WordPress plugins automate and customize your website in powerful ways.  They are one of the best features of WordPress-The web-based software that powers over 25 million websites worldwide.  But unless you are a webmaster by trade, customizing your website can frequently be expensive if you have a contracted webmaster running your website or very frustrating if you are trying to improve the look and functionality of your site yourself.  For those of you who have used WordPress for any length of time, you have probably spent countless hours searching through WordPress.org or using Google to find the plugin you need and then testing them one by one.  And who likes wasting time searching and testing plugins?  I have tested hundreds of plugins over the past year and I wanted to share my list with you in the hope of saving you hours and providing the best plugins available.  If I saved you the frustration of actually finding and testing hundreds of plugins please let me know.  Or if you have other recommended plugins I don’t have listed here, please let leave a comment and describe your experience with them.

I have kept many plug-ins in my inactive plugin folder because I exchanged most of them for premium plugins.  I kept them in this list for those who don’t want to pay for premium plugins, some for illustrative purposes, and others I am testing or that you may find helpful.

Below you will find my some details on the premium plug-ins I use versus the free ones I replaced.  I provide the differences and reasons I decided to upgrade.  Please let me know if you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them.

• Pretty Link Pro replaces the following:  All 4 Twitter Tools plug-ins, AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Buttons, Facebook Share, Tweetmeme or Topsy Retweet (I used both-Topsy to create trackback Twitter comments and kept the Tweetmeme to keep my retweet counts), SEO Smartlinks, No Follower, and Go Codes.

There is a free version of Pretty Links called “Lite” and I had been using it with success.  It allowed me to manually create and tweet short URLs branded to my website, to manually tweet right from my WordPress dashboard, and to then track the results.

The reasons I paid for the Pretty Links Pro (premium) version were:

• I could automate Pretty Links for Twitter and replace all of my 6 existing Twitter automation plugins,
• My site load time was far too slow with all of the plugins running so replacing 11 plug-ins with 1 was a huge speed boost.
• I could automatically implement “_blank” (opens URL in a new window) and “no follow” tags (prevents PageRank loss) to all affiliate and plug-in links.
• Pretty Link Pro consistently and automatically creates short URLs branded with my own domain/business  name (increasingleverageblog.com) for every post, page, and link (affiliate and other) on my site.

You can find out more by clicking on the banner below.  If you hover over the banner, you will see that the this banner has a link beginning with my website URL.  I pasted in the HTML code with my ugly affiliate ID and Pretty Link Pro automatically converted into a branded pretty link for me.  Is that not powerful?  Whether you decide to go Pro or Lite, start using Pretty Link in your Twitter and linking strategy to brand yourself.

• LinkWithin or WordPress Related Posts (they do the same thing) was replaced by Shortcodes in my available in my WordPress theme.  While I like the idea of LinkWithin and their slick looking thumbnails, I found it to be buggy with duplicate displays and old posts.  The Most Popular posts worked very well but the short codes perform the exact same function and help increase page load time.
• Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin eliminates 99% of bot spam and does a better job than both Akismet and Bad Behavior running in tandem.
• Google XML Sitemaps was replaced by my built-in sitemap template in my premium WordPress theme.
• Fast Secure Contact Form was replaced by my built-in contact page template in my premium WordPress theme.

I used the wp-pluginsused plugin to compile this list.  It automatically includes a brief description of the plugin functionality and a link to the plugin page.
There are 62 plugins used: 18 active plugins and 44 inactive plugins.

Active Plugins

  Advanced Code Editor
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Enables syntax highlighting in the integrated themes and plugins source code editors with line numbers, AutoComplete and much more. Supports PHP, HTML, CSS and JS.

  AntiVirus
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Security solution as a smart, effectively plugin to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections.

  Broken Link Checker
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Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

  cbnet Ping Optimizer
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Doesn’t do anything. Isn’t needed. Core WordPress handling of Pings is oh-so-fine!

  Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin
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Very simple plugin that adds a client side generated checkbox to the comment form requesting that the user clicks it to prove they are not a spammer. Bots wont see it so their spam comment will be discarded.

  JW Player 6 Plugin for Wordpress
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Embed a JW Player 6 for HTML5 (or Flash) into your WordPress articles. Please note: The part of this plugin that works with JW Player 6 is new and might not be as polished as the part for player 5. If you find bugs, please report them in the Wordpress section of our forum.

  Permalinks Moved Permanently
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When permalink isn’t found, this checks if a post with the requested slug exists somewhere else on your blog.

  ReplyMe
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Send a email to author automatically while someone reply his comment.

  Revision Control
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Allows finer control over the number of Revisions stored on a global & per-type/page basis.

  Smart Youtube PRO
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Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.

  TinyMCE Advanced
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Enables advanced features and plugins in TinyMCE, the visual editor in WordPress.

  WooDojo
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WooDojo is a powerful collection of WooThemes features to enhance your website.

  WooSidebars
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Replace widget areas in your theme for specific pages, archives and other sections of WordPress.

  WordPress Database Backup
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On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Tools → Backup to get started.

  WP-MalWatch
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Scan your WordPress system nightly and on demand with this quick and easy WordPress malware detector.

  WP-PluginsUsed
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Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

  Wp NicEdit
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This plugin integrates the a very slick Nice editor by Brian Kirchoff to wordpress comments converting it to a rich text editor.

  WP Smush.it
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Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress.

Inactive Plugins

  Admin Management Xtended
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WordPress 3.2+ only. Extends admin functionalities by introducing: toggling post/page visibility inline, changing page order with drag’n'drop, inline category management, inline tag management, changing publication date inline, changing post slug inline, toggling comment status open/closed, hide draft posts, change media order, change media description inline, toggling link visibility, changing link categories

  Admin Menu Editor
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Lets you directly edit the WordPress admin menu. You can re-order, hide or rename existing menus, add custom menus and more.

  All In One SEO Pack
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Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Options configuration panel | Upgrade to Pro Version | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist

  Audio player
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Audio Player is a highly configurable but simple mp3 player for all your audio needs. You can customise the player’s colour scheme to match your blog theme, have it automatically show track information from the encoded ID3 tags and more. Go to your Settings page to start configuring it.

  Bad Behavior
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Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.

  CommentLuv
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Reward your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. Encourage a community and discover new posts.

  Custom Post Templates
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Provides a drop-down to select different templates for posts from the post edit screen. The templates are defined similarly to page templates, and will replace single.php for the specified post.

  Delete-Revision
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Delete revision post from Database,let us now to drop Redundancy, lose weight !

  Disqus Comment System
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The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. Head over to the Comments admin page to set up your DISQUS Comment System.

  Fast Secure Contact Form
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Fast Secure Contact Form for WordPress. The contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Super customizable with a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. Settings | Donate

  FT Signature Manager
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FT Signature Manager allows each author on your blog to include a signature at the end of their posts.

  Google XML Sitemaps
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This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

  Gravity Forms
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Easily create web forms and manage form entries within the WordPress admin.

  Limit Login Attempts
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Limit rate of login attempts, including by way of cookies, for each IP.

  Maintenance Mode
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Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Navigate to Settings → Maintenance Mode to get started.

  MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad
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A new non-obtrusive way of displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog. Adjust your settings here.

  Most Popular Posts
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Display a link to the most popular posts on your blog according to the number of comments.

  Pretty Link Pro
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Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website!

  Print Friendly and PDF
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PrintFriendly & PDF button for your website. Optimizes your pages and brand for print, pdf, and email.

  Share Buttons by Lockerz / AddToAny
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Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and many more. [Settings]

  Simple Facebook Connect
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Makes it easy for your site to use Facebook Connect, in a wholly modular way.

  Simple Facebook Share Button
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On July 17, 2012, Facebook completely dropped support for the Share button, rendering this plugin useless. You should deactivate and delete it at your earliest convenience.

  Slideshow Gallery 2
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‘Slideshow Gallery’ 2 is a image viewing solution that integrates with the WordPress image upload and gallery application. Great for thumbs and lightbox. Flexible, configurable and easy to use. Embed-able and hardcode-able and improved. To embed into a post/page, simply insert [slideshow] into its content with optional post_id, exclude, and caption parameters. To hardcode into any PHP file of your WordPress theme, simply use <?php if (class_exists('Gallery')) { $Gallery = new Gallery(); $Gallery -> slideshow($output = true, $post_id = null); } ?> and specify the required $post_id parameter accordingly.

  Smart 404
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Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.

  Social Media Widget
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Adds links to all of your social media and sharing site profiles. Tons of icons come in 3 sizes, 4 icon styles, and 4 animations.

  Spam Free Wordpress
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Comment spam blocking plugin that uses anonymous password authentication to achieve 100% automated spam blocking with zero false positives, plus a few more features.

  Top Commentators Widget
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Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin.

  Top Commenters Gravatar
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Display the gravatars of top commenters for your blog. The gravatars are displayed as widget that can be placed anywhere within your blog.

  Topsy Retweet Button
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Provides a Twitter retweet button powered by Topsy. Can also provide automatic trackback comments when someone tweets about your posts.

  TweetMeme Retweet Button
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Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

  Tweet old post
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This plugin helps you to keeps your old posts alive by tweeting about them and driving more traffic to them from twitter. It also helps you to promote your content. You can set time and no of tweets to post to drive more traffic.For questions, comments, or feature requests, contact me! Ajay Matharu you can follow me twitter at @matharuajay.

  Use Google Libraries
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Allows your site to use common javascript libraries from Google’s AJAX Libraries CDN, rather than from WordPress’s own copies.

  W3 Total Cache
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The highest rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress.

  What Would Seth Godin Do
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Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

  Wordpress Code Editor
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Brings Syntax-Highlighting to the Theme- and Plugin-Editor of Wordpress. Supports php, css, html and js. Visit the Plugin Homepage for more details.

  WordPress Editorial Calendar
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The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.

  WordPress Mobile Pack
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The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. It includes a mobile switcher, filtered widgets, and content adaptation for mobile device characteristics. Activating this plugin will also install a selection of mobile themes by ribot, a top UK mobile design team, and Forum Nokia. These adapt to different families of devices, such as Nokia and WebKit browsers (including Android, iPhone and Palm). If enabled, your site will be listed on mpexo, a directory of mobile-friendly blogs. Also check out the documentation and the forums. If you like the plugin, please rate us on the WordPress directory. And if you don’t, let us know how we can improve it!

  WordPress Related Posts
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Quickly increase your readers’ engagement with your posts by adding Related Posts in the footer of your content. Click on Related Posts tab to configure your settings.

  WP-Polls
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Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

  WP-Table Reloaded
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This plugin allows you to create and easily manage tables in the admin-area of WordPress. A comfortable backend allows an easy manipulation of table data. You can then include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.

  WP Minify
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This plugin uses the Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

  WP Super Cache
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Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.

  WPtap Mobile Detector
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This plugin automatically detects the type of mobile browser that you site is viewed from, and activates the mobile theme you have chosen for it. User can install multiple mobile themes and link it to different mobile browsers for best performance. If you have a separate WAP or mobile website, this detector also allows you to redirect your mobile traffic to the WAP/mobile site.

  Yoast Breadcrumbs
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Outputs a fully customizable breadcrumb path.