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It made sense for me to list 101 WordPress tools next seeing as I absolutely love WordPress and couldn’t ever imagine not using it for my blog. And one of the main reasons why I love WordPress so much is the fact that there are so many different and amazing WordPress plugins out there. It was quite difficult compiling this list of my favorite 101 WordPress plugins, but mostly because it was actually hard to choose just 101! It’s worth noting that I obviously don’t think you should use every one as that will simply slow your site down and is unnecessary. However do go through the various categories and feel free to try a few out.

So without further ado, here they are, my favorite 101 WordPress plugins for the perfect blogging experience:

Cool Plugins

1. After the Deadline – anyone can make some mistakes while writing their blog posts. After the Deadline is a plugin that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology that does your spell, style and grammar checking for you. And it is infinitely better than Word’s spellchecking!

2. wpStickies – wpStickies is an image tagging plugin for WP. Just like you would tag pictures on Facebook, you can use wpStickies to tag images on your site with either small dots or entire areas by a drawing a box in the area you choose (just like on Facebook). So whenever you hover with your mouse over those spots, the information you put in will be displayed in a bubble.

3. Woothemes – This is a very cool plugin. It provides you with amazing high quality premium themes, various useful plugins (of which WooCommerce, for e-commerce websites, is their standout) as well extensions for your site. I will be using it for my upcoming (free!) Traffic Master Class that will be launching very soon!

4. Pretty Link Lite – with Pretty Link Lite you can create some beautiful URLs, shorten them, share them and track them, all the while using your domain name – makes for some great branding!

5. What Would Seth Godin Do – If you want your visitors to appreciate your website even more, then try this great app: it will send out different welcome messages to your visitors, depending whether it’s their first time on your site or they are returning visitors.

6. All in One Favicon – this incredibly simple, yet great tool will allow you to, you’ve guessed it, add Favicons to your site.

7. MapPress Easy Google Maps – do you want to give people directions to your office? Or to an event you might be hosting? Then you have to make it easy for people to get there and Google Maps is definitely the best way to do it. With this easy to use plugin you will be able to integrate Google maps and directions to the location of your choice directly on your blog.

8. WP-PostViews – A very simple plugin that allows you to display how many views each of your posts/pages has.

9. Testimonials Widget – This plugin lets your readers know what wonderful things others have said about you in the past. You can easily set it up to rotate and randomize different quotes, reviews and whatever else you want your readers to see on your blog.

10. Fancier Author Box – Do you want a fancier author box on your WordPress website? Well, you’ve guessed it – this great tool offers you just that. It’s the author box you see at the bottom of this post too.

11. Dynamic Widgets – Choose what pages you want your widgets to appear on and choose to hide or show widgets on your blogs’ pages. With this plugin you will easily be in total control of your widgets – as you should be!

12. WP-PageNavi – this simple plugin allows you to change your current, “boring” pagination links with some that are “fancier”. For example, you can change the “Older/Newer posts” links with page links.

13. Enable Media Replace – This plugin can be a real time-saver, as it allows you to replace files from your media library, saving you from having to delete, re-upload, etc…

Backup

14. Backup Buddy – back ups are a must, especially when it comes to your website. Backup Buddy is an amazing plugin that you can use to easily back up your entire WordPress installation.

15. VaultPress – VaultPress is another great backup service. What makes it even better, however, is that it also helps with your security. Apart from real-time backup of your content, it also restores your website automatically and performs daily security scans.

16. WordPress Backup to Dropbox – there isn’t much more that I can say that the name hasn’t already: use this plugin to backup your WordPress blog to your Dropbox in minutes.

SEO

17. SEO Pressor – This great plugin which was just updated in time for the start of the New Year, will help you get your website better ranked on Google. And I have to say, their on-page SEO is pretty amazing!

18. SEO Smart Links – If you are tired of constantly working on your SEO, then this plugin could be a real time/life saver. SEO Smart Links will automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts/comments, as well as custom keyword lists and nofollow, among other features.

19. All-in-one SEO Pack – if WordPress SEO isn’t for you, then you might want to try the All-in-one SEO Pack. I guess its name says it all – this plugin will automatically optimize your blog for search engines.

20. WordPress SEO – everybody wants their blog to be on the first pages of Google searches, and that can require a lot of work. This great plugin (probably the best SEO plugin for WordPress) will help you optimize all of your blog’s content.

21. Google XML Sitemaps – Another great tool that will really help with your Google rankings. Google XML Sitemaps will help Google index your blog better, by generating a special XML sitemap.

22. Add Meta Tags – Add Meta Tags is an essential SEO plugin, as it will add metadata to your content: description, keywords metatags, Opengraph, Dublin Core metadata.

23. Scribe SEO – Scribe SEO is a great content marketing tool. It will help you create better content (from an SEO point of view) that will bring in more traffic to your website and ultimately increase sales and leads!

Social & Commenting

24. CommentLuv – I’ve mentioned my love of CommentLuv on several occasions, it probably even is one of my favorite WordPress plugins out there. This amazing tool helps you reward your readers by allowing them to post a link to their latest blog post at the end of each of their comments, as well as some other, very cool features.

25. Tweet Old Post – what a great plugin! Sometimes it’s inevitable that some of your old posts will die out and be forgotten, but Tweet Old Post can help you keep your old posts alive by tweeting about them and driving more traffic to them from Twitter.

26. Only Wire – This amazing plugin will help you save lots of time by automatically sending your content to any of 48 of the biggest social networks.

27. Social Slider – this WordPress plugin will allow you to add an expandable box that will contain links to your different social network profiles, on the left/right side of the screen. The great thing is it supports dozens of different social networks!

28. Social Media Widget – everybody needs social sharing buttons on their website. Social Media Widget is a very simple sidebar widget that allows you to include icons with URLs to your different social profiles on the sidebar.

29. bbPress – if you want to install a forum or bulletin board on your website, then try bbPress: they make great forums/bulletin boards, that are easy to use and fast.

30. WP to Twitter – Linking to each of your blog posts on Twitter can bring in lots of traffic, but it can prove to be very time consuming. The WP to Twitter plugin will automatically post on Twitter on your behalf whenever you post anything from your blog. You can also choose your own URL shortening service for the plugin to use.

31. Facebook Members – Use this plugin to get both the Facebook like box and the Facebook recommendation bar functionalities on your blog.

32. Shareaholic – This plugin combines social bookmarking menu/related content widget that you can add to your individual posts, pages or in your website’s index. A useful plugin to generate more shares/traffic to your website.

33. Add Link to Facebook – You can save lots of time with your blog promotion with this simple plugin. You only have to set it up once and it will automatically add links on your Facebook page/groups etc. whenever you post something new on your blog.

34. Facebook Like Box – We all want more Facebook likes and this simple, yet effective plugin can help you get more. It will display like buttons for each of your posts, making it easy for your readers to like them.

35. Facebook Comments – Use this plugin if you want to add Facebook comments to your site and easily administer and customize them.

36. WP-Polls – Polls can be great engagement tools. Use this plugin to add an AJAX poll system to your blog or blog posts.

37. Floating Social Media Icon – do you want your website to be more interactive, more engaging? With this plugin, you can easily create ‘floating’ social media buttons for all of your social profiles.

38. Really Simple Facebook Twitter Share Buttons – This easy to use plugin will allow you to add share buttons from all the favorite social networks above or below your posts. It’s the one I use here on Socialable and whilst it’s not the prettiest I’ve experimented and found that I get more shares by using this plugin. Simple, yet highly effective!

39. Twitter Plugin – This is a very basic plugin, but it can help you get you more Twitter followers, as visitors will be able to easily click on a Twitter Follow button directly on your website.

40. Social Discussions – This is a great 2 in 1 plugin. It enables social sharing to over 30 different social networks, as well as automatically publishes your blog posts to over 25 different networks.

Spam

41. Akismet – Nobody wants spam in their comments, and unfortunately it’s impossible to avoid. There’s so much of it that it can take too much time to go through each of your comments to check which ones are spam and which aren’t. That’s where Akismet comes in – this great plugin checks your comments against its web service to find spam. I personally use Akismet and whilst it’s a great plugin I always recommend you check your spam in case it filters it by mistake.

42. Defensio – similar to Akismet, this great anti spam plugin will not only help you avoid spam, but also malicious content and content that contains profanities!

43. Captcha – Use the Captcha plugin to protect your website from spam – nothing more, nothing less. But it does what it’s supposed to do, and well.

E-commerce

44. Ready! Ecommerce Shopping Cart – if you sell anything on your website, you have to make it easy for visitors to buy your products and also make sure you offer them a pleasant online shopping experience. The Ecommerce Shopping Cart will help you do that by helping you create a shopping cart. The plugin also has lots of free e-commerce themes that you can use.

45. Easy Digital Downloads – If you have any digital products to sell on your website, then try this great plugin. It really is one of the best digital downloads management plugins out there.

Imagery

46. Ultimate TinyMCE – we all want a beautiful blog that looks like a pro’s. This easy to use plugin will help you create visually stunning posts in no time, by manipulating fonts and font sizes, colors etc.

47. Layer Slider – this top-notch slider allows you to create some beautiful and interactive sliders with the use of, you’ve guessed it, layers. It works with almost any type of content you can think of: text, images, videos, flash etc.

48. Global Gallery – we all know how powerful images can be and how much engagement they can bring in. Global Gallery is a mobile-optimized plugin that will allow you to create fully responsive galleries on your website.

49. Visual Composer – a visually stunning blog is a must for all respectable bloggers. Visual Composer is a plugin that will help you create a beautiful blog, even if you have no knowledge of making websites.

50. Font Press – Font Press is a plugin that allows you to customize all of your text either by theme or by choosing any of their very extensive range of fonts.

51. NextGEN Gallery – use this great plugin to upload and manage galleries of images on your website.

52. Gallery – another great plugin that will allow you to implement galleries on your website. You can put in as many as you want and wherever you want them.

53. MeteorSlides – With MeteorSlides you can create some amazing slideshows very easily. And the best part is they work on any device (mobile, tablets etc.) as well as having touch support.

54. Genesis Slider – This simple, yet highly effective slider is great for blogs: it displays the featured image of a post, as well as its title and the first few paragraphs.

Site Performance

55. Hotfix – as much as I love WordPress, some of its bugs can be quite annoying and it can take a long time before they release a new upgrade. Hotfix will fix some of these bugs (not all of them however) before the update comes out, to keep you going. This won’t mean that you have to stop updating however!

56. W3 Total Cache – No one has the time (or the patience, for that matter) to wait around for a slow website. I love using W3 Total Cache to help me with this problem: it really improves my server performance, caches every aspect of my website and it considerably reduces download times – all leading to a much more pleasant user experience!

57. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – If you have too many plugins on your website, you can expect it to run a lot slower, and that can be a big problem. P3 is an incredibly useful plugin that will search through your website and create a performance report to let you know which plugins are slowing it down.

58. Better WordPress Minify – I’ve already mentioned how annoying it can be to wait for websites to load and how it can drive away visitors. Better WordPress Minify will make your pages load faster by minimizing your CSS and JS files.

59. WP Smush.it – Smush.it will allow you to reduce image file sized and help you improve your performance. You can use Smush.it’s API to perform different useful optimizations, such as stripping meta data from JPEGs.

60. WP-Optimize – This database cleanup and optimization tool will allow you to clean up your WordPress database as well as optimize it.

61. Theme-Check – Use this plugin to easily check your blog’s theme and find out if it’s up-to-date with WordPress’s theme standards.

62. WPtouch – nowadays, almost everybody has a smartphone, including your readers, so it is extremely important that you have a mobile-friendly version of your blog. WPtouch is a great free plugin that will automatically transform your website into a mobile-friendly version. Definitely a must if your theme isn’t mobile responsive!

63. Breadcrumb NavXT – Breadcrumb navigation makes for a great browsing experience for your readers. It shows them the path they took to get to their current location within your website, which makes it easier for them to explore your traffic.

64. Genesis Simple Edits – Use this plugin to modify different areas of your Genesis theme: the post-info, post-meta and the footer area.

Contact Forms

65. vCita – I love this plugin and have used it for a while now. (You can chose whether you have it pop up or not, you should be able to see it on the right hand side – feel free to come and say hello:)) It’s really helped me grow my business and generate leads from my website. They have an advanced contact form that I really love and another great thing is that it allows people to schedule appointments with you in no time. It’s also very easy for me track my contact requests and online scheduling on their dashboard.

66. Gravity Forms – One of my personal favorite contact form plugin. Forms are very easy to create and customize, plus they look great!

67. Contact Form 7 – You can use this plugin to manage multiple contact forms and as a plus, it allows you to customize the form and the mail contents.

68. Contact Form DB – This plugin will get all the data from Contact Form 7 and Fast Secure Contact Form and saves it to the database, and then displays it through short codes.

69. Contact Form – you can also use Contact Form to add feedback forms to any of your blog posts or website pages.

Security

70. BulletProof Security – This great plugin will protect your website efficiently against many different combinations of letters I’m not sure I even understand…! XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection, SQL Injection hacking.

71. Better WP Security – this name says it all: it really is one of the better WP security plugins. In just a matter of seconds, any WordPress website’s security can be dramatically improved.

Analytics & Monitoring

72. Social Metrics – Monitoring your blog constantly should be one of your top priorities. The Social Metrics plugin allows you to easily monitor your blog’s social performance on all the major social networks.

73. Google Analytics for WP – in order to provide the right content at the right times you will have to closely monitor your blog. Google Analytics for WP will make tracking your blog’s analytics very easy and efficient.

74. Wassup – This simple plugin makes analytics easy: it gives you real-time statists about your visitors to help you figure out what they like about your website and what they don’t.

75. Chartbeat Real Time and Traffic Engagement Data – Another extremely explanatory plugin name that does my job for me. What I can add is that this plugin will also put a “top pages” widget on your, apart from letting you see who is on your website and what they are doing in real-time.

Coming Soon & Redirection

76. WP Maintenance Mode – sometimes when you want to give your website some new life, you might have to close it down completely. If you want your visitors to know that your website will be back, use WP Maintenance Mode to add a splash page that lets them know that your website is only down for maintenance.

77. Ultimate Coming Soon Page – if you don’t want to lose any time while waiting for your website to be live, try this great plugin: it creates beautiful Coming Soon/Launch pages for your websites, while still allowing to collect visitors’ emails.

78. Redirection – Use Redirection to manage all your 301 redirections and 404 errors. This can be especially important if you are migrating from an old website and don’t want to lose any potential readers.

79. underConstruction – Another great plugin that will allow you to show a ‘Coming Soon’ page if your website is on its way. Especially useful if you are developing your website on a live server.

80. Ultimate Maintenance Mode – When you need to keep your website up to date, use the Ultimate Maintenance Mode plugin to display a “Maintenance Mode” page to your visitors, so they know you will be back. You can also tell them why your website is in maintenance.

Subscribing & Newsletters

81. Popup Domination – Love or hate pop up’s? If you’re looking to grow your list then having a pop up is one of the most successful ways to grow your list. Pop Up Domination is one of the better plugins as it’s fully customizable and works with most of the main email marketing capture systems such as Aweber.

82. Wysija Newsletters – With this great plugin you can send your newsletters/notifications directly from WordPress with no HTML coding required.

83. Subscribe2 – use this simple plugin to send all of your email contacts a notification whenever you post something new on your blog.

84. Newsletter – This simple plugin allows you to collect unlimited amount of subscribers and send them emails/newsletters will allow you to add a newsletter to your blog, all in a matter of seconds.

85. WP Subscribers– WP Subscribers will help you get lots of new subscribers. It’s the plugin I use and am personally a massive fan.  As you can see there are various places you can promote your optin (I currently have a pop up, right hand side and underneath each of my blog posts).  I’ve seen a huge increase in my subscribers as a result from using this very intuitive plugin.

Podcasting

86. Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting Plugin – if you have a podcast, then it’s a good idea to integrate it on your website. The PowerPress plugin makes that very easy to do, it also includes full iTunes support.

Video & Audio

87. Viper’s Video Quicktags – Whenever you want to post a video on your blog, use this plugin if you want to save time and make the process easier. It works with videos from a variety of websites, such as YouTube and Vimeo.

88. Audio Player – The name is quite self-explanatory: this plugin is basically an mp3 player for your website.

89. Advanced YouTube Embed Plugin – Embed Plus – There isn’t much more that I can say about this plugin that its name doesn’t. What I can say is that it does what it’s supposed to and well. The playback options are particularly useful.

Calendars

90. The Events Calendar – Use this tool to create and manage all of your events from one place. It allows for multiple views and 3rd party integrations, as well as many other amazing features such as Google Maps integration and an ‘upcoming events’ widget.

91. All-in-One Event Calendar – Another great calendar plugin. Show all of your events in a stylish calendar with month, week, day and agenda views. It also has an ‘upcoming events’ widget and allows you to use different colors in different categories.

92. Editorial Calendar – Use this plugin to see all of your posts in a calendar. You can also drag and drop them around to manage your blog. Very easy to use and very intuitive plugin!

Creating Tables

93. Easy Table – Use this plugin to easily insert tables in your blog posts, without needing to write any complicated HTML syntax. All you have to do is enter the table data directly in your post as you are writing it.

94. TablePress – another useful plugin with no need for HTML knowledge, you can use this plugin to easily create and manage tables on your website.

Thumbnails

95. Regenerate Thumbnails – the name of this plugin makes it very clear what it does: whenever you’ve changed thumbnail sizes, for any reason, you can use Regenerate Thumbnails too regenerate the thumbnails for your image attachments.

96. AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild – This great plugin will allow you to rebuild all of the thumbnails on your website at once, with no problems and timeouts.

Related Posts

97. Link Within – We all want to keep our old posts alive. Link Within doesn’t let any story go to waste; this great widget will appear under each of your blog posts, giving links to all of your related posts from your blog archive. A great way to keep your readers stay on your website for longer!

98. WordPress Related Posts – Similar plugin to Link Within. The extra benefit that this plugin brings to the table is that it also gives you some statistics about page views and clicks.

99. Special Recent Posts – When it comes to making a blog stand out, every little detail counts. Special Recent Posts is a great plugin that allows you to display your recent posts with thumbnails.

Ads

100. Adgenie – It’s always easy getting clicks for your website’s ads. Adgenie helps your ads to get noticed more easily, by more people, and therefore generate more clicks!

101. AdRotate – If you have ads on your website, try AdRotate in order to make the experience easier for you: manage all of your ads from one, easy-to-use dashboard.

Phew! There you have it. My favourite 101 WordPress Plugins. I hope you’ve found this list useful and not too overwhelming. Plugins are meant to make your blog run smoother and more effectively but remember not to go overboard – if you have too many plugins installed, it can affect the speed of your site.

What plugins do you use? Do you know any other plugins that you think I should’ve mentioned but haven’t? Please let me know in your comments! And if you’ve found this post useful please do share it too.

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Lilach

Founder at Socialable Ltd

Lilach Bullock is passionate about getting tangible results using social media. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers. She's the co-author of "Images that Influence" (Number One in its category on Amazon). Lilach is consulted by journalists and regularly quoted in newspapers on social media related matters, including (Forbes, Social Media Today, Prima Magazine, The Sunday Times and BBC Radio 5 Live ). A keynote speaker at business and marketing seminars. If you want excellent results, more business and better visibility you can can subscribe to Socialable newsletter here.

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