WordPress plugins are nothing shy of totally amazing and WordPress is quickly becoming the de facto hosting platform for almost any kind of site. It could be just a blog, a photoblog, an e-commerce site or even just a basic webpage. The amount of customization is insane and the root of that stems from the plugins.

Currently on VagabondGuide.com I use about 29 different plugins.

Advertising Manager – Control and arrange your Advertising and Referral blocks on your WordPress blog. With Widget and inline post support, integration with all major ad networks.

This plugin is very handy if you like to display ads on your site. I’ve pretty much stopped inserting ads into my posts to make things a litter cleaner but that’s totally your call.

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.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template.

Akismet isn’t really necessary if you use some of the other plugins I’ll be listing below but it’s not hurting anything by staying on.

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

Great all around SEO plugin and worth your time.

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

DBC Backup – Database Cron Backup

I’m kind of a backup nut. This little guy makes a scheduled backup of your database and store it somewhere else on your server. Really handy.

Disqus Comment System – The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. Head over to the Comments admin page to set up your DISQUS Comment System.

In my opinion the best comment system out there. It allows for a nice clean feel along with multiple logins.

Favicons - Choose a favicon to make your site eye-catching and easily recognizable by visitors.

Basically a simple favicon chooser/uploader.

FD Feedburner Plugin – Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed

Feedburner is a great way to track your RSS subscribers. It also has a great email tracking section.

Google Analyticator – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin visit the settings page and enter your Google Analytics’ UID and enable logging.

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.

MiniMeta Widget – WordPress (Mini)Meta Widget with different logon types (form,link) and additional admin links. All links can enabeld/disabeld.

NextGEN Gallery – A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.

If you don’t feel like setting up a full blown gallery then this plugin will work wonders. Simple and easy.

No Self Pings – Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.

Internal linking is a great way to not only expose your visitors to other articles but is good for SEO. This guy prevents pings from showing up in the linked posts.

Page Links To – Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.

I use this for pages like my gallery.

Revision Control – Allows finer control over the number of Revisions stored on a global & per-type/page basis.

SEO Slugs – Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.

Awesome plugin! I’m not a huge fan of long post link names. Instead of the_best_website_in_the_world it’s more like best_website_world. It’s all automagic.

SexyBookmarks – SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

They really are pretty sexy and they have some nice customization.

Simple Feed Copyright – Adds a simple copyright notice at end of full text articles in your feed.

Smart 404 – Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.

This plugin absolutely saved my life when I moved my blog from a subfolder to the root. I’m in love with this plugin.

Theme Test Drive – Safely test drive any theme while visitors are using the default one. Includes instant theme preview via thumbnail.

Great plugin for testing or configuring a new theme. I’ve used this on several theme ideas but never ended up changing. Another plugin that is really handy.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

Twitter Tools – A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your WordPress admin.

Great plugin for sending your posts to twitter. It also works with many different URL shorting services. Like…

Twitter Tools: su.pr Links – Makes the links that Twitter Tools posts to Twitter be API-created su.pr links so you can track the number of clicks and such via your su.pr account. Requires PHP 5.2.0+.

This is my favorite one. Su.pr is from Stumbupon and will automatically add your post to their site. Great for bringing in new traffic.

WordPress Facebook Fan Box Widget – Display facebook fan box as widget in your WordPress blog.

WordPress Gravatars – Makes use of Gravatars and MyBlogLog Avatars, places Gravatars, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or MyBlogLog Avatars in the comments section. Uses the comment authors email to display their Gravatar. It also gives the user an Author Profile picture, based on his or hers Gravatar.

Everyone can have a face now! :)

WordPress Hashcash – Client-side javascript blocks all spam bots. XHTML 1.1 compliant.

One of the better spam preventers I’ve found yet.

WordPress Related Posts – Generate a related posts list via tags of WordPress

This is an awesome plugin. Not only does it add a bit more content to your site but help promote other posts to your visitors.

WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.

This is a must have if you ever happen to get to the front page of Digg!

WPtouch iPhone Theme – A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch,Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones.

I don’t get a ton of mobile traffic but I want to make sure the few that do find my site on a mobile device are happy!

Well there you have it. The plugins I use. Hopefully this will answer a few of the emails I’ve gotten lately about which plugins I use here. I’m always happy to check out new plugins too. Just leave a comment below with your thoughts and maybe a like!

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