Top Ten WordPress plugins in 2011

Wordpress in itself is a very powerful Content Management System (CMS), but it still has it’s limitations. There are thousands of plugins available to extend the features that WordPress has to offer. This aim of this article is simply to assist you when making choices on which plugins to install.

Below is a list of arguably the 10 best WordPress plugins (in no particular order) and on a must-have for most, if not all, WordPress blogs or websites.

1. Akismet – Usually installed in a deactivated state and used by millions. Akismet is a plugin which identifies and blocks comment and trackback spam on blogs with integration to various blogging systems.
2. All-in-One SEO Pack – Extremely important, This plugin automatically optimizes your site for search engines and provides areas in each post specify keywords, tags and a description for your post.
3. Google XML Sitemaps – Sitemaps are extremely important to have. Search Engines will take one look at that and know your site backwards (if built correctly). This plugin makes life SO much easier by automatically generating a sitemap for you.
4. WP-Typography – This WordPress plugin can control, manage and improve a website’s typography/fonts. Highly recommended to implement a typography standard.
5. WordPress.com Stats – You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stats
6. WP Minify – When trying to increase the speed of your page, every little bit helps. WP Minify will remove all the unnecessary white space from your CSS and javascript files on the fly, to to compress those files and therefor speed up the page.
7. Sharebar – Sharebar adds a dynamic and fully customizable vertical box to the left of a blog post that contains links/buttons to the most popular social networks.
8. WPTouch -WPTouch will deliver a mobile + iPad version of your website in a few clicks, with the feel of a native mobile app.
9. WP-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.
10. WP-PageNavi – Although most themes have their own page navigation, PageNavi will give you more control over css and other advanced features

There are many more great plugins out there and the best way to find out what is best for your site is to experiment. Not all plugins will fit all themes and be careful because I have found that plugins can conflict with each other and cause errors, or sometimes not display the plugin at all.