Useful Wordpress Plugins

Here’s a list of useful WordPress that I’m currently using for my blog. If you happen to know any other plugins that I should know about, feel free to post it on the comment section below 😀

1. Add Link to Facebook

This plugin will allow you to publish to Facebook whenever you publish a post on your blog. It automatically adds a link to your posts or pages that are being published to your Facebook wall, pages or groups. Simple one time setup and forget. The way links appear on Facebook can be customized.

2. Akismet

Installed by default when you install WordPress on your website. You can use it for free and it does a really good job of protecting you from any kind of spam!

3. All in One SEO Pack

Great package for all your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) needs! It’s very extensive and you can customize it to your liking. This is a must have if you want to make your blog and content visible on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

4. Another SoundCloud Quicktag

Not a must, but it’s useful if you want to add SoundCloud music to your posts. It also adds a new button to the tinyMCE plugin if you have it.

5. Easy Google Syntax Highlighter

If you want to share coding then this is the best plugin to highlight your code in WordPress! It supports numerous programming languages such as ActionScript3, C++, CSS, JavaScript,PHP, Python, SQL, and many more.

6. Embed Object

You can easily embed flash objects and YouTube videos in your wordpress blog. You can use it in posts and pages, and you can use any attribute that you want. But I would recommend using “Viper’s Video Quicktags” for embedding YouTube video (see plugin #15 in this post).

7. Fast Secure Contact Form

Adds a contact form to your website with minimum effort! Check out my “About” page to see how it looks like.

8. Google Analytics for WordPress

Very useful plugin for integrating Google Analytics with your blog. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata.

9. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

10. Lightbox 2

Adds a fancy Lightbox with your images. Lightbox will make your blog look prettier when someone clicks on an image to enlarge it. It will display your images in a Lightbox rather than opening it on a new page or whatever.

11. My Page Order

The built-in page ordering method with WordPress is really retarded and annoying to use. My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. A must have!

12. Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.

13. Share-Widget

Add the share-widget button on the footer of your post. Users can share your content through popular social network and email. It supports about 20 of the most popular social networking and bookmarking websites. Very useful plugin!

14. TinyMCE Advanced

Enables the advanced features of TinyMCE, the WordPress WYSIWYG editor. This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Advanced List, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Always handy when you’re too lazy to use HTML code 🙂

15. Viper’s Video Quicktags

Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you. Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more.Viper’s Video Quicktags supports numerous video sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Blip.tv and many more!

16. W3 Total Cache

The most complete WordPress performance framework. Improve site performance and user experience via caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.