19 Favorite WordPress Plugins

I am not a WordPress expert nor am I a marketing guru.  I suppose I am a software developer and that skews what I look for in a plugin.  I prefer several light-weight, well-focused, and well-written plugins over one massive transform-my-wordpress-and-suck-all-my-memory plugin.  If you agree, this list may be for you.  My criteria for a good plugin are simple.

1. There is a need, and your plugin remedies the need
2. The plugin does not attempt to do more than its intended purpose
3. There interface is self-explanatory
4. The use of resources in running the plugin is justifiable
5. The plugin should provide a more positive experience for either my users or me (ideally both)
6. Don’t add more plugins to the list than needed to get to a round number like 20, 25, 50, or 100.

#19 WP Ajax Edit Comments

Allow users more control of their comments by editting them after posting with an easy to navigate interface.

#18 Twitterlink Comments

Allow commenters to display a link to their twitter site.  Simple.

#17 CDN Tools

I only use this for google’s ajax system.  If my blog got bigger, I would definitely consider subscribing to a cdn to speed up the user experience.

#16 danixland User Panel

Sidebar widget to show details about the user currently logged in.

#15 Do Follow

Decrease the spam-bots.  Simple.

#14 Sidebar Login

Hate the meta widget? I do.  This does what it says.

#13 WP Mobile Detector

Use this along with your favorite mobile theme to provide a better experience for your users on the move.

#12 FeedBurner FeedSmith

Get better statistics for your RSS feeds.  If you’re using google analytics for your site, then you should be using FeedBurner for your feeds.

#11 AddToAny

Who doesn’t have a social sharing plugin, right?  Is this the absolute best one?  I don’t know.  What I like is that it is easy to configure and I can choose which social sharing buttons I would like to display.  A good balance between simplicity and features.

#10 Highlight Author Comments

The biggest compliment you can give to a plugin is that the functionality should just be incorporated into the base product itself.  This plugin simply does what it says.

#9 WP-Mail-SMTP

This plugin reconfigures the wp_mail() function so all mail from your blog can be sent by SMTP instead of using PHP’s mail() function.  This makes Contact Form 7 and wordpress email work much better.

#8 Really Simple CAPTCHA

There are some CAPTCHA’s out there that really annoy me.  I am a human. I promise.  If someone writes a spam-bot that can interpret my comments CAPTCHA, I’ll think about changing it then, but kudos to them.  Anyway this would be a great defalut CAPTCHA for WP.  It’s used in two plugins in the list anyway (Contact Form 7 and Cbnet Really Simple CAPTCHA Comments).

#7 Cbnet Really Simple CAPTCHA Comments

This small, simple, plugin filled the balance between me wanted to not get comment-spammed and not wanting to force everyone to login to leave a comment.

#6 Contact Form 7

The defacto contact form.  It is simple and it works.  (the ranking is purely coincidental)

#5 W3 Total Cache

Speed up WordPress through a series of caches.  Someday I’ll maybe have enough traffic to see if this makes a difference.

#4 WP to Twitter

Automatically post to twitter when you post to wordpress.  Saves me an alt-tab and a few clicks each post.

#3 Google Analytics for WordPress

Integration for advanced tracking in google … and man am I addicted to data and graphs.

#2 Add Post Footer

1. Easily adds ad code (google adsense or other) to the bottom of your posts
2. Option to include related posts
3. Option to include footer on blogroll or single page only

#1 WordPress SEO

Wow.  Learn about all the things you never thought about when you wrote your awesome content and then fix them so more people get to see your post.