Website Help – Best Plugins : WordPress List & Description With Links, October 2011

I see bloggers asking about what other bloggers use for plugins all the time. I have personally spent many hours reading top lists of the best WordPress plugins, so I wanted to post my own plugin list of WordPress plugins I recommend. These are my current active plugins that I use on my website. I find them to be the best WordPress plugins available, but if you know of one I simply MUST try, please leave me a comment on this post!

Advertisement Management – With Advertisement Management you can control all your blogadvertisements from one single location in the blog backend. This is the plug-in I use to add advertisements to the top and bottom of every blog post.

Askimet – Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. I use this to control spam comments on my website.

Bad Behavior – Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. This is my spam defense backup.

Broken Link Checker – Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. I’ve installed this…unfortunately, I have yet to do anything with it. However, I do love that even without doing anything, this plugin automatically crosses out broken links.

Fast Secure Contact Form – Fast Secure Contact Form for WordPress. The contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Super customizable with a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. This is what I use on my “Contact Page“. It is super easy to set up and works very well.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, adding lots of features, eg. custom variables and automatic clickout and download tracking. I use this to view my Google Analytics account from within WordPress.

JetPack By WordPress.com – Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users. I use JetPack for site statistics. It does a really good job of displaying your traffic in an easy-to-understand way. It also features other widgets you can add to your blog that I have yet to really play with.

Official StatCounter Plugin – Adds the StatCounter tracking code to your blog. I use this to also view my StatCounter traffic stats…I know, I have a lot of traffic statistics tools!

ReplyMe – Send an email to author automatically while someone reply his comment. This plugin makes it super easy to to reply to any comments that require a reply.

Share and Follow – A simple plugin to manage sharing and following. This is my all-in-one tool for all my social media needs. This is where the buttons that float on the left side of my blog comes from. It is also the thing that is displaying those nifty share buttons at both the top and bottom of my posts. I really love this plugin.

W3 Total Cache – The highest rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress. This is what I use to cut down on loading time for my visitors.

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. I use this plugin to do my backups of my website, “just in case” or whenever I am making big changes. You can also schedule backups to be emailed to you.

WordPress Editorial Calendar – The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog. This is one of my favorite plugins. It has helped me stay organized so much.

WP125 – Easily manage 125×125 ads within your WordPress Dashboard. This is great for displaying your ads. I am not currently using this, but I plan on implementing it soon.

WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more! Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins.

WP Smush.it – Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress. This plugin keeps my page load time down for my visitors, as well.

WPtouch – A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for visitors on Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones. This makes my website easy to browse through a cell phone.