Wordpress is one of the most popular CMS solutions used to power many blogs around the globe. It is so easy to install and use that you do not need to be a web design graduate to be able to use it.

Once you have installed your chosen blog theme or integrated your own custom design, it is then time to start building on these foundations by adding some of the best wordpress plugins on the planet.

It is safe to say that with the use of some of these plugins, your wordpress blog will have the chance to sky rocket to a whole new height.

Here we have a list of plugins to help you with your admin panel, SEO (search engine optimisation), display of portfolio through the use of a gallery, blog security and statistics, ecommerce solutions including invoicing, social media solutions, and the most important of them all – blog usability.

Show Top Commentors – If you are looking for a way to increase your comments and the interaction among your readership, this plugin is an excellent choice. Show Top Commentators encourages discussion by rewarding readers for making a comment. The top commentators are displayed in the sidebar with the number of comments they have made and a link back to their website. Download

Related Posts – This plugin will find other blog posts that are related to the current post based on keyword matching. You can then display the related posts at the bottom of each article. This is an excellent way to keep visitors at your site for longer periods of time. Customize this plugin to display as many or as few related posts as you desire. Download

Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure – this plugin will eliminate any worries you might have about duplicate content. The Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure prevents search engines from indexing Wordpress pages that contain duplicate content. This includes archives and category pages. Download

Digg This – Digg this wordpress plugin is a plugin that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story. When a digg is first recognized an email is sent to the site’s admin. Download

Max Banner Ads - Easily add and rotate banners in your wordpress blog anywhere you like without editing any themes or touching any codes. Download

Do Follow Plugin - The dofollow plugin for WordPress lets you remove the evil nofollow attribute from your comments. Download

WP Super Edit – WP Super Edit is designed to get control of the WordPress wysiwyg visual editor and add some functionality with more buttons and customized TinyMCE plugins. WP Super edit acts as framework for TinyMCE visual editor plugins and buttons allowing administrators (or users) to arrange buttons and add TinyMCE plugins to the visual editor. Download

Scissors – This plugin adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to Wordpress' image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images. Additionally, images that are resized in the post editor are automatically resampled to the requested size using bilinear filtering when a post is saved, which improves the perceived image quality while reducing the amount of data transferred at the same time. Download

HeadSpace2 - HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages. It provides option to collect metadata not only from the page itself, but nested parent pages, dynamically extract data from the post itself, auto-suggested AJAX interface for tags and keywords, mass-editing for all pages and posts. Download

Google (XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress – This plugin generates a compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. Download

Redirection – Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation. Download

Upcoming Posts – Upcoming Posts WordPress plugin allows you to notify your readers when you will post something. So if you want the readers be more curious about your blog you can use this plugin. It helps you to show scheduled posts or drafts. Download

Where did they go from here?    - This plugin will show "Readers who viewed this page, also viewed" links on your page (as on Amazon). When a visitor views a blog post the plugin checks to see if the referrer is another blog post on your site. If this is the case, then the referring post is updated with a reference to this post. And, the process continues as the visitor moves through the blog. Download  

WP Comment Remix – WP Comment Remix adds to WordPress such features as Reply and Quote links for commenters. You can add a Reply link to each comment, which, when clicked, adds "@OriginalPoster", and links it to the anchor of that comment. Clicking the Quote link has a similar action to the Reply link, but it adds the entire comment in a blockquote tag. You can choose how you want to order the comments for your readers. You can also separate the Trackbacks from the comments and move them to the bottom of the list, or remove them completely. Download

WordPress Scanner – WordPress Scanner is a free online resource that can be used to check your WordPress blog security level. To run wp-scanner, you have to download the wp-scanner activator plugin. This plugin is only about 5 lines long. All it does is add "" to your current WordPress template. It allows WPscanner online service to verify that you actually own the blog and have permission to test it. Just don’t forget to disable the plugin after use or others will be able to scan your blog too. Download

I am reading WordPress plugin - I am reading is an easy configurable WordPress plugin to display books you are reading in a sidebar widget. Book information is pulled from Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Open Library and gets cached in database. You don’t need to input the book information manually (just type in ISBN or AWS key), you can change widget title through WP Admin, easily adjustable fonts, colors and HTML output. Download

Twitter Tools -Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress. You can also archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes), post a tweet from your sidebar or the WP Admin screens and pass your tweets along to another service. Download

Fresh from FriendFeed & Twitter - Fresh from FriendFeed and Twitter keeps your blog always fresh by regularly adding your most recent content from FriendFeed or Twitter. No external passwords required. Download

WP Follow Me - is a wordpress plugin that allow you to add a twitter "Follow me" badge on your wordpress blog. Download

WP Super Cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Download

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny's customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor's browsing history. Download

Easy Adsense – Easy AdSense provides a very easy way to generate revenue from your blog using Google AdSense. With its full set of features, Easy AdSense is perhaps the first plugin to give you a complete solution for everything AdSense-related. Download

Google Analytics for WordPress - The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin. Download

FlareSmith - FlareSmith is a plugin to integrate the FeedBurner Stats and FeedFlare services into your WordPress site – all without having to edit any of your theme files! It acts as a content filter, and adds the required javascript to your site after the output of your original content. Download 

Search Exceprt WordPress plugin - Search Exceprt plugin displays text snippets around found keywords, with matches highlighted, in a WordPress search. WordPress’ searching capability is a bit mediocre at the moment. It splits up the keywords, digs out texts using SQL’s LIKE operator, and returns all entries that match the criteria, in a reverse chronological order. Then the default template will display some of these entries, using the template function the_excerpt(), which basically returns the first 55 words, HTML striped. Download

Link Harvest - Link Harvest will go through all of your posts and pages and compile a list of all external links. Then it will create a live updating linkroll for you, based on your actual linking activity. Download

Broken Link Checker – This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Download

WP Invoice – WP-Invoice plugin lets WordPress blog owners send invoices to their clients. The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information. Once an invoice is created from the WP admin section, an email with a brief description and a unique link is sent to your client. Clients follow the link to your blog’s special invoice page, view their invoice, and pay their bill using their credit card via Authorize.net, MerchantPlus’ NaviGate, or PayPal. Download

Smart Ads - Smart Ads automatically inserts advertisements like Google’s Adsense above and below your post content. These advertisements are only visible when viewing a single post. users can set a "Wordcount" minimum for their advertisements. Smart Ads will only insert advertisements into posts that meet or exceed the desired Wordcount. Also users can chose to only place ads on posts that are over a certain amount of days old. Advertisements can be manually disabled on a post-by-post basis while writing a post, for entire categories, or for registered blog members. Download

All in One SEO Pack - Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). For beginners, you don't even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install. For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want. Download

NextGEN Gallery - NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Before I start writing the plugin I study all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums. Download  

Contact Form 7- Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. Download  

Top 10 WordPress Plugin – Top 10 is a page counter and popular posts plugin for WordPress. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts and store them in the database. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views. Includes a sidebar widget to display the popular posts. All settings can be configured from within your WordPress Admin area. Compatible with caching plugins. Download

WP Visitors WordPress plugin - WP Visitors WordPress plugin records information about every visitor (page load). Requested URL, referring URL, IP address, hostname and browser along with Date/Time are recorded and displayed in a tabular fashion. Geographical resolution of IP address (it’s only approximate) is also included. Download

Flickr Tag Plugin - Flickr Tag WordPress plugin is simple solution to show image thumbnails on your WordPress blog "inline" your posts and keep the photos and discussion on Flickr. Download

Smart Youtube - Smart Youtube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in your RSS feed. The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources. Smart YouTube also supports playback of high quality videos, works on iPhone, produces xHTML valid code and allows you to view videos in fullscreen. Download

WordPress Popular Posts - WordPress Popular Posts is a sidebar widget to show the most popular posts in your blog. You can set its title (or leave it blank if you don’t want to use any), how many entries to show, whether to display or not comments count and/or pageviews for each entry listed, and to show (or not) an excerpt of each post’s title. You can list your posts either by comment count, pageviews or average daily views. Download

WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin – WP Greet Box WordPress 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. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Compatible with various WordPress cache plugins. Download

Absolute Privacy - Absolute Privacy foe WordPress provides you with the ultimate user moderation. It’s perfect for family blogs, private communities, and personal websites. It could force users to enter first and last name during registration, let users to choose their own passwords, get emailed every time an approval is waiting (with a link for quick approval), lock out all non-logged in views from your website. Download

VidoopConnect - VidoopConnect WordPress plugin makes it easier to sign up and login to your site by letting your blog visitors reuse their existing accounts from sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and MySpace, or any other OpenID provider. Signing up is a quick process, you need to choose the way you wish to sign in (any account you already use), after entering some basic information like your name and email confirmation, you are logged in. Download

WordPress Membership Sire Plugin Memberwing – This plugin lets you build Membership Site allowing up to 4 levels of membership. It supports Recurring Paypal payments and affiliates programmes, optimized for SEO. Download

MailPress - With MailPress WordPress plugin you will be able to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails for comments subscribers, your periodic newsletters or post notification (per post/daily/weekly/monthly) as well as specific admin events : registration of a new user, comment to moderate, new comment on your posts. This plugin is widget ready; it’s using Swiftmailer and Google Chart API. Download

GD Star Rating - GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules; time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, and has a widgets build in and shortcodes support. It also supports Review rating for posts, pages and comments; Ajax rating support using jQuery. Download

Script Compressor - Script Compressor WordPress plugin compresses JavaScript files and CSS files loaded by the theme or other plugins automatically. Extra spaces, lines, and comments will be deleted. Download

Autoclose - Autoclose WordPress plugin enables a granular approach to managing pingbacks/comments/trackbacks on both posts and pages. With its help you can close Comments on posts/pages older than (number of days), close Pingbacks/Trackbacks on posts or pages. Autoclose also provides a checkbox to delete post revisions. Download  

No Comments on Pages – No Comments on Pages is a tiny WordPress plugin which, when activated, disables posting of new comments to all pages and hides existing ones. Download

WordPress Backup - WordPress Backup is an essential plugin for all WordPress blog administrators. It performs regular backups of your upload (images), current theme, and plugin directories. Backup files are available for download and optionally emailed to a specified email. You can adjust the interval between backups and the email address to which the backups are sent. For database backup you can use WP DBManager. Download  

Branded Login Screen for WordPress - Branded Login Screen for WordPress lets you use custom login screen instead of WordPress default. Branded Admin which lets you change the admin area is also available. Download  

AJAXed WordPress (AWP) – AJAXed WordPress (AWP) is a WordPress plugin that adds the power, usability and beauty of AJAX to any blog or WordPress based website. Its features improve the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential of any WordPress based blog. It can display excerpts of posts and then load full posts inline, submit comments without reloading the page, thread comments to make those long discussions easier to read. Download

I am sure you will already have some of the above installed to your WordPress blog if you are a serious blogger, but I am also sure that there must be something in our list which you will be able to take away from reading this blog post.

Which of the above are you already using and which ones are you now going to download for your blog? If you know of any other WordPress plugins please let us all know by leaving a comment for us below.

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About The Author:

Michelle Kirkbride

Michelle Kirkbride is a web developer, she currently lives in Yorkshire, UK with her two beautiful children and loving partner. She spends far too much time at her computer and is currently addicted to her work. Michelle Kirkbride the founder of Kaplang is also a business Mentor with D100, a Success Doncaster mentoring programme run by Deloitte and funded by the Doncaster Council.