Top 12 WordPress Plugins For WordPress 2.7.x
May 10, 2009 by Andy
On July 6th 2008, these were my top 10 WordPress plugins:
1. Google XML Sitemaps.
2. TinyMCE Advanced.
3. Lighter Menus.
4. All in One Adsense and YPN.
5. Akismet.
6. AddThis – Social Bookmarking plugin.
7. Ultimate Google Analytics
8. WordPress automatic upgrade.
9. WP-DBManager.
10. HeadSpace2.
As WordPress has evolved, so has my choice of plugins. Some in the list above no longer work in the current version of WordPress, and a few others have become redundant or simply don’t work as well as they use to. I can’t actually reduce it to my top 10 anymore, so here is my top 12 WordPress plugins that I install on every site I build:
1. Google XML Sitemaps – This is still the plugin of choice for automatically building a sitemap and submitting it to the search engines. The sitemap is highly configurable and I can easily exclude certain pages or posts (or even categories) from the sitemap. This plugin will rebuild and resubmit the sitemap after every post – it is a huge time-saver.
2. All In One SEO – I use to use the Headspace plugin but switched to this one because Headspace was causing a few conflicts with some of the plugins I was using. All In One SEO does everything I want and more. I can control meta tags plus lots more.
3. Include It – This plugin is very cool. When I use to build static HTML sites I used server side includes very heavily. This plugin replicates that functionality. I wrote an article on using this plugin called Using SSI with WordPress.
4. All in One Adsense and YPN – A quick and easy way to add Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network ads to your site. I must admit that this plugin is slipping down my list and may not be here next time I update my top WordPress plugins. The reason is that I now prefer to use Include It for better placement of ads, or hard code the ads into the templates.
5. Akismet – Comes pre-installed with WordPress. You need a WordPress API key to get this working, but that is easy enough to obtain, and it’s free.
6. Similar Posts – This is a fantastic plugin that allows me to include a list of related posts at the end of my articles. I created this Similar Posts Tutorial for those who want to see how to use it.
7. Ultimate Google Analytics – This is a very easy way to integrate Google Analytics code into your web pages. Google Analytics is a free service that gives you detailed website stats for any type of site. You just have to include tracking code in the pages of your site, and this plugin handles that for you. Google analytics has a great feature called Site Overlay – you can read more about that in an article I wrote called Google Analytics – Find out what your visitors are clicking on
8. WordPress automatic upgrade – Although WordPress 2.7 has an automatic upgrade feature built into it, I have never been able to get it to work on any of my sites, so I still rely on this plugin which the authors have graciously updated for 2.7. I guess there was a lot of other people who had problems with the built in upgrade feature 
For those who prefer to upgrade WordPress manually, here is a Manual Upgrade of WordPress tutorial
9. WP-DBManager – This plugin helps maintain the health of the database that drives your WordPress site. One of the coolest features is automatic backup of your WordPress database. The plugin actually emails you a backup every week (or at the interval you define). Automatic backups of your WordPress databases is a tutorial I created showing how to set this automatic backups up.
10. Sociable – A plugin that adds links to your favourite social network site at the end of posts. You can see what this plugin adds if you scroll to the bottom of this article. You can of course edit which sites show up, and the list to choose from is very large. I am not totally convinced how many people actually bookmark pages from this type of widget, but I don’t think it can hurt 
11. WP-Sticky – Again, WordPress 2.7 has a similar feature built into it, but it is not as powerful as the old WP-Sticky plugin, so this is a firm favourite. This plugin allows you to stick posts to the top of the pile. Why is this useful? Well it means that on category pages, you can make one post always appear at the top. You can see this working on my Diabetic site: Diabetes Diet. This page is a category page showing one post at the top, and then listing all other posts in the category. If I add more posts to this category, my chosen post remains at the top, and new posts are added to the list of related articles at the bottom.
12. wp-gbcf – also called Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0 – This is one of many contact form plugins, but its the one I currently use on a lot of my sites.
If you have any plugins that you see as a must use, please post a comment at the end of this article and let others know about it.
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Hi Andy,
The usual brilliant stuff. Regarding the automatic upgrade, I found that the in-built WordPress automatic upgrade was not working properly when the upgrade plug in was activated. Remove the plug in and the in-built upgrade function works well.
Pearson
Pearson
I didnt have the automatic upgrade active last time I tried. I will try again next time there is an upgrade and see if that helps.
Andy,
The WP-Sticky plugin is a neat improvement on the WP default sticky-maker.. with its “per category” sticky-ness (spelling?) factor. Thanks for explaining that. I would never have even looked at it.
Gary Harvey
Thanks Andy – as usual very helpful and informative posts from your hand!
On top of your ‘top 12 list’ of WP plugins I wonder if you have ever come across a good plugin to make prints for the user of a post. I was reminded about this functionality as I wanted to make a print of your post about top WordPress plugins to use when I update my WP sites as a checklist – and couldn’t find a print function on the page, except to have to print the full webpage. – Do you have any advice?
Thanks in advance
Soren Breiting
Denmark
PS: Long time ago I actually wrote an article to Ecinearticles about the overlooked marketing perspective of printable webpages, and I think that is still a valid point.
Soren
Because of your comment I added a “Print This Post” to this blog. Its not perfect, but it does the job of converting the page to a printable format. This is the plugin I used:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-print/
Thanks for your list of WP plug-ins. I’ll be sure to grab the ones I don’t have.
Dr Andy,
Have you updated your base plugin list since the May 10th 2009 article?
Thanks,
Rick