Since its launch in 2003. WordPress has been downloaded more than 60 million times and counting. Great CMS, large plug-in base, easy SEO and much more to choose from.

Probably the best way to expand WordPress functionality is with some of nearly 30.000 available plug-ins. You can visit WordPress’ Most Popular Plug-in Directory, but to save you time and give some amazing but fairly known plug-ins, we have created list of  25 most popular WordPress plug-ins. Let’s start!

All In One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is a WordPress SEO plugin to automatically optimize your WordPress blog for Search Engines such as Google.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Contact Form 7

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.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin, and one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time, with over 10 million downloads.

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.

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata.

WP Touch

WPtouch is a mobile plugin for WordPress that automatically enables a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors of your WordPress website.

WordPress Importer

Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

 is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

Fast Secure Contact Form

Easily create and add forms to WordPress. Fields are easy to add, remove, and re-order. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin, and also send a meeting request to talk over phone or video.

WP PageNavi

Want to replace the old ← Older posts | Newer posts → links with some page links? This plugin provides the wp_pagenavi() template tag which generates fancy pagination links.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO, this was true when I wrote my original  article in 2008 (and updated every few months) and it’s still true today, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at  to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects.

Share Buttons by AddToAny

The WordPress sharing plugin to help people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites.

WP eCommerce

Since 2006, we’ve been helping entrepreneurs just like you realize their goal of selling online. Whether you’re hoping to sell digital downloads, physical inventory, or subscriptions and memberships – with WP eCommerce, you’re only minutes away from your next sale.

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator is back! Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) displays pages, posts, and custom post types related to the current entry, introducing your readers to other relevant content on your site.

TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin will let you add, remove and arrange the buttons that are shown on the Visual Editor toolbar. It includes 15 plugins for  that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen.

Sociable

As you know, Sociable continues being the fastest growing leader in the sharing space of WordPress plugins. We really appreciate your feedback, so, here you are lastest version including Pinterest icon, font changes you suggested and other terrific features you get totally Free.

We hope we made things easier for you with these. So, if you are self-hosted and ready to enhance your WordPress site, check out these 25 handpicked plug-ins.

Have a favorite plug-in that we haven’t mentioned? Feel free to shout it out in the comments section below.

Really Simple CAPTCHA

Really Simple CAPTCHA does not work alone and is intended to work with other plugins. It is originally created for , however, you can use it with your own plugin.

Note: This product is “really simple” as its name suggests, i.e., it is not strongly secure. If you need perfect security, you should try other solutions.

WP to Twitter

WP to Twitter posts Tweets from WordPress to Twitter. Shorten URLs using a variety of popular URL shorteners, or leave Twitter to do it for you using t.co. Use WP to Twitter display a feed of recent Tweets. Display Tweets from any account by entering that account’s Twitter ID!

Share Buttons by AddThis

Get more traffic back to your site by installing the AddThis WordPress plugin. With AddThis, your users can promote your content by sharing to over 330 of the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn). We also support address bar sharing in modern browsers. Our button is small, unobtrusive, quick to load and recognized all over the web.

BuddyPress

BuddyPress lets users sign-up and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups, and much more. A social network in a box, BuddyPress lets you easily build a community for your company, school, sports team, or other niche community.

WB-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

W3 Total Cache

The only WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework; designed to improve user experience and page speed.

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