Top 60 incredibly handy WordPress plugins to power up your blog are thoroughly handpicked to be included in this list. Among some popular WordPress plugins you also will discover new, not so well known or underrated but extremely useful WordPress plugins. To make it easy for you all WordPress plugins are listed within the topics: Content Management, User Management, WordPress Administration, Multimedia, E-Commerce, Stat, Seo and Security. Do you have a favorite plugin not listed here? Please let me know in the comments.

WordPress Administration

WPtouch WordPress plugin
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-like experience when viewed from an iPhone or iPod touch. It comes complete with Ajax & effects, and all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more.

Maintenance Mode
Maintenance Mode WordPress plugin adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrator gets full access to the blog including the front-end. You can modify message which is being displayed when the maintenance mode is activated in the plugin’s options.

Script Compressor
Script Compressor WordPress plugin compresses JavaScript files and CSS files loaded by the theme or other plugins automatically. Extra spaces, lines, and comments will be deleted.

Autoclose
Autoclose WordPress plugin enables a granular approach to managing pingbacks/comments/trackbacks on both posts and pages. With its help you can close Comments on posts/pages older than (number of days), close Pingbacks/Trackbacks on posts or pages. Autoclose also provides a checkbox to delete post revisions.

WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates HTML files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly. WP-Cache 2 caches the pages of your WordPress blog and delivers them without accessing the database. If your site is struggling to cope with the daily number of visitors, or if your site appears on Digg.com, Slashdot or any other popular site then this plugin is for you.

WP Optimize
WP-Optimize plugin is a WordPress database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, and unapproved comments within few clicks. Additionally you can rename any username to another username too.

Raw HTML Plugin for WordPress
Raw HTML Plugin for WordPress doesn’t let WordPress to put backslashes in front of apostrophes, insert superfluous tags in place of newlines, and break HTML in various ways. This plugin lets you put any code or script (e.g. JavaScript) in your posts and display it to the visitor unmodified.

No Comments on Pages
No Comments on Pages is a tiny WordPress plugin which, when activated, disables posting of new comments to all pages and hides existing ones.

Titles as External Permalinks
With this WordPress plugin you can use the post titles as direct links to the sites. This small plugin will replace the standard permalink with an external URL without any need to modify your sites theme. There’s also an extra filter so that it will replace the permalinks within your RSS feed as well.

Multi-level Navigation Plugin for WordPress
Multi-level Navigation Plugin for WordPress generates the code necessary to create a horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu. The plugin produces W3C valid HTML and CSS and only requires JavaScript to function for very old browsers such as IE 6. You have control over what items (pages, categories, archives, blogroll etc.) appear in your dropdown via the plugins options page.

WordPress Backup
WordPress Backup is an essential plugin for all WordPress blog administrators. It performs regular backups of your upload (images), current theme, and plugin directories. Backup files are available for download and optionally emailed to a specified email. You can adjust the interval between backups and the email address to which the backups are sent. For database backup you can use WP DBManager.

Download Counter for WordPress
Download Counter for WordPress keeps track of statistical information about downloads of files attached to your posts and pages. It also can display the last download time, allows you to add counters to both internal and external urls, can print the amount of downloads, the file size and the last modified date in a post.

Branded Login Screen for WordPress
Branded Login Screen for WordPress lets you use custom login screen instead of WordPress default. Branded Admin which lets you change the admin area is also available.

AJAXed WordPress (AWP)
AJAXed WordPress (AWP) is a WordPress plugin that adds the power, usability and beauty of AJAX to any blog or WordPress based website. Its features improve the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential of any WordPress based blog. It can display excerpts of posts and then load full posts inline, submit comments without reloading the page, thread comments to make those long discussions easier to read.

WordPress Security

Yawasp
Yawasp (Yet Another WordPress Anti-Spam Plugin) uses an innovative approach to fight comment spam. Unlike other anti-comment-spambot-plugins which focus on user interaction, e.g. captcha or math comment spam protection, Yawasp focuses on handling comment-spam-protection within WordPress. It replaces the names of the comment form fields with random names changed every 24 hours, protecting your blog from spambots that aim at the default comment field names. As additional layer of protection it adds a blank field, hidden from the user that needs to be left empty.

WordPress Scanner
WordPress Scanneris a free online resource that can be used to check your WordPress blog security level. To run wp-scanner, you have to download the wp-scanner activator plugin. This plugin is only about 5 lines long. All it does is add “<!–wp-scanner–>” to your current WordPress template. It allows WPscanner online service to verify that you actually own the blog and have permission to test it. Just don’t forget to disable the plugin after use or others will be able to scan your blog too.

Content Management

Supple Forms
Supple Forms for WordPress offers two significant functions for your blog. You can build custom write panels for the WordPress Write Post page and easy insert form data and HTML snippets into your posts. Supple Forms lets you store your data in either WordPress Custom Fields or your own custom table that the plugin will create for you. So you can format and insert your data into pages and posts with shortcodes, and without tweaking templates.

I am reading WordPress plugin
I am reading is an easy configurable WordPress plugin to display books you are reading in a sidebar widget. Book information is pulled from Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Open Library and gets cached in database. You don’t need to input the book information manually (just type in ISBN or AWS key), you can change widget title through WP Admin, easily adjustable fonts, colors and HTML output.

Twitter Tools
Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress. You can also archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes), post a tweet from your sidebar or the WP Admin screens and pass your tweets along to another service.

Fresh from FriendFeed and Twitter
Fresh from FriendFeed and Twitter keeps your blog always fresh by regularly adding your most recent content from FriendFeed or Twitter. No external passwords required.

MailPress
With MailPress WordPress plugin you will be able to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails for comments subscribers, your periodic newsletters or post notification (per post/daily/weekly/monthly) as well as specific admin events : registration of a new user, comment to moderate, new comment on your posts. This plugin is widget ready; it’s using Swiftmailer and Google Chart API.

GD Star Rating
GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules; time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, and has a widgets build in and shortcodes support. It also supports Review rating for posts, pages and comments; Ajax rating support using jQuery.

Geotagger WordPress plugin
Geotagger is a WordPress plugin to manage your post geotags and optionally to display maps with markers and paths in your posts

Pods WordPress plugin
Pods WordPress plugin provides you with options to create more than just blog posts and pages. You can add new content types with only the fields you need. Customize exactly how each content type’s list and detail pages appear. It supports automatic pagination, filtering, public forms, access control.

Stray Random Quotes
Stray Random Quotes plugin helps you collect and display random quotes everywhere on your WordPress blog. The quotes can be reloaded on the blog with Ajax automation. The plugin is widget compatible, and the appearance of the quotes can be highly customized. It comes with an easy to use, advanced management tool and an option page.

Upcoming Posts
Upcoming Posts WordPress plugin allows you to notify your readers when you will post something. So if you want the readers be more curious about your blog you can use this plugin. It helps you to show scheduled posts or drafts.

Contextual Related Posts
Contextual Related Posts WordPress plugin helps you display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content/feed. It doesn’t require the post to be tagged in order to display related posts and you can manually add related posts where you want them displayed

Smart Archives Reloaded
Smart Archives Reloaded is an enhanced version of the Smart Archives. It’s easier to setup, there’s no code editing required, it features better caching and now you don’t need to wait when publishing a new post and provides you settings page to choose how you want the archives displayed.

Where did they go from here?
This plugin will show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page (as on Amazon). When a visitor views a blog post the plugin checks to see if the referrer is another blog post on your site. If this is the case, then the referring post is updated with a reference to this post. And, the process continues as the visitor moves through the blog.

LinkCurl WordPress plugin
LinkCurl WordPress plugin grabs related links from Google Blog Search based on post titles, tags, or categories and appends them to your entry. You can choose tags, categories, or title as the basis of Google Blog Search results to use with the plugin as well as the number of results to grab from Google Blog Search and the number of links to display.

WP Comment Remix
WP Comment Remix adds to WordPress such features as Reply and Quote links for commenters. You can add a Reply link to each comment, which, when clicked, adds “@OriginalPoster”, and links it to the anchor of that comment. Clicking the Quote link has a similar action to the Reply link, but it adds the entire comment in a blockquote tag. You can choose how you want to order the comments for your readers. You can also separate the Trackbacks from the comments and move them to the bottom of the list, or remove them completely.

Insights WordPress plugin
Insights for WordPress bring a powerful new way to write your blog posts. With Insights you can very quickly (in couple of seconds) do the following: search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post, insert Flickr Images, Youtube videos, links to Wikipedia, Google Map. Insights allows you to do all this using dynamic AJAX interface which loads the relevant information to your post in just a few seconds.

WP-Directory-List
WP-Directory-List provides you with a categorized directory listing for Url’s and Businesses. The directory listing can range from the simple link with description to a full business address, phone, fax and contact email. You can create separate pages for each category or list all of them at one time and allow your users to add links that will be pending until approved.

Art Direction WordPress plugin
This plugin allows you to have global archive and single page per-post styles and provides you with the ability to add styles/JavaScript/whatever you want to each entry.

Multimedia (photo, video)

Picturesurf Gallery The service is dead.
Picturesurf Gallery is a free service which provides WordPress plugin that allows you to upload, link, and share photo galleries anywhere. The advantages of using Picturesurf Gallery: it doubles your ad impressions (because each image has a separate page), increases pageviews, provides you with hassle free drag and drop editing, image galleries are optimized for SEO purposes as well.

FancyBox for WordPress
FancyBox for WordPress is a WP plugin that uses jQuery (bundled with default WordPress installation) to display images when clicked, without reloading the page. Once activated, each time you load your blog, the plugin will your search for direct links to JPG, PNG or GIF images and will apply the effect on them. All images on the page will be considered part of a gallery, allowing you and your visitors to navigate through them with the FancyBox interface.

Shadowbox JS WordPress Plugin
Shadowbox JS WordPress Plugin is a JavaScript media viewer similar to Lightbox and Thickbox. Supports all types of media, not just images. JavaScript libraries supported are: YUI, Prototype, jQuery, Ext, Dojo and MooTools.

ProPlayer WP Plugin
ProPlayer WP plugin will help you to put videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymoition on your blog in any FLV Player. It’s highly customizable with support of 27 skins and in addition you can play mov/mp4/h264/mp3 files too. Plugins includes Rating video, Visualizer for audio files, Displaying watermark. By default JW FLV Media Player is used.

Simply Picasa Web WordPress plugin
Simply-Picasaweb WordPress plugin lets you display thumbnails from one of your public Picasa Web albums (or all albums) in either your blogs template (sidebar) or alternatively within a blog post. This plugin takes the feed generated by your Picasa Web account and generates clean and simple html for display.

Flickr Tag plugin
Flickr Tag WordPress plugin is simple solution to show image thumbnails on your WordPress blog “inline” your posts and keep the photos and discussion on Flickr.

Smart Youtube
Smart Youtube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in your RSS feed. The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources. Smart YouTube also supports playback of high quality videos, works on iPhone, produces xHTML valid code and allows you to view videos in fullscreen.

WordPress Stat

Top 10 WordPress plugin
Top 10 is a page counter and popular posts plugin for WordPress. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts and store them in the database. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views. Includes a sidebar widget to display the popular posts. All settings can be configured from within your WordPress Admin area. Compatible with caching plugins.

WP Visitors WordPress plugin
WP Visitors WordPress plugin records information about every visitor (page load). Requested URL, referring URL, IP address, hostname and browser along with Date/Time are recorded and displayed in a tabular fashion. Geographical resolution of IP address (it’s only approximate) is also included.

WordPress Popular Posts
WordPress Popular Posts is a sidebar widget to show the most popular posts in your blog. You can set its title (or leave it blank if you don’t want to use any), how many entries to show, whether to display or not comments count and/or pageviews for each entry listed, and to show (or not) an excerpt of each post’s title. You can list your posts either by comment count, pageviews or average daily views.

WassUp Plugin
WassUp is a WordPress plugin to track your visitors in real time. It has a very readable and fancy admin console to keep tracks of your blog’s users visits. It comes with a “Spy” view in Ajax like the Digg Spy.

User Management

WP Sentry
WP Sentry is a plugin for access-restricted posting, allowing bloggers to discuss sensitive subjects without being exposed to Google or non registered users. With WP Sentry you can create user groups, specify which users or groups have access to the post. Setting any access restrictions forces the post to be listed as “private” in WordPress, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting to hide a sensitive post. Users may be members of multiple groups.

WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin
WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer URL. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Compatible with various WordPress cache plugins.

Absolute Privacy
Absolute Privacy foe WordPress provides you with the ultimate user moderation. It’s perfect for family blogs, private communities, and personal websites. It could force users to enter first and last name during registration, let users to choose their own passwords, get emailed every time an approval is waiting (with a link for quick approval), lock out all non-logged in views from your website.

VidoopConnect
VidoopConnect WordPress plugin makes it easier to sign up and login to your site by letting your blog visitors reuse their existing accounts from sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and MySpace, or any other OpenID provider. Signing up is a quick process, you need to choose the way you wish to sign in (any account you already use), after entering some basic information like your name and email confirmation, you are logged in.

EasySMS
EasySMS is a great way for WordPress administrators to send SMS message to users’ cell phones. You can group subscribers together for more productive SMS messaging. Features include owner verification of cell phones with unsubscribe feature, auto-notification of new posts to subscribers, 80 default carriers.

WordPress Membership Site Plugin Memberwing
This plugin lets you build Membership Site allowing up to 4 levels of membership. It supports Recurring Paypal payments and affiliates programmes, optimized for SEO.

SEO

HeadSpace 2
HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages. It provides option to collect metadata not only from the page itself, but nested parent pages, dynamically extract data from the post itself, auto-suggested AJAX interface for tags and keywords, mass-editing for all pages and posts.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
This plugin generates a compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. It also lets you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

Redirection
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

WordPress E-Commerce

WP-Invoice
WP-Invoice plugin lets WordPress blog owners send invoices to their clients. The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information.
Once an invoice is created from the WP admin section, an email with a brief description and a unique link is sent to your client. Clients follow the link to your blog’s special invoice page, view their invoice, and pay their bill using their credit card via Authorize.net, MerchantPlus’ NaviGate, or PayPal.

WordPress e-Commerce Plugin
The WordPress e-Commerce plugin is e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. This plugin makes it easy for you to accept payments online via Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Express. You can also tweak your site to look however you want utilizing WordPress PHP template tags, shortcodes and widgets.

Store Locator
Store locator is a WordPress plugin that uses Google Maps to provide robust mapping tools for Web Designers & Developers who create sites in WordPress. You will need a Google account in order to retrieve an API for your maps to work properly. You have an option to show and drop-down of all cities that user can search.

Google Mapper
Google Mapper allows the administrator of a website built with WordPress to enter locations of stores. The information is then displayed on the front end using the Google maps interface. The user can enter a starting location in the search field, the system will then find the closest location from it’s starting point and display the path and necessary steps to get to that location.

Smart Ads
Smart Ads automatically inserts advertisements like Google’s Adsense above and below your post content. These advertisements are only visible when viewing a single post. users can set a “Wordcount” minimum for their advertisements. Smart Ads will only insert advertisements into posts that meet or exceed the desired Wordcount. Also users can chose to only place ads on posts that are over a certain amount of days old. Advertisements can be manually disabled on a post-by-post basis while writing a post, for entire categories, or for registered blog members.

WP125 WordPress Plugin
The WP125 plugin is designed to make it easy to manage 125X125 banner ads on your blog. It’s very customizable, allowing you plenty of options for displaying the ads. It can optionally track the number of times the ads are clicked and how long an ad should run.