WordPress Plugins
WordPress.org is powerful on its own, but its functionality can be extended using WordPress plugins. Yoast offers several WordPress plugins built by Joost de Valk to optimize your WordPress SEO, track its performance and tweak the minor usability issues power users sometimes encounter. You should also check the WordPress plugin reviews by Yoast.
Essential WordPress Plugins
If you only want to pick two of the free WordPress plugins from this site, pick these two, they've both proven to be best in class and will help you take your blog to the next level.
Yoast's all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
Track your WordPress site easily in Google Analytics and add lots of data, for example views per author & category and automatic tracking of outbound clicks, pageviews & downloads.
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Like these two WordPress plugins? Be sure to browse the others too:
Functionality Plugins
Some things should have just been built in in WordPress, these plugins make it look almost like it is.
The original WordPress contact form plugin by Ryan Duff was cool (no link since the page is down), as it made a simple drop in contact form for your site. I've used it for a lot of...
This plugin has been succeeded by my new WordPress SEO plugin. The info below is still valid, but you'd better try the new plugin, which has even cooler WordPress breadcrumbs! This...
With Google FriendConnect, you could already allow people to become a "member" of your sites community, and do all sorts of fun stuff with that. But when they were logged in like...
WordPress 2.8 introduced a "simple" way to add taxonomies to WordPress. It still required coding though. This plugin allows you to add taxonomies just by giving them a name in the...
Analytics and Metrics Plugins
Want to know what's going on on your blog? Install one or more of these plugins and gain yourself the deepest insights!
Track your WordPress site easily in Google Analytics and add lots of data, for example views per author & category and automatic tracking of outbound clicks, pageviews & downloads.
Based on ideas in an excellent post by Avinash Kaushik this plugin calculates the following: Raw Author Contribution: average number of posts per month average number of words per...
Formerly known as Gatineau for WordPress This plugin does one simple thing: add the Microsoft adCenter Analytics javascript tag to all your pages.
From RSS WordPress pluginSometimes you want to do something extra for your RSS subscribers, you might want to give them a little bit of extra content, or simply leave out some...
SEO & Affiliate Plugins
WordPress is superbly optimized by itself, for a content management system, but it can still use a few free WordPress plugins here and there to get it to the absolute top.
Yoast's all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
This plugin has been succeeded by my new WordPress SEO plugin. The info below is still valid, but you'd better try the new plugin! There's no easy way to add meta robots tags to...
This plugin has been succeeded by my new WordPress SEO plugin. The info below is still valid, but you'd better try the new plugin! This very simple plugin let's you add an extra...
This plugin has been succeeded by my new WordPress SEO plugin. The info below is still valid, but you'd better try the new plugin! This plugin fixes all sorts of weird addons to...
By request of Michael Gray, I coded this plugin to Auto Affiliate Linker, which automatically adds your Amazon Affiliate ID to the back of all the links to Amazon you use in your...
The WordPress canonical link plugin has been succeeded (and in many ways superseded) by my new WordPress SEO plugin. Below follows an explanation of what a good canonical link...
Social Media Plugins
If you're the kind of person who is social or shares his content elsewhere as well, these plugins might come in handy!
People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right...
If you've seen my speaking page, you know what this plugin does, if not, you should check it out right now. Basically it gets all of your Upcoming events from Upcoming through the...
The SlideShare WordPress plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your posts and pages. You just copy paste the default WordPress embed code and off you go. It...
DownloadThis is a plugin to easily include CrunchBase widgets in your posts. This way you can easily point your readers to more specific information on a certain person, company,...
More useful WordPress info
Be sure to check out my info on WordPress SEO and WordPress hosting while you're looking around this site, and if you're looking to hire a developer, have a look at my WordPress consulting services!
Fixes and Tweaks
While WordPress is a wonderful system, you'll sometimes want to tweak a couple of things here and there, these plugins are here to help.
Based originally on a request of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, I created this plugin to easily add an Apple iPod Touch / iPhone icon, a favicon and a feed image to your blog. Just...
Don't you hate it when you search for something on a WordPress blog, and only after being frustrated for a bit there there's no results, you realize that you've made a spelling...
Don't you find it annoying when someone comments with just a smiley? Or a "thanks"? On quite a few forums you have to leave a comment with a minimum of 15 characters to be able to...
Your first time commenters are precious people, once you realize that they're first time commenters. This plugin allows you to redirect just those people to a page of your choosing...
Want to (easily) email all or some of the people who commented on a certain post? This plugin is for you. It adds an icon to the toolbar when you're viewing a post, with a simple...
Kickstart your mailinglist! DownloadSometimes you have a well running blog, and you decide you want to create a mailinglist. What's easier than to kickstart it by exporting the...
By default in WordPress 2.3 and up, you have a tag input section below your posts, which looks like this: Since I don't use any tags on most of my blogs, I found that tag input...
Most plugin authors host all their plugins on WordPress.org, and though this has huge advantages, it denies them of one thing: easy access to statistics of downloads. Recently, the...
MySQL is a great database, but it doesn't clean itself up the way it should sometimes. This plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively...
This very simple WordPress plugin does one thing: it allows you to embed something like this: By adding a bit of code to your posts or pages that looks like this: It has three...
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