If you run your website on WordPress, chances are you use at least a handful of plugins. That's what's so great about a CMS like WP: rather than some huge bloated system with every feature under the sun, the use of plugins lets you add just the functionality you need, without taxing your site's resources more than necessary.
But you may be wondering which plugins are really ressential, and which aren't. Part of that depends on what you want to do with your WP installation. Essential plugins for a personal blog are different than those for a corporate blog, just like must-have plugins for a podcaster are different than for someone using WordPress as a CMS.
Below are more than forty fantastic plugins. Most of them would be valuable on any WordPress site, though there are a few included that are more essential only for specific niche sites. In any case, check them out and decide for yourself if they're essential or not.
One note: Akismet has been left off this list, despite the fact that it is almost certainly a must-have plugin for everyone. The main reason for this is that it's included with a standard WordPress installation, so including it felt a little like cheating. But just because it's not here doesn't mean it isn't essential.
Jetpack
Jetpack, from Akismet, offers up a number of features that were previously only available to WordPress.com users. This includes WordPress.com stats, sharing tools, spelling and grammar checker, comment features, subscriptions, a carousel, enhanced distribution, custom CSS, WP.me shortlinks, shortcode embeds, and much more. Jetpack is free, though there are also premium features available (mainly VaultPress for added security).
Jetpack Lite
Jetpack Lite is an unofficial fork of the Jetpack plugin with limited functionality. It was created to be less resource-intensive than the official Jetpack plugin that only includes Stats and WP.me shortlinks. All other modules normally included with Jetpack are absent here, making it a much leaner plugin if those are the only two functions you want.
Sociable
Sociable is a social sharing plugin that makes it easy to share your content on a ton of different social media sites. This includes the usual suspects: Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Google+, and Delicious, as well as Posterous, LinkedIn, Digg, MySpace, Reddit, HackerNews, Tumblr, and more. It's been downloaded more than 1.7 million times, making it one of the most popular social sharing plugins out there.
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics for WordPress, from Yoast, makes it easy to integrate Google Analytics into your WP site. It uses the newer asynchronous tracking for faster page loads, and support for custom variables. Custom variables include tracking of logged-in users, page views per author, views per category (if your posts are only in one category), publication year (so you can see if your older posts are still being viewed), and post type, among others. It will even fully integrate with WP E-Commerce and Shopp for easier tracking of your sales.
Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps has been around for awhile, and it's a great plugin for generating a sitemap for use with Google Webmaster Tools, and to make it easier for other search engines to index your site. It supports all kinds of WP generated pages, custom URLs, and more. And it notifies all the major search engines when you create new content, helping your site be more thoroughly indexed. There's a new beta version that supports dynamic sitemap generation, full support for network activation, and more.
WP-Polls
If you need to add polls to your site, WP-Polls is a great solution. Adding new polls is simple, with plenty of settings to choose from. Just add a question and possible answers, decide whether users should be able to select more than one answer, and the start and end date of your poll, and you're done. You can also manage the look and feel of your polls easily, without diving into your site's CSS.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a complete WP performance framework used by tens of thousands of sites, including a lot of very high-traffic blogs, and recommended by a number of web hosts. It caches every aspect of your site, which reduces download times. When fully configured, it can improve your site's performance more than ten-fold, and can help sustain high traffic loads on your site. Site performance even has an impact on Google search rankings.
Quick Cache (Speed Without Compromise)
Quick Cache (Speed Without Compromise) builds a cache of every post, page, category, and link on your site, and uses advanced techniques to decide whether to serve the cached version of your files. The best part is that the engine that makes these decisions can be completely controlled by you, via a back-end control panel. By default, Quick Cache excludes admin pages, login pages, and POST/PUT/GET requests, as well as certain other things (and you can define your own).
WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is a complete SEO plugin from Yoast. It helps you optimize your page content, image titles, meta descriptions (and more) to XML sitemaps, along with tons of other optimization options. It also includes Robots Meta configuration, breadcrumbs, permalink cleanup, canonical link element support, and optimized post titles. There are even RSS enhancements added in.
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack optimizes your site for search engines, and includes Google Analytics support, support for custom post types, integration for WP E-Commerce, support for CMS-style installations, automatically generated Meta tags, and support for canonical links. It will work right out of the box, or advanced users can fine-tune the functionality. It's also backwards-compatible with a lot of other plugins, including Ultimate Tag Warrior and Auto Meta.
SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate includes 20 modules and hundreds of features for free. It gives you control over noindex, meta tags, slugs, Open Graph, title tags, 404 errors, autolinks, and more. It includes the "Deeplink Juggernaut", which searches your content for specific anchor text and automatically links them to a destination you choose (there are options to limit the number of autolinks and more). It also allows you to customize footer links on a page-by-page or site-wide basis, and more.
WordPress Backup to Dropbox
Backing up your site's content is vital, and offsite backups are a good idea. But you probably don't want to take the time to download a backup and then re-upload it to a cloud storage service. WordPress Backup to Dropbox takes care of that step for you. Instead of downloading a backup, it'll just save it to your Dropbox account. It uses OAuth to keep your Dropbox account details safe, has a sleek and simple UI, customizable backup settings, and it's cross-browser compatible.
Better WP Security
Securing your WP site is vital, regardless of what kind of content you provide. Better WP Security combines a number of WP security features and techniques and combines them in an easy-to-use plugin. It works by obscuring sensitive information, blocking unauthorized users, increasing security of passwords, and detecting bots and attempts at finding vulnerabilities. It also makes regular backups of your site so you can get back online quickly should an attack ever occur.
10 essential WordPress plugins
