A lot of sites I see advocate WordPress plugins, but do not actually use the plugins they claim as “essential” or “needed”. Here’s a list of 25 WordPress plugins I personally use.

  1. After The Deadline
    Adds a contextual spell, style, and grammar checker to WordPress. Write better and spend less time editing. Visit your profile to configure. See the Proofreading Support page for help.
    By Raphael Mudge | Visit plugin site
  2. Akismet
    Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need an API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” See also: WP Stats plugin.

    By Automattic | Visit plugin site

  3. All in One SEO Pack
    Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

    By Michael Torbert | Visit plugin site

  4. BackUpWordPress
    Manage WordPress Backups. Beta Release. Please help testing and give me feedback under the comments section of the Plugin page. Backup DB, Files & Folders, use .tar.gz, .zip, Exclude List, etc.

    By Roland Rust | Visit plugin site

  5. Clean Options
    finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table

    By Mittineague | Visit plugin site

  6. Contact Form 7
    Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

    By Takayuki Miyoshi | Visit plugin site

  7. Digg Digg
    All-in-One social vote buttons – Digg, Reddit, dDone, Yahoo Buzz, TweetMeme, Topsy, facebook share, facebook like, Polladium, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Post comments, Google Buzz, Designbump, Designfloat, Thewebblend and blogengage.

    By Yong Mook Kim | Visit plugin site

  8. Downloads Manager
    This Plugin adds a simple downloads manager to your blog.

    By Giulio Ganci | Visit plugin site

  9. Easy Peasy Adsense
    An easy peasy way to insert Google Adsense ads into your WordPress posts and pages.

    By Martin Glover | Visit plugin site

  10. Google XML Sitemaps
    This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

    By Arne Brachhold | Visit plugin site

  11. In Series
    Gives authors an easy way to connect posts together as a series.

    By Travis Snoozy | Visit plugin site

  12. IntenseDebate
    IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Full comment and account data sync between IntenseDebate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you! To get started, please activate the plugin and adjust your IntenseDebate settings .

    By IntenseDebate & Automattic | Visit plugin site

  13. No Right Click Images Plugin
    Uses Javascript to prevent right clicking of images to help keep leaches from copying images

    By Keith P. Graham | Visit plugin site

  14. Permalink Finder
    Never get a 404 page not found again. If you have restructured or moved your blog, this plugin will find the right post or page every time.

    By Keith P. Graham | Visit plugin site

  15. Related Tweets (by BTE)
    Randomly choose a post from the blog. Search for related websites & posts via the Blog Traffic Exchange and tweet the most relevant related post. Automatically adding hashtags Configuration options are here.

    By Blog Traffic Exchange | Visit plugin site

  16. Related Websites (by BTE)
    Add your posts to the Blog Traffic Exchange and add Links to related websites throughout the blogosphere. Configuration options are here.

    By Blog Traffic Exchange | Visit plugin site

  17. Secure WordPress
    Little basics for secure your WordPress-installation.

    By jremillard | Visit plugin site

  18. SexyBookmarks
    SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. See configuration panel for more settings.

    By Shareaholic | Visit plugin site

  19. Twitter for WordPress
    Displays your public Twitter messages for all to read. Based on Pownce for WordPress by Cavemonkey50.

    By Ricardo González | Visit plugin site

  20. W3 Total Cache
    The fastest and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress.

    By Frederick Townes | Visit plugin site

  21. WordPress.com Stats
    Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

    By Andy Skelton | Visit plugin site

  22. WP-Stats-Dashboard
    Displays the WordPress.com stats graph, your traffic and social metrics monitoring on your dashboard.

    By Dave Ligthart | Visit plugin site

  23. WPhone
    A lightweight admin interface for the iPhone and other mobile devices.

    By Stephane Daury, Doug Stewart, and Viper007Bond | Visit plugin site

  24. WP SlimStat
    A simple but powerful web analytics plugin for WordPress.

    By Camu | Visit plugin site

  25. WP SlimStat Dashboard Widgets
    Adds some widgets to monitor your WP SlimStat reports directly from your dashboard.

    By Camu | Visit plugin site

  26. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
    Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

    By mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) | Visit plugin site

Most of these plugins are pretty self-explanatory. However, I feel as though some of these plugins should be explained and promoted a little bit more.

Some people find IntenseDebate to be a nuisance or dislike it altogether. I for one LOVE it. It’s a nicely styled comment system that is packed full of features. It also allows logins from twitter, facebook, wordpress.com, ect. and you can sync info with other blogs using IntenseDebate (which can equal more traffic?). Some people prefer Disqus, but I for one found IntenseDebate to be much better.

All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Permalink Finder, and W3 Total Cache are ESSENTIAL to running a good blog. They help make it run well and make it search engine optimized.

Finally, I’m watching the plugin, Related Websites (by BTE). It is a very interesting concept, linking to related blogs, and blogs link back to you. I got approved, but it is not working entirely yet. Once everything is ironed out I’ll be sure to give the Blog Traffic Exchange a very good review.

That’s it for my WordPress plugins list. Feel free to share with others!