10 Psychotically Awesome And Free WordPress Plugins

When it comes to WordPress, no other blogging platform can touch it. There are many reasons why WordPress remains the King (and Queen) of the blog (and CMS) world, but one of the most obvious reasons is the mass availability of extremely awesome plugins. Thanks to a smart, cutting edge user community, it seems there has been a plugin developed for just about any situation you can think of. Maybe this is where the iPhone team drew their inspiration (there’s an app for that).

Anyway, I wanted to quickly present to you a list of 10 “psychotically” awesome WordPress plugins that seem to be cornerstones and valuable additions to a large portion of WordPress based blogs out there. You’re probably already aware of most of these, but hopefully you’ll gain some extra plugin knowledge and be able to try something new that you may not have used before.

10 Psychotically Awesome And Free WordPress Plugins

1. WordPress Database Backup – Most of the plugins on this list will the essentials. The ones that every blog should have regardless of content. The WP Database Backup plugin is perhaps one of the simplest, yet most important plugins that one can install on a blog. Why? Well, it does exactly what it implies, with relative ease. With the ability to scheduled regular backups of your database, as well as on demand, protecting your blog content with a backup is the easiest and one of the smartest things you can do. Anyone without this little gem installed (it takes 10 seconds to install it) should get it right now.

2. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Another fine utility like plugin that easily makes this list, WP Automatic Upgrade comes in VERY handy, especially due to the constant barrage of new WordPress releases that we’re used to seeing. Take the hassle out of upgrading to the latest version of WordPress with this helpful one-click upgrade option. Again, with the frequency of new WordPress versions, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth with this (wait, it’s free).

3. All In One SEO Pack - Folks, this plugin deserves a moment of silence. That’s how great it is. All In One SEO Pack is one of those plugins that any blogger worth his/her salt will proudly say they have installed and is probably one of the only plugins that directly affect the income of a serious blogger’s blog (due to the huge SEO benefits that can be reaped with this plugin). With the ability to customize meta data for each page and post on your site, and a dozen other helpful SEO related options, All In One delivers a full payload of capability that every blogger can take advantage of.

4. Exec PHP – Look, this might be one that’s hard to get excited about for some people, but until you realize the importance of being able to execute PHP scripting within a blog post or page, you’ll not understand how powerful this plugin really is. PHP Exec allows you to add PHP code to virtually any part of your blog without doing any hardcore coding (that’s assuming you even know how). Many of today’s plugins and widgets require the implementation of PHP code, and if you’re not familiar with how to work with it, it can be quite frustrating to say the least. PHP Exec will make it a lot easier to accomplish this task without any problem at all. This is a very solid and reliable plugin.

5. Sociable – Every once in a while, a plugin comes along that revolutionizes a certain aspect of a blog. In my opinion, this is exactly what sociable did for helping bloggers expand their ability to provide easy, shareable social media icons for their readers. Sociable is an awesome plugin that automatically inserts sweet little icons at the end of your post which allow readers to easily submit your article to a number of social bookmarking/social networking sites. Making it easy for readers to do this important task after reading one of your articles can directly affect the success of each and every post on your blog. With icons available for over 90 of the hottest social bookmarking sites, Sociable rocks the house when it comes to sharing the bookmarking love.

6. WP Super Cache - Speaking of social bookmarking, we all know what happens when you get lucky enough to experience something like the “Digg effect”. It typically means the start of greatness for your blog, but it can also mean your blog being knocked out very quickly from the influx of traffic. This is very common (as exciting as it sounds), and even though it’s pretty much a great thing, it can rob you of a large amount of readers (because when they click through to your blog they can’t load it, so they go away). WP Super Cache not only protects against instances like the Digg effect, it just overall makes your blog load faster and more efficiently, as instead of your blog serving up PHP processed pages, it generates an HTML version of your blog page which uses significantly less bandwidth. Because of the lighter “load” on your blog when WP Super Cache is enabled, it loads pages faster and with less bandwidth. What more can you ask for?

7. Google XML Sitemaps – This is definitely another “must have” plugin for any blog out there. The famous Google XML sitemaps plugin does so much that I can’t take the time to explain it all here, but what you need to know is that this awesome plugin will prepare a perfect XML sitemap for submission to Google, Yahoo, and Bing! It’s a one-click, hand-off approach (all you have to do is a quick configuration when you first install it) and from there on out, you can expect perfectly crafted sitemaps of your blog to be prepared and submitted to the big 3 search engines.

8. Tweetmeme – While this plugin compared to the rest is pretty young, by no means should it be underestimated! Tweetmeme.com keeps track of the hottest articles on Twitter and allows you to easily share and “retweet” at your delight. This plugin takes that concept to your blog and puts a nice and simple (and smart) “retweet” button at the beginning (or end) of your post that will allow your readers to quickly retweet your article in a familiar format. “Retweets” have easily become the new “Diggs” and the more retweets your article gets, the more chance it has at going “viral”. I haven’t seen a more easy to use retweet plugin yet, so Tweetmeme easily takes the cake in this category.

9. WordPress.com Stats - As a blogger, you’ll eventually become addicted to checking your stats. For some it’s just a phase, and they can go without checking for a few days (or even weeks) at a time. For others, checking stats is close to a mental health condition. Sure, Google Analytics can tell you more about a site than most people need to know, but you have to go through the trouble of logging in, and finding the screen you want and clicking this and clicking that….but WordPress.com stats plugin makes it stupidly simple to check the stats that matter, in nearly real-time, without leaving your WordPress admin interface. And because the load is handled on their servers, you don’t have to worry about it eating any of your bandwidth. This is a very fun (and HIGHLY addictive) plugin that every blogger should run on their blog.

10. Plugin Manager – Hey, what’s the use of all these plugins if you can’t easily check them out and install them in one click from within your WP admin interface? Plugin manager was created to do just that. Simply install this amazing utility plugin and never be more than one fancy Ajax click away from previewing and installing any plugin found in the WordPress plugin database. This is especially helpful for lazy bloggers (like me).

Hopefully you’ve gained some new plugin knowledge from the above 10 that are listed. Again, these are pretty common plugins, but the functionality and practical usefulness of all of them make them prime candiates for a top 10 plugin kind of post. These plugins are the ones that should be a staple in every bloggers plugin directory.

If you have any you’d like to share (or point out ones I left out), please leave them in the comments below, thanks!