Top 10 WordPress Plugin Lists

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlejohncollection/

The popularity of WordPress makes it an amazing tool for making successful websites. However, WordPress does a terrible job at cleaning up their plugin and theme directory. So, finding good plugins is challenging. One of the most common services I do for my clients is select plugins. As an example, searching for SEO plugins brings up 30 pages of plugins or over 600 plugins! Fortunately, the plugin most people use, All-In-One SEO, is near the top. Yet, many users select dubious SEO plugins that can often have disastrous consequences.

Why Top 10 Lists are Important

A company I consult for had downloaded an interesting search engine optimization plugin, but after looking through the plugin I realized the plugin purposefully removed their homepage from Google! The plugin did nothing to notify users of it’s disastrous behavior. Luckily, deleting the plugin fixed the problem quickly. When selecting WordPress plugins, it’s important to get recommendations. So, I’ve a list of lists by the leaders in WordPress development.

The Top Lists

  1. Prelovac’s 10 hidden gems list has some great plugins not on other lists
  2. Seo Chick’s top 10 list covers a pretty standard set of plugins
  3. Lorelle’s mind blowing list has way too many plugins, but it’s worth reading
  4. Michael Gray’s SEO plugins list has more than just SEO plugins
  5. WordPress.org has most popular list so you can follow the crowd
  6. Mashable posted a SEO plugins list that looks rather bland, but automatic links looks good
  7. Interesting Ajax plugins list that has some nifty plugins.

What Am I Using?

  • Akismet to block spam comments
  • All in One SEO Pack to fix my page titles
  • Contact Form 7 for my contact page
  • Google Analyticator to add analytics, but I’m looking for a plugin that does “asynchronous” loading
  • WordPress.com Stats so I can get a pretty graph of hits in real time