78 Useful WordPress Plugins From #blogchat

There is no savvier blog community than the group that participates in #blogchat each week.

(#blogchat is a spirited tweetchat among bloggers on Sunday nights, 9-10 pm ET, hosted by @mackcollier.

It’s a great place to learn from other bloggers, discover new blogs to read and great new people to follow).

This past week, the topic was plugins … a topic very close to our heart!

#Blogchat Crowdsourcing: A Great Resource

We missed #blogchat this past week (our excuse: Father’s Day and Game 5 of the NBA Playoffs) — so we read the transcript to see what plugins #blogchat participants recommend.

The transcript inspired us to create this crowdsourced master list of plugins that participants find useful.

Thank you to @mackcollier, who kicked off the chat with this post about his three favorite plugins, and to all the #blogchat participants, for this crowd-sourced list!

P.S. WordPress plugin best practices are summarized in our companion post.

What’s the Best Plugin for Your Blog?

Simply put, it’s the plugin that meets your particular needs. Here are some guidelines:

No two blogs are alike – the needs of a business development blog, for instance, are very different than a personal journal. While some categories are universally agreed to be essential — anti spam, for instance — others are more specific to particular needs.

With so many choices, it’s not surprising to find several “equally good” options, on the list below.
Plugins are not “set it and forget it” … your blog needs periodic plug-in maintenence, where you add new ones as your blogging needs change, and disconnect the ones you no longer use. (more on this, in our companion post on plugin best practices).
Many plugins (like iCopyright, for example) are available in multiple CMS versions. Non-WordPress CMS Users: once you know solution you need, look for the best of breed for your particular CMS.

So check the list, read the reviews, and add what makes sense for your blog. Remember, you can always uninstall.

NOTE: **Plugins with the most positive #blogchat sentiment are shown with **

Crowdsourced List of WordPress Plugins

Anti Spam

** Akismet

** G.A.S.P (Growmap Anti-Spambot Plugin) … adds check box by comment box to slow down spammers

Conditional Captcha for WordPress (stop spam and keep your regular blog comments)

Blog Appearance

Custom Sidebars

** Popular Posts

** WPTouch (makes your blog easy to read on mobile devices)

Blog Metrics

** Google Analyticator

Google Analytics Dashboard

WP Click Info

Jet pack Lite (adds Google Analytics)

Piwik (open source analytics — own your own data)

Build Forms

** GravityForms (paid – and worth it)

Formidable forms (“best free one”)

Aweber (forms plus followup campaigns)

Contact form 7 (leads and price quotes)

Boxes/Popups

** GreetBox

Cloud Storage

WP backup to Dropbox

WP Google Apps Plugin

Commenting System:

** ReplyMe

** Disqus (but password req. deters people)

** LiveFyre

** WordPress Comments (native, not a plugin, but well liked)

CommentLuv

** Comment Redirect, by Yoast (allows you to send 1^st time visitors to a specific page … for instance, redirecting first-time commenters to a Thank You page)

SEO Facebook Comments (to extend reach of comments … when folks comment, it goes on their FB wall).

(also mentioned: JetPack comments section and Intense Debate)

Content Protection

RSS Footer (adds a credit to your posts in RSS feeds, helps when people scrape your content)

iCopyright (adds a toolbar for copyright protection and infringement detection)

WP-CopyProtect

Editorial Calendar

** WordPress Editorial Calendar

TinyMCE Advanced

CoSchedule

Email Integration

Mailchimp

Aweber

Performance

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – tells you how many database queries WP Core and all of your plugins send/receive

Outbrain

SEO Plugins

** All in One SEO Pack

Google XML Sitemaps

Google Integration Toolkit

SEO Friendly Images

** WordPress SEO by Yoast (with a great Google result snippet preview feature)

Noted: built-in SEO on Genesis themes

Security

** WP fence

Website Defender

Lockdown WP Admin. (It hides your admin from prying eyes)

** Better WordPress Security

** BulletProof Security

Mute Screamer (w/option to force SSL )

Limit Login Attempts

WP Security Scan (lets you know of any security issues)

Also mentioned: Login Lockdown, Exploit Scanner, AntiVirus, BBQ (Bad Block Queries), WP-Ban

Site Admin./Management

WordPress Database Backup

** WordPress Super Cache

W3 Total Cache

QuickCache

** Jetpack

(AND Jetpack Lite)

Adminimize (let’s you hide unnecessary items on the WP backend)

Social Sharing:

ShareThis

Social Profilr

The Slide

** Really Simple Share

Tweet WordPress

Uncategorized/Misc.

Some plugins were mentioned without explanation (below). If you know what these do, let us know in the comments and we’ll re-categorize them. Thanks!

WP - DBmanager
Redirection
Linkdex Page Analysis
MaxCDN and AWS
OptinSkin
WP RSS Aggregator (great for people who write on multiple sites)
Listly
Code Insert Manager
Flares
Noted: @wpengine and @ClickHost for hosting

Is there a plug-in that you want that hasn’t been created? Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments!

P.S. Full Disclosure …

1. We took the liberty of adding our plugin to the plugin category “Content Protection”. We’d have contributed it during last week’s blogchat, if it wasn’t Father’s Day:)