Most-Used WordPress Plugins

There are thousands of WordPress plugins available, but there’s only a few that I use pretty regularly. Every WordPress developer has his own favorite plugins, and here are the ones I use most:

Advanced Twitter Widget
Some WordPress themes come with a Twitter widget built in, but if yours doesn’t then Advanced Twitter Widget is a simple plugin that lets you add your tweets to your site. (And while it’s true you can use Twitter’s own widgets, I prefer to style the tweets to better match the site’s style.)

Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a simple but useful contact form. Lets you easily create multiple custom forms and send to various email addresses.

Exclude Pages
Exclude Pages lets you create public pages that don’t appear in the navigation. This is useful for public pages you’d like to remain hidden, landing pages you don’t want to appear in your site’s navigation, client pages, and for themes that don’t allow you to use custom menus.

Lightbox 2
Lightbox 2 automatically makes any linked image display in a lightbox-style popover, rather than just open the image in a browser window.

Widget Logic
This is one of the most useful WordPress plugins, and it gives you a lot of control over how sidebar widgets appear on your site. While many WordPress themes allow for different sidebar content for various pages, some have a single sidebar for all pages. And even for those themes with multiple sidebars, you might want more control over what widgets appear on specific pages. Widget Logic lets you control exactly what widget appears on what page. That sounds vague, but once you learn how the conditions are written it’s powerful and easy to have widgets appear exactly where you want them.

WP-DB-Backup
It’s always a good idea to make backups. WP-DB-Backup makes backups of your MySQL database and saves, emails or downloads it. You can also schedule automated backups to be sent to an email address.

WP Super Cache
John Gruber is infamous for trashing WordPress sites he links to: often such sites are overwhelmed with traffic, and WordPress can’t handle high levels of traffic very well. Enter WP Super Cache: this plugin creates cached versions of your site’s pages instead of having to hit the database each time a page is accessed. If you expect a lot of site traffic, WP Super Cache is a must-have.

WordPress SEO by Yoast
Another no-brainer plugin. WordPress SEO gives you control over page titles, descriptions, and keywords on a per-page basis. A nice feature is the “Google result preview” that shows how the page would appear in Google based on your current settings. Also, WordPress SEO generates a Google sitemap XML file as well (which eliminated the need for a no-longer-must-have plugin, Google XML Sitemaps).