This article some of the best wp plugins I know of personally. There are thousands of plugins for wordpress and these are just a few essential plugins that any new wordpress blog would need. If you know any plugin that should have been included here, leave a comment below.

I have tried my best to give links to the plugins page on wordpress.org.  This is because plugins get updated by author pages usually dont change forcing you to download older versions. Hope you enjoy this list.

Best WordPress Plugins

SEO

1 ) Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search, Bing and Yahoo are notified about the update. Plugin author page

2 ) All in One SEO Pack

Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines. Features include Canonical URLs, Nonce Security, Support for CMS-style WordPress installations, Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines, Generates META tags automatically. Plugin author page

3 ) Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Just add you Google Analytics’ UID and your all set. Plugin author page

4 ) Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. (You can see the sitemap for this blog on the top navigation bar)

Advertisment Management

5 ) Shylock Adsense Plugin

This plugin allows you to add advertisment code like adsense to different pats of a post without ever editing the template. It can handle up to 10 different codes, these codes can then be inserted into the top, middle or below posts. Also has options to show different ads based on the number of days since a post was published.

6 ) AdSense Now!

Aiming at simplicity, AdSense Now! does only one thing: it puts your AdSense code in up to three spots in your posts and pages. Enforces the Google policy of not more than three ad blocks per page. Control over the positioning and display of AdSense blocks in each post or page. Plugin author page

7 ) WP125

This plugin can help you manage those 125X125 ad spaces you have on your sidebar. Max 6 ad boxes, can auto deactivate an ad after set number of days. Shows ads in random spots and can track the number of times ads were clicked. (The tracking doesnt seem to work correctly, I see very high numbers) Plugin author page

Comment Management

8 ) Do Follow Plugin

The dofollow plugin for WordPress lets you remove the nofollow attribute from your comments. Removing the nofollow attribute means google will respect links from comments to the authors site. This encourages readers to comment more. (TechiePortal is a dofollow blog, so leave a comment)

9 ) Top Commentators Widget

The Top Commentators Widget a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. You can easily change most of the options from the widget screen. Another way to encourage commenting. Plugin author page

10 ) reCaptha (Spam Control)

reCaptha is one of the best captha plugins for wordpress. It also helps to digitize books while stopping spam from spambots. Combine this plugin with wordpress’s built in Akismet and you will never see spam again. Akismet API Guide in case you need a API key.

11 ) Comment Mailer

Comment Mailer helps you maintaining the discussion on your blog by letting the commenters know that you have replied their comments on the comment section of your post. You have an option to choose who you are replying to and they get an email with their comment and your reply.

12 ) Comment Luv

CommentLuv enables you to reward your blog readers by leaving a titled link to their last post automatically whenever they comment thus encouraging more comments by more people on more posts!

13 ) Get Recent Comments

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and trackbacks in your sidebar. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date. Plugin author page

14 ) OpenID

This plugin enables commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account.

WordPress Enhancement

15 ) Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Plugin author page

16 ) FD Feedburner Plugin

Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com. Just tell the plugin what your Feedburner feed URL is and you’re done. On this website I still use the old feedburner feedsmith plugin but cant seem to find a link for it anywhere. Plugin author page

17 ) Maintenance Mode Plugin

Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. For those times when you need to update your blog or take it down for testing something. Plugin author page

18 ) Enhanced WP Contact Form

Every blog needs a contact page so that readers or advertisers can contact you.  This plugin gives an easy contact form, embed it in a post or page by writing a shortcode. It has inbuilt spam protection, shows referrer info so you know what the person was doing on your site and more. Plugin author page

19 ) Firestats

Its an excellent stats plugin for WordPress and other self-hosted systems. Able to show deatiled informations about who’s visited, referrals, search engine terms, countries, browsers and popular pages on your blog. My blog shows the User Statistics (right sidebar, last widget) using Firestats. Featured on this blog earlier

20 ) WordPress Database Backup

You never want your MySql database to crash without a backup do you !?! This plugin helps you backup the wordpress database on a regular schedule. It can also mail the backup file to you, so you always have a backup. Plugin author page

21 ) RSS Footer

All those scrapbots out there using RSS feeds to take content blogs to build scrap sites. Now you finally have a way to make that work for you. This plugin makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feeds, for instance to display a link back to your blog. This gives you backlinks when those bots use your content. Plugin author page

22 ) Exec-PHP

The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. For those times when you need to put some PHP code into your sidebar or pages. Plugin author page

23 ) Insights

Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time the appeal of your posts. With Insights you can search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post, insert Flickr Images, Youtube videos, Search and link to Wikipedia and a lot more without leaving your post !

24 ) WP Opt-in

For those of us who dont use aweber and do CPA marketting, this lil plugin allows you to collect email addresses from visitors. The front side of the ‘WP Opt-in’ plugin is a simple form with an e-mail input field and a submit button. By entering an e-mail address into the field and pressing submit, an e-mail is sent automatically to the specified address. Plugin author page

25 ) WP Greet Box

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it.

26 ) Homepage Excerpts

Once you activate the plugin you will have the option to select how many posts to display fully in the homepage. Helps reduce the duplicate content penalty by Google for having duplicate content on your homepage.

27 ) Thumbnail For Excerpts

There are some solutions for you if you want to show thumbnails near excerpts of your posts. Thumbnail For Excerpts search the post for the first image. If exists, than it will search for the thumbnail created by default by WordPress for the image, if it was uploaded from WP administration area. If not, it will show the image itself (scaled).

28 ) Lightbox Plus

Lightbox Plus permits users to view larger versions of images without having to leave the current page, and is also able to display simple slide shows. The use of the dark or light background, which dims the page over which the image has been overlaid, also serves to highlight the image being viewed. Lightbox Plus captures the image title for display in the overlay. Plugin author page

29 ) WP-Cumulus

Seen those rotating spherical category boxes on some blogs. This is the plugin that makes them. WP-Cumulus allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting. Plugin author page

30 ) Share This

Make it easier for your readers to bookmarks and submit your pages to social networking sites. If you would like to make your own, visit our Custom Social Networking code for WordPress page.

Hope you liked this list of plugins. Leave a comment if you know any plugins you think are worth being mentioned. Help our readers discover more !