101 Killer WordPress Plugins that Kick Ass

Chris Roane WordPress Tips & Tutorials

There are many WordPress plugin lists, but most of them are out of date or not categorized. Often times it isn’t easy to find the right plugin, and this was created to make the best plugins easily available through a categorized WordPress plugin list. I also wanted a list of wp plugins to reference for my own WordPress websites.

I searched the web for the best and most popular WordPress plugins. If you know of a plugin that is not in this list and is popular and highly rated, please post a link in the comments.

  • The majority of these plugins were updated at least by the end of last year (if not sooner).
  • All of these are popular and highly rated.
  • For you convenience, I link to the plugin site (if there is one) and the plugin page hosted on wordpress.org.
  • I have not used all of the plugins, but any that I would recommend and have experience with, I made bold.
  • The categories and plugins are listed alphabetically.

Click on a Plugin Category

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font-size:12px;
padding-bottom: 7px;
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.wp-plugins1-name {
font-size: 12px;
font-style:italic;
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.wp-plugins1-name-special {
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 12px;
font-style:italic;
}
.wp-plugins1-pluginlink {
margin-left: 5px;
}
.wp-plugins1-wplink {
margin-left: 8px;
}

Admin Plugins

  • After the Deadline: Spell check and grammar check your posts in WordPress. Works in code view
    as well! PluginWP
  • Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu: Make all admin links available in one drop down menu. PluginWP
  • TinyMCE Advanced: Add additional features to the WYSIWYG editor used in WordPress. PluginWP
  • WordPress Admin Bar: Replicates the admin bar seen on WordPress.com . Easily access major areas of the admin. PluginWP
  • WP-Table Reloaded: Enables you to create and manage tables. PluginWP

Advertising

  • AdSense Integrator: Developed to insert and manage your AdSense ads, based on the latest Google rules and AdSense updates. It can also be used with other services. PluginWP
  • Advertising Manager: Manage all the different adds throughout your site. Includes post pages and other theme pages. PluginWP
  • Chitika | Premium: Allows you to easily change the display of your Chitika | Premium ads through a settings page in the WordPress admin interface. PluginWP

Archives

  • Clean Archives Reloaded: Generates a list of all of your posts, sorted by month. It’s enhanced with JavaScript to allow collapsing and expanding of months.WP
  • Collapsing Archives: Make the sidebar archive links collapsible. PluginWP
  • Snazzy Archives: Provides many different options to customize your archive pages. PluginWP

Audio Files

  • Audio Player: Highly configurable but simple mp3 player for all your audio needs. PluginWP
  • Flash MP3 Player: This plugin can display a highly customizable MP3 player on your sidebar, in a single post page or any other places on your blog pages. PluginWP
  • podPress: Adds tons of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for
    hosting a podcast. PluginWP
  • WPaudio MP3 Player: Easily play mp3 audio on your WordPress website. PluginWP

Backup & Optimization

  • WordPress Backup: Make a zip backup of your current theme, plugins and uploaded files. This can be setup to happen automatically. This plugin does not backup your database. PluginWP
  • WP-DBManager: Has many options for backing up and working with your database. Includes automatic scheduling. PluginWP
  • WP-Optimize: Database and cleanup tool. PluginWP

Categories

  • AVH Extended Categories Widgets: Contains multiple widgets and replaces the default WP category functionality. PluginWP
  • Category Posts Widget: Display the most recent posts from a certain category. PluginWP
  • Collapsing Categories: Uses JavaScript to form a collapsible set of links in the sidebar for the
    categories. PluginWP
  • My Category Order: Allows you to set the order in which categories will appear in the sidebar. PluginWP

Code Formatting

  • SyntaxHighlighter Evolved: Allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without losing its formatting or making any manual changes. It uses the SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript package by Alex Gorbatchev (this is what I use for this site, but I don’t use the plugin at this point). PluginWP
  • WP-CodeBox: Clean syntax highlighting and AJAX advanced features for embedding source code within pages or posts. PluginWP
  • WP-Syntax: Provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi – supporting a wide range of popular
    languages.WP

Comments

  • Comment Luv: Post the latest link to comment authors’ blog with each of their comments. PluginWP
  • Comment Rating: Allow your visitors to rate each comment. PluginWP
  • Disqus Comment System: Connect with the Disqus system for your comments. PluginWP
  • IntenseDebate Comments: Adds advanced features to the comment system, including reply by email, rating, user accounts and other options. PluginWP
  • NoFollow Free: Removes the “nofollow” attribute from your comments. PluginWP
  • Subscribe to Comments: Add a check box to the comment form, allowing users to receive emails when new comments are submitted on that post. Also includes functionality for the user to manage the posts they are subscribed to. PluginWP
  • Top Commentators Widget: A widget that displays the top commentators on your blog. PluginWP
  • WP Ajax Edit Comments: Provides a method to edit comments easily and quickly. PluginWP

Feature Posts

  • Featurific For WordPress: Feature posts in a similar way to time.com and msn.com. PluginWP
  • Smooth Slider: A JavaScript and text based featured post slider. PluginWP

Links

  • Broken Link Checker: Monitors your blog for any broken links and lets you know if it finds any. PluginWP
  • Link Library: If you want a simple way of displaying links on a page, and a method for your visitors to submit links, this is a great script.WP
  • My Link Order: Allows you to set the order in which links and link categories will appear in the
    sidebar. PluginWP
  • Pretty Link: Create shorter urls using your own domain name. PluginWP

Mapping

  • Visitor Maps and Who’s Online: Display visitor maps with location pins, city and country. Also includes who’s online widget. PluginWP
  • XML Google Maps: Display Google Maps or Google Earth on your blog. PluginWP

Miscellaneous Plugins

  • DMSGuestbook: Put a guestbook on your website. PluginWP
  • PollDaddy Polls & Ratings: Easily integrate polls into your WordPress website.WP
  • Quotes Collection: This ajax powered random quote sidebar widget helps you collect, manage and display your favorite quotations on your WordPress blog. PluginWP
  • Sidebar Login: Has both a widget and a template tag to allow you to have a login form in the sidebar of your wordpress powered blog.WP
  • Theme My Login: This plugin themes the WordPress login, registration and forgot password pages according to your current theme. PluginWP
  • WordPress Download Monitor: Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links.WP
  • WP-FlashTime Widget: Add a flash clock widget.WP
  • WPML Multilingual CMS: Make your website multilingual. PluginWP
  • WP-UserOnline: Enables you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who they are.WP

Must Have WordPress Plugins

  • Akismet: Prevent comment spam. PluginWP
  • All in One SEO: A great SEO plugin that has many options and allows you to edit the title, meta description and meta keywords for each page. PluginWP
  • Comment Form 7: Simple contact form. PluginWP
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith: If you use FeedBurner, this plugin is a must. PluginWP
  • Google XML Sitemaps: This will automatically generate the sitemap files on your server, which is used by search engines. PluginWP
  • WordPress.com Stats: I suggest getting this, even if you use Google Analytics. This gives you more readable data that is immediately available the next day after you start using it.WP
  • WP Super Cache: One of the best caching plugins. PluginWP

Photos and Galleries

  • flickrRSS: Display Flickr photos on your wordpress website. PluginWP
  • GRAND Flash Album Gallery: A flash based photo gallery for your WordPress blog. PluginWP
  • Lightbox Plus: Display larger versions of photos easily with this plugin. PluginWP
  • NextGEN Gallery: A full featured photo gallery for WordPress. PluginWP
  • Page Flip Image Gallery: An image gallery plugin that provides a page flipping technique. PluginWP
  • Picasa Photos: Pick photos from picasa album and display them randomly. PluginWP
  • Post videos and photo galleries: Advanced features includes encoding of video files and hosting of your media files. PluginWP
  • Scissors: This plugin adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs.WP
  • WP-SimpleViewer: Enables you to easily add fancy SimpleViewer Flash galleries to your posts and
    pages. PluginWP

Posts and Pages

  • AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button: Integrates with the AddToAny service, which allows your visitors to share across many different networks. PluginWP
  • GD Star Rating: Allows you to set up a rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. PluginWP
  • My Page Order: Easily change the order of how the page list is displayed. PluginWP
  • pagebar: Pagebar adds a nice page bar to your blog posts, multipage posts and paged
    comments. PluginWP
  • Permalinks Moved Permanently: This will automatically create 301 redirects for any page where the permalink structure has changed. If you are moving blogs or making major changes to your permalinks, this is a must! PluginWP
  • ShareThis: Integrates with the ShareThis service, which allows your visitors to share across many different networks. PluginWP
  • Sociable: Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. PluginWP
  • TweetMeme Button: Allows your post or page to be retweeted easily. PluginWP
  • Twitter Tools: Full integration with your posts and twitter. Includes the ability of putting tweets on
    your page. PluginWP
  • WordPress Related Posts: If YARPP is more than what you are looking for, and you do not want to use a technique that doesn’t require a plugin, than this is a good option. PluginWP
  • WP-PageNavi: Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site where multiple posts are shown (like on the home and category pages).WP
  • WordPress Popular Posts: Display popular posts on your site. You can display popular posts by the day, week, month and other options.WP
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: This is a great plugin if you need more advanced options than the technique described without a plugin. PluginWP
  • WP-o-Matic: Automatically creates posts based on rss feeds that you specify.WP
  • WP-Sticky: A method for featuring a post. PluginWP

SEO

  • Platinum SEO Pack: Another awesome SEO option. PluginWP
  • SEO Smart Links: Goes through your post content and automatically links text to other content on your site. There are a lot of options with this one and I found it very useful. PluginWP

Search Plugins

  • Search Everything: Increase the capabilities of the default WordPress search. PluginWP
  • Search Unleashed: Extends the standard WordPress search to include data from posts, pages, comments, and meta-data, as well as the full content of data inserted by plugins. PluginWP

Shopping

  • eShop: Another shopping cart option.WP
  • WP e-Commerce: A full featured shopping cart solution for WordPress. PluginWP

Spam Prevention

  • Bad Behavior: This provides a method for blocking link spam on your site. PluginWP
  • SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam: Adds a captcha field to the comment form and a few other forms. PluginWP
  • WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam: Another option for blocking spam. It also contains a simple contact form you can use on your site. PluginWP

Statistics Related Plugins

  • GeneralStats: Counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages. PluginWP
  • Google Analyticator: Easily include google analytics code on your site, and display stats in your
    admin. PluginWP
  • Google Analytics for WordPress: Add additional options for tracking statistics with Google
    Analytics.WP
  • StatPress: Gather statistics about the visitors in your blog. PluginWP

Tags

  • Better Tag Cloud: If you want more options when displaying tags on your site, take a look at
    this plugin. PluginWP
  • Configurable Tag Cloud: Provides better customizations to the tag cloud than the default
    functionality. PluginWP
  • Simple Tags: Adds features for managing and working with tags. PluginWP

Video Files

  • EasyTube: Easily embed YouTube and Google Video into your posts.WP
  • TubePress: Displays gorgeous YouTube galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar. PluginWP
  • Video Sidebar Widgets: It enables the user to embed FlashVideo from various video sharing networks into the widgetised sidebar of a WordPress powered blog. PluginWP
  • Viper’s Video Quicktags: Easily include videos from popular video sites without having to paste embed
    code. PluginWP

32 thoughts on “101 Killer WordPress Plugins that Kick Ass”

  1. 101 Killer WordPress Plugins that Kick Ass – Montana Programmer…

    There are many WordPress plugin lists, but most of them are out of date or not categorized. Often times it isn’t easy to find the right plugin, and this was created to make the best plugins easily available. I also wanted a list of plugins to reference…

    Like

  2. 101 Killer WordPress Plugins that Kick Ass…

    There are many WordPress plugin lists, but most of them are out of date or not categorized. Often times it isn’t easy to find the right plugin, and this was created to make the best plugins easily available. I also wanted a list of plugins to reference…

    Like

  14. 101 Killer WordPress Plugins that Kick Ass…

    There are many WordPress plugin lists, but most of them are out of date or not categorized. Often times it isn’t easy to find the right plugin, and this was created to make the best plugins easily available. I also wanted a list of plugins to reference…

    Like

  15. Great list of plugins. I find that having too many plugins on my site slows down the load time too much so I needed to cut back to the bare minimum.

    I’ve heard that “WP Security Scan” is also a good one to have.

    Like

    • I agree that too many plugins is a bad thing. But there are times when some of them are useful. Thanks for sharing.

      Like

  20. Thanks Susan and baterya for sharing. This list took many hours to put together, and I’m glad there are a few people who find a use for it! 🙂

    Like

  24. Awesome. Thanks, I had been looking for a better syntax hilighter and am going to give your recommendations a shot. Also, I’m going to test out some of those photo galleries – I am just not thrilled with NextGen.

    Like

  26. I’ve read your article and found your article very interesting, do you still have another article, maybe we can exchange articles.

    Like

  27. I agree 101% with XML Google Map Plugin. The plugin website only introduces the tip of the iceberg of the plugins capabilities. I found it 101 times more versatile. More so than umapper (with premium fee)

    I wrote a comprehensive instruction on how to insert dynamic maps in to posts or webpages, with using using google earth desktop and the plugin. Very easy and quick job.

    http://www.watataw.com/blog/955

    examples:
    http://www.watataw.com/map
    http://www.watataw.com/travel/27

    Like

  28. This is a great list of plugins, and I’ve downloaded several! But, I am really interested in having a Most Popular Box just like the one you have in your sidebar. I have seen it on other blogs, but I can’t find it anywhere. Is it a plugin?
    Thanks again for the great list! Hope you can help.

    Like

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