WordPress is a dominant Content Management System which is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites as of August, 2013. It is the most popular blogging system on the Web. WordPress is very customizable with tons of plug-ins available to choose from. They do almost anything you can imagine. Most of these are available free of cost.

There are nearly 30,000 WordPress plug-ins available and here we’ll talk about the most popular ones. These are a must-have for your website or blog.

1. Google XML Sitemaps
This useful plugin will bring better search rankings. It will generate a special XML sitemap to help search engine index your blog better.



2. Akismet
Akismet is the best guard against comment spam for your WordPress blog or website. It seems whether comments look like spam or not.

3. All in One SEO Pack
This plugin is widely considered as the most essential plugin. With it, you can give your page an SEO-friendly title, homepage description and keywords related to your topic.

4. Advanced Custom Fields
It fully customizes WordPress edit screens with powerful fields. It visually creates your Fields and assigns your fields to multiple edit pages. It’s a perfect solution for any WordPress website that needs more flexible data.



5. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a free WordPress plugin that comes with overwhelming features. The necessity varies from website to website. Sites with heavy images and scripts will see a nice speed improvement with this plugin.

6. WP Super Cache
It is a static caching plugin for WordPress. With this plugin, you can speed up your blog or website significantly. It generates html sites that are served directly by Apache.

7. Contact Form 7
This plugin allows you to manage multiple forms and comes with great customization features. It supports CAPTCHA, Askitmet spam filtering and AJAX powered-submitting. It is a great plugin for converting traffic to successful leads.



8. Broken Link Checker
Consider this plugin as an essential one. It scans your website and notifies you if any broken link or missing images are found via the Dashboard or by email. It monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields.

9. Redirection
Redirection is a must-have WordPress plugin to manage 301 restrictions and keep track of 404 errors. It comes with beneficial features such as custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.



10. WordFence Security
It is a free enterprise class security plugin that makes your sites secure as well as fast. It includes a fash caching engine, firewall, anti-virus scanning and live traffic including crawlers. It is a free plugin.



11. Google Analytics for WordPress
A great way to track your WordPress site easily with lots of metadata! This plugin uses the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest tracking code Google Analytics offers.



12. Sociable
It is the fastest growing leader in the list of WordPress plugins. It is totally free and is being downloaded by over 1.5 million. It allows you to set up different rating systems for posts, pages and comments.



13. JetPack by WordPress.com
This plugin supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with awesome cloud power. It provides simple, concise stats with no additional load on the server. It has also integration with and automatic posting to your favorite social networks.

14. WP RSS Multi Importer
It is an All-in-One solution for importing, merging and displaying RSS and Atom feeds on your WordPress site.

15. Slideshow Gallery
It features content in a beautiful and fast JavaScript powered slideshow gallery. You can easily display multiple galleries throughout your WordPress websites including custom added slides, slide galleries.



16. Print Friendly and PDF Button
This useful plugin automatically creates printer friendly and PDF versions of your pages, saving you from the hassle of creating a print CSS file. It also gives your user the ability to remove images and paragraphs of text, to print exactly what they need.



17. BackUpWordPress
BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including database and all files on a schedule as per your convenience. It is simple to use and no setup is required.

18. WPtouch 3
WPtouch is a mobile plugin that enables an elegant mobile theme for your mobile visitors. You can customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly version to the visitors.

19. WooCommerce
It is a powerful eCommerce plugin that transform your WordPress website into a thoroughbed eCommerce store. This efficient, robust and intuitive plugin is a must-have for eCommerce websites.



20. WordPress Importer
This plugin will import pages, posts and other custom post types; comments; custom fields and post Meta; categories, tags and terms from custom taxonomies from a WordPress export file.

What WordPress plugins do you use for your website or blog? Share your thoughts with us by commenting below!