Noupe Editorial Team March 30th, 2008

Powerful List of WordPress Lifesavers Plugins

This is the third article in the four-part series, "Powerful guide to master Your WordPress". We are taking a look at 77+ quality and useful WordPress Plug-ins, which have been very handy and saves us lots of time and effort to run our blog the way we wanted. You can also take a look at other 4 articles in this series : So let's get started and don't forget to subscribe to our RSS-Feed to keep track on our next post in this series.

Post related Plugins

1) WP-Sticky WordPress Plug-in - Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress's blog where you can choose to “stick” certain posts at the top of your blog.
2) Daily Top 10 Posts- Tracks the number of pageviews per blog post for the current day and cumulatively with options to display sidebar widgets for both. You may also display sidebar widgets containing a list of the most popular posts for the day and most popular posts overall.
3) Popularity Contest- This Plug-in will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given configurable point values to determine popularity.
  • Download Plugin: Here

4) Homepage Excerpts- A must have plug-in. If your blog uses full posts on the homepage, it makes it more search engine friendly. Also it gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.
  • Download Plugin: Here

5) Related Posts Plugin- WordPress Related Posts Plug-in will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.
  • Download Plugin: Here

User related Plugins

6) WP-Polls- Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog where you can easily include a poll into your WordPress's blog post/page.
7)Gravatar- The Plug-in makes available a tag called gravatar that, when used inside the Comment Loop, outputs the correct gravatar URL based on the commenters email address.
8 )AJAX Shoutbox- Realtime conversation with sound to alert of new messages.

Stats

9) Google Analytics for WordPress- This Plug-in easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code to all pages within your blog. That's it's main functionality, it also Tracks outgoing links, tracks downloads, Tracks AdSense clicks, Tracks image search keywords and tracks extra search engines.
  • Download Plugin: Here

10) ‘Subscribe to Comments’ Report and Stats- If you are wondering how many people where actually using "Subscribe to Comments" checkbox on your site, you can use this Plug-in to give you a list of users and their subscriptions and the posts they are subscribed to.
  • Download Plugin: Here

11) WassUp Plugin- WassUp is a WordPress Plug-in to track your visitors in real time. It has a very readable and fancy admin console to keep tracks of your blog’s users visits.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Contact Form Plugins

12) cforms- cforms is a Plug-in for WordPress, offering deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page. The form submission utilizes AJAX, falls back, however, to a standard method in case AJAX/Javascript is not supported or disabled.
  • Download Plugin: Here

13) Secure and Accessible PHP contact form + multi-user version - Designed to make contacting you from your website easy, accessible, and secure. Deter spam emails from arriving in your mail box with a multi-user plugin.
14) intouch- A customizable contact form Plug-in which allows you to insert a custom build contact form, which on submission will send the information via email, with the ability to specify mandatory fields, Ajax submission.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Photos Plug-ins

15) Photo Dropper WordPress plugin- This new Plug-in searches flickr for Creative Commons licensed photos for you to add to your WordPress blog.
  • Download Plugin: Here

16) Lightview for WordPress- Lightview is similar to Lightbox and has been able to overlay not only images but also videos, iframed webpages, and almost anything!
  • Download Plugin: Here

17) NextGEN Gallery- Adds a powerfull image gallery to your control panel. Features: Sortable Albums, Upload a Zip-File with pictures, Watermark function, Slideshow...
  • Download Plugin: Here

Navigation

18) Creating a drop down navigation menu using jQuery- Create a navigation menu with drop down menus for you WordPress blog, with a slick jQuery animated sliding down for menus and fading out.
  • Download Plugin: Here

19) WP Digg Style Pagination- Allows to add or replace the WordPress pagination by one easy and more comfortable paged navigation like Digg website. You can choose one CSS Style for your pagination from those of this list and append the CSS to your theme CSS sheet.
The site of this plugin was working 2 days ago, but today it is a parked domain. Until the owner of the site fixes this issue, you guys can download this plug-in from Here
20) WP PageNavi- Adds a paging navigation your WordPress blog.» Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » ... Last »
  • Download Plugin: Here

21) In Series- Provides navigation controls for “next” and “previous” links within a connected series of posts.
  • Download Plugin: Here

22) CustomNav- CustomNav is a Plug-in for WordPress that allows the administrator to easily create and add a horizontal navigation menu or even a vertical navigation menu.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Further Reading on Navigation Plugins
Create drop-down menus with WordPress Plug-ins and themes

Administrative Plugins

23) Dashboard Editor- Allows you to add or remove whatever you want from the WordPress dashboard to be more useful to you.
  • Download Plugin: Here

24) Fluency Admin- One of the best interfaces ever created for WordPress. Works with WordPress 2.5.
  • Download Plugin: Here

25) Lighter Admin Drop Menus- Provides css-enabled drop down menus to speed the use of the WordPress dashboard.
  • Download Plugin: Here

26) WP Admin Bar Reloaded- Displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog’s page - but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions.
  • Download Plugin: Here

27) Wordpress Themed Categories Plugin- The ability to assign different themes for each category.
  • Download Plugin: Here

RSS

28) From RSS- If you want to give your RSS subscribers a little bit of extra content, or simply leave out some annoying footer about subscribing to the RSS feed.
  • Download Plugin: Here

29) What Would Seth Godin Do- New visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.
  • Download Plugin: Here

30) Feed Count- If you don’t like the feedburner chickletd, You can use this Plug-in to display the number of subscribers to your feedburner feed by using your own taste.
  • Download Plugin: Here

31) Feedburner Feed Replacement- Created by Steve Smith, it's a reliable way to track your entire feed-reading audience by redirecting all your subscribers to using your feed from Feedburner so you could keep track of the actual number of subscribers.
  • Download Plugin: Here

32) Full Text Feed- WordPress will truncate your feed’s content anywhere you insert a <!--more--> tag. Full Text Feed undos this functionality, allowing your feeds to contain the full text regardless of <!--more--> usage.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Full Text Feed is no longer required for WordPress 2.5.
33) Subscribe-Remind- An effective way to turn visitors into subscribers by adding some text at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Database and Server

34) WordPress Database Backup- This popular Plug-in allows users to schedule automatic database backups by creating backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.
  • Download Plugin: Here

35) 404 Notifier README- Log 404 (file not found) errors on your site and get them delivered to you via e-mail or RSS.
  • Download Plugin: Here

36) WP-phpMyAdmin - Allows to access your PHP databases directly from the WP admin area without having to login to phpMyAdmin.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Comments

37) Subscribe to Comments 2.1- Allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments on the subscribed post. It is one of the most popular WordPress Plug-ins out there cause it helps encouraging the commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.
  • Download Plugin: Here

38) Live Comment Preview- Live Comment Preview is the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.
  • Download Plugin: Here

39) Get Recent Comments- This Plug-in shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar.
  • Download Plugin: Here

40) Show Top CommentatorsThis Plug-in encourages discussion from your readers by displaying their name (linked to their site without a nofollow tag if desired) and number of comments on the sidebar.
  • Download Plugin: Here

41) NoFollow Free NoFollow Free removes the “nofollow” attribute from your WordPress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links to encourage your users to submit comments.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Further Reading on Comments Plugins
30+ Plug-ins for WordPress Comments

CMS


42) Advanced Category Excluder- The main goal is to hide some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog. It can override your search results, your RSS feed listing, your category listing, and also your entry page, if you want to. This is great, for SEO reasons, for content separation, for grouping information, and handle them as real sub pages.
  • Download Plugin: Here

43) Filosofo Home-Page Control- This plug-in lets you put pages on the same Permalink level (or higher) as the blog’s directory and set which page you want to be the “home” page.
  • Download Plugin: Here

44) Search Everything - Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search, to search Every Page, Every Tag, non-password protected pages only, Search Every Comment, Search only approved comments, Search Every Draft, Search Every Excerpt...
  • Download Plugin: Here

45) Custom Query String- After installing this plug-in you will be able to set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website. Here are some of the pages that you will be able to customize: author, archive, category, year, month, day, home, feed, search.
  • Download Plugin: Here

46) Manually order your Pages with My Page Order WordPress plugin- Gives you additional Page flexibility by allowing you to manually order your Pages without coding.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Further Readings on WordPress CMS Plugins
Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins
13 Plug-ins that will make WordPress into a CMS
5 WordPress Plug-ins that will turn WordPress into a CMS
Wordpress As CMS: Pages, Nav, Crumbs, And Plugins

Social bookmarking Plugins

47) Sociable- Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others.
50) Socialize Me!- Socialize Me! will identify where the visitor is coming from, and in the case that the source is a social site where you have a profile on, it will display a tailored message. Imagine if you could reach out to all those visitors from StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious et cetera, right from your articles…
  • Download Plugin: Here

SEO

51) All in One SEO Pack- Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by automatically optimizing your titles for search engines , generating META tags automatically and avoiding duplicate content found on WordPress blogs.
  • Download Plugin: Here

52) Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator- This Plug-in generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog to help google crawl your site.
  • Download Plugin: Here

53) Meta Robots- This Plug-in allow you to manage your meta robot tags.
  • Download Plugin: Here

54) Head META Description- Head Meta Description provides an automatic meta description tag for your blog, inserting a dynamic description depending on the query-type (i.e. page you’re on). Some search engines are supposed to love this tag.
  • Download Plugin: Here

55) Enforce www. Preference- This Plug-in will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/). Most search engines treat those addresses as two different domains.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Speed up Your WordPress Plugins

56) WP-Cache- WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Further Reading on speeding up your WordPress
Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours
The 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress

Fignting Spam, Splogs

Splogs are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/ or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Splogs (spam blogs) scrape content from others and re-post the material as their own in order to earn money. 57) Digital Fingerprint — detecting content theft- To combat splogs use of your content, this Plug-in will place a digital fingerprint into blog posts. Once embedded in your post, the Plug-in allows you to quickly and easily search the blogosphere for references to the digital fingerprint.
  • Download Plugin: Here

58) Akismet- Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not.
  • Download Plugin: Here

59) RSS Feed Signature- Provide a simple administration interface to allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or © copyright message to the WordPress generated rss feeds to protect your content from splogs (spam blogs).
  • Download Plugin: Here

60) Simple Trackback Validation Plugin- This Plug-in performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Further Readings on Spam Fighting Plugins
30 Spam Fighting WordPress Plugins

Advertising Plug-ins

61) Got Banners- Got Banners is a simple banner rotating Plug-in for WordPress that displays all the banners provided simultaneously. But, in a different random order each time.
  • Download Plugin: Here

63) WPAds- WPAds is a WordPress Plug-in for showing and rotating ads in your blog. You only have to define the ad positions and the ads you want to rotate in each position, and WPAds will serve your ads randomly.
  • Download Plugin: Here

WordPress Developer's Plug-ins

64) Code Markup- Code Markup is a WordPress Plug-in that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML
  • Download Plugin: Here

65) Clean Options- Cleans up your blog after removing unwanted plugins.
  • Download Plugin: Here

66) Theme Test Drive- Theme Test Drive WordPress Plug-in allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one.
  • Download Plugin: Here

67) runPHP- runPHP is a WordPress plug-in that enables users to embed PHP code directly into their posts.
  • Download Plugin: Here

68) AJAX CSS Switcher- This WordPress Plug-in allows you to add CSS switching to your theme without any reload. It also stores the users selection for future visits.
  • Download Plugin: Here

Tags Plug-ins

69) Category Cloud Widget- The Category Cloud Widget is a widget that displays your categories as a tag cloud in your sidebar.
  • Download Plugin: Here

70) Heat Map plugin- Provides you with two new template tags for displaying a heat map (aka weighted list) of your categories and your monthly archives, can be indicated by varying font sizes, color intensities or both.
  • Download Plugin: Here

71) Recommended Tags- This is a Plug-in for WordPress 2.3+ that utilizes the built-in tag system for recommending and displaying a list of your current tags. It avoids the troubling issue of creating duplicate tag names that are nearly identical, such as “download” and “downloads.”
  • Download Plugin: Here

Further Readings on WordPress Tags Clouds
Best Tagging Tools and Plugins

Archive Plugins

72) Extended Live Archive- This Plug-in creates dynamic archive page that helps your readers to easily navigate your archive, has the ability to sort posts by tags, categories, date and popularity.
  • Download Plugin: Here

73) SRG Clean Archives- This Plug-in is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s Search Engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar. It lists the Month / Year, shows total post count for the month, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article and the number of comments that have been made on each article.

Worth Checking Plugins

74) Author Exposed- Author Exposed is a simple WordPress Plug-in that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author.
  • Download Plugin: Here

75) PodPress- This Plug-in makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple and supports unlimited number of media files.
  • Download Plugin: Here

76) WP-Print- Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog's post/page.
77) Comment relish- Developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before.
  • Download Plugin: Here
Further Readings on WordPress Plug-ins
Tips to Speed Up WordPress Plug-in Development 5 Advanced Techniques for Creating Plug-ins and Widgets for WordPress.com

Noupe Editorial Team

The jungle is alive: Be it a collaboration between two or more authors or an article by an author not contributing regularly. In these cases you find the Noupe Editorial Team as the ones who made it. Guest authors get their own little bio boxes below the article, so watch out for these.

43 comments

  1. Great as always!

    But you’ve got a duplicate at 26/27. Thought I’d point that out.

    Excellent round-up.

  2. A great up-to-date list here. I would also add the plugin comment relish… it sends an automatic email to new commentators on your blog.

  3. Thanks Everyone, i am glad you found this list helpful.

    Thanks Jacob for mentioning Comment Relish plug-in, i added to the Worth Checking Plugin.

  4. Thanks for an informative post, I’m still getting to grips with plug-ins and have bookmarked this for future use. I’m looking forward to trying some out!

  5. WOW!! thats all i can say is wow! im using a lot of these on my site now thanks to you! great list!

  6. This the BEST ARTICLE that I ever read about how to make a great great blog using an CMS!!! I’ll watching your blog closely for now on.

  7. Thanks everyone, really glad you found some useful information here.

    Thanks Andrew, i have pointed the link of your plug-in to the WordPress Directory.

    You are welcome Igor, your plug-in is a must have for a multi author website.

    Richard, not all the plug-ins are compatible with WordPress 2.5 as it was just released 2 days ago. Hopefully the authors of these plug-ins will update their own.

    You are right Bryan, but i included it for users who still use previous version of WP. Also i just added a note for this.

    Thanks Nicola M., i am glad you found this list useful.
    The site of “WP Digg Style Pagination” was working 2 days ago, i wonder what happened. Anyway, i have uploaded the version that we are using here on Noupe so you guys can download it. A link to the file was added to #19.

  8. What a simply stunning collection – I thought I had a good idea of most of the best plugins but there are tonnes of great ones here I hadn’t heard about. THANKS!

  9. awesome collection you have here..! i’ve visited a few of the sites and bookmarked them… i currently use a few on my blog now… thanks!

  10. This is a very handy list, I’ve got most of them already installed on my site but a few which i was looking for, i found through noupe. Thanks a lot!! Keep up the good posting and i’ve linked you.

  11. Wow, you saved me a lot of searching! I picked up five great plugins in just a few minutes. I actually forgot what I was looking for!

  12. Excellent work…

    How do I know? Because for a few of the categories here I’ve done my own thorough research, saw all the currently available options – and decided just like you have :-)

    So now, as I can conclude we share the same “evaluation principles” – I can honestly declare I’ve found my one-stop-shop for WP plugins!

    Gosh, you’ll save me tons of work researching for the many other plugins I’m after…

    Thanks heaps!

  13. Hey! This list is AMAZING. As everyone above has posted, this is definitely a must-stop shop for all things WP-plug in related.

    Thought I’d also let you know about another plug in that was just released that would probably work under your “Worth Checking Category.” This new plug in, which was developed by Magnify.net, allows bloggers to search, aggregate, and embed video from the top 10 video sharing sites, flickr, and their webcam straight from the WYSIWYG panel. Just tried the beta release yesterday and it look promising!

    Thanks again for compiling such a great resource.

  14. Great list, thanks very much!

    Quick correction – Number 15, PhotoDropper, the link points to the wrong page (a pagination plugin)

    Cheers, Jon

  15. The All in One SEO plug-in has been great up until now, but since it is no longer being supported, I wouldn’t recommend new installations of it. Better off using plug-ins from Joost de Valk or Stephen Spencer.

  16. Regarding “78”: wpSEO- Have more than 50 different settings for SEO your blog. The license changed. It’s no longer free for pages with web banners (no matter if it’s business or individual).

    Better and FREE: “All in One SEO Pack”

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