There is a WordPress plugin for just about everything you can think of. Calendars, social media, galleries, widgets, and everything in between. In fact there are over 14,000 plugins. That’s a lot. Want to know a secret? Most of them are crap. I’m not talking about the quality, I’m talking about the need for them in the first place. Many blogs and websites I visit have a bunch of useless things in the sidebar/header/footer that keep the page from loading quickly and add little or no value to the site’s user experience. Of course there are some outstanding plugins out there, so I’ll focus on the best of the best. If you get as much use out of these plugins as I do, please donate to the respective authors.

So what makes a good plugin?

A good plugin, by my definition, does the following:

1. Solves a real problem and/or adds genuine value to the user experience
2. Does not hog system resources
3. Is well maintained, with a dedicated developer actively maintaining the plugin

There are plenty of plugin developers that fulfill 2 and 3, but the real challenge is getting number one right. The following plugins are essential to this site. There may be other plugins that do the same things as those I have listed, but I swear by these ones and I will tell you why. So without further to do, here is my list of must-have plugins.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

There’s about a gazillion WordPress SEO plugins out there. Some of them are free, some of them cost money. I’ll be the first to admit that I have not tried them all, but I have tried a lot. All things considered, I highly recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast. I’m not going to run through all the features (way too many to list), but I will say that a lot of detail and thought went into this plugin. It’s basically like one super-mega-seo plugin that combines the features of several others. It does EVERYTHING. It’s easy to use, and it simply works. The developer of this plugin updates it very frequently, and he really knows his shit. Download it today, and put it on your site. It’s a no brainer. It truly amazes me that this plugin is free.

W3 Total Cache

The best cache plugin out there. I have used it for some time and it definitely works as advertised. I love how it works seamlessly with Content Delivery Network (CDN) services like Amazon Cloud and Speedy Mirror. When tweaked properly, the performance improvement this plugin provides is substantial. It really does not make sense to run a WordPress blog without W3 Total Cache. Many of the most popular blogs in the world run this plugin, and it’s free.

Organize Series

This plugin was made to organize “series” of posts. For example, if you decide to publish a 3 part series of articles on “How to pass gas without getting blamed for it”, this plugin will keep the series posts organized and easy to find on your blog. It even comes with a widget that will display all of your “series” post in the sidebar. Awesome. Organize Series is an extremely well-executed plugin that will give your blog an extra degree of professionalism. Be sure to check out Organizeseries.com where you can purchase premium addons for the plugin.

Askimet

This plugin is absolutely essential to EVERY WordPress blog. There is a reason it comes with the default installation. Askimet will catch 95% of spam comments on your site. It’s a life saver. Without this plugin, you would spend HOURS every day deleting spammy comments and messages.

Tiny MCE Advanced

The default WYSIWYG post editor that WordPress provides (TINYMCE) is cool, but it lacks certain advanced features. TINYMCE Advanced is the way to go. This plugin beefs up your installation by adding 17 features to the default editor. If your like me, you have a bunch of custom css classes that you use in your posts. It’s a huge pain in the ass switching between html and visual views a million times to get a post done. TINYMCE Advanced solves that problem by allowing me to create custom css classes that I can easily asses from a drop-down menu. It’s mad convenient and easy. It also has useful functions such as search and replace, advanced lists, and font changer.

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