. Automatically adding your Clicky (from getClicky.com) tracking code everywhere, Option to ignore admins, Option to store names of commenters, Stores comments as an action using the getClicky internal data logging API.
Download from here
StatPress
The first real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc.
Download from here
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is a WordPress 2.9++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables.
Download from here
WP-DB Manager
Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database.
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Contact Form 7
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.
Download from here
