My top 10 favourite WordPress plug-ins

I’ve been using WordPress as back-end for all of my websites since 2007. I started with PHP-Nuke back in 2000 and I moved to Geeklog after getting tired of how things were managed by the single PHP-Nuke developer and ran with it for a good 7 years until I finally made the switch to WordPress and never looked back.

The main reasons I never had to look elsewhere is the plug-ins developments on WordPress is close to amazing. The developers work hard at creating various plug-ins and these plug-ins can do almost anything imaginable.

I wanted to list just a few of the WordPress plug-ins that I use and that made my top 10 favourite list for being reliable and still maintained by their developers.

• Facebook Connector
  This is a great way to encourage easy sign up for your users by allowing them to connect and comment using their Facebook login information.
• GD Star Rating
  A nice and simple star and thumb rating system for your posts, pages and comments. Lets users vote and review articles.
• Exec-PHP
  Really handy if you know PHP and want to include some PHP code inside of your posts or pages without creating modules.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  Sends out pings to google and yahoo search engines and creates a sitemap of your recent posts, pages.
• Google Analyticator
  Google’s Analystic web stats are just the best in the industry and they wont slow down your site. This plug in will add widgets and the java coded needed for track web statistics.
• Insights
  Nice widget for editors, when creating or editing posts you can search using Insights to add pictures, videos, and links and with a simple click they get imported into your post.
• Popularity Contest
  Rate every page or post based on it’s popularity, more comments, more page views the higher the popularity percentage goes. You can then include widgets based on popularity results.
• Twitter Tools
  A must for all you twitter users outs there, it adds the ability to auto create posts based on your tweets or it can auto tweet using your account about new posts that were recently published on your site.
• WP Super Cache
  File system based caching for wordpress, very fast and reliable. Don’t generate the same page twice within minutes!
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
  Another must have, it appends related posts to articles. This reduces bounce rates and it’s a SEO must have.

There are more but I wanted to keep this list short, two more I’ll mention that I think are must haves and that’s the All in one SEO pack and Twit Connect. All of these plug-ins I use my self on this site and others, I recommend and trust them all for reliability. As of the writing of this post “WordPress 2.8.4″ they all work just fine out of the box. That’s a very important thing when choosing plug-ins as many are created and never maintained or updated for newer versions of WordPress. This is one of the things I looked at when reviewing my top 10 favourites, I hate when I find a great plug-in concept but to find its a few years old and never got updated.

If you’re using any of the above plug-ins or want to add your list of favourite “must have” feel free to comment below.

No related posts.