22 Best Must Have WordPress 3 Plugins

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When I decided to move to WordPress 3.1, I revisited all of the plugins that I have been using and started a research project to find some new must have plugins that would enhance the blog. The criteria I used for choosing these best must have plugins was that they:

1) must be popular plugins (as defined on the WordPress.org site so that I have a fair amount of confidence that they are reliable, stable, and not prone to security leaks.
2) must be coded in such a way that they do not collide with other plugins which would destabilize my blog.
3) work with the most current version of WordPress and that they have a reasonably long pedigree so that I know that they will be updated as new WordPress versions are released.
4) receive decent comments on the WordPress.org support forum. If the plugin has its own forum even better.
5) do not overburden and slow down the site and work well with the caching plugin that I am using.
6) have decent documentation especially if there are many options.

Here is the list that I came up with and use. I welcome any other recommendations or comments:

Security

My approach to security for WordPress 3 is the same approach I use for security on my on personal computer. I attempt to install multiple layers of security that work in different ways so that if intruder enter and gets through one layer the next layer will hopefully stop them. These plugins also help to minimize bandwidth traffic since fewer intruders get through.

Akismet is the granddaddy of WordPress anti-spam plugins. The idea is ingenious. Aksimet maintains a comprehensive database of known spammers and whenever a comment is submitted to your blog the WordPress application will check Akismet to see whether it is being submitted by a spammer. The Akismet database is kept updated in real-time by the universe of Akismet users whenever a post is tagged as spam, so the database is current and complete. Akismet can be used by other types of plugins, such as registration plugins, to block known spammers from registering. The knock against Akismet is that sometimes good guys are blacklisted on the Akismet database and it is difficult to get un-blacklisted. An Akismet key is free for personal blogs.

Bad Behavior
Bad-Behavior has a different objective from Akismet. It is designed to analyze the behavior of the visitors to your blog and stop spam bots even before they have a chance to view the blog. This helps minimize bandwidth while also protecting your blog. It works even if the spammer is not yet in the Akismet database and you can turn off logging so that it uses a minimum amount of resources. Another great plugin in this category is WP-SpamFree. I chose Bad Behavior because it is participating in Project Honey Pot which provides another layer of protection. Project Honey Pot harvests spammer addresses and stores them in a centralized database.

Fast Secure Contact Form
I chose Fast Secure Contact Form because it has two types of security (remember I like layering). You can choose either Captcha, Akismet, or both (I use both). In addition to these security features the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. It is a very flexible and secure contact form plugin that is very popular among WordPress users.

Login LockDown
The Login LockDown plugin is designed to lock down the sign in process. It keeps count of the number of times a vistor tries to login. After a certain number of administrator specified attempts, the visitor is no longer permitted to try to log in for specified amount of time.

SABRE
Here is a plugin that helps to secure the registration process. The administrator can choose between Captcha, math question or both (I chose the math question since Captcha can be a pain sometimes). It allows you to to block visitors on a ban list, specify the interval time between registration and first login, specify invitation codes and more. It is a very handy plugin to add to your security set up.

Secure WordPress
Until this plugin came along, an administrator might serendipitously pick up specific security tips while perusing forums or blogs. This plug-in is a compilation of good practices that you can enforce to help secure your WordPress blog.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
This is a straightforward anti-bot plugin that allows the administrator to adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to the comment form, registration form, login, or all.

Administration and SEO
These are a set of plugins that makes it easier for administrators to improve SEO (search engine optimization), manage their databases, check for the integrity of the blog’s links, manage tracking scripts, etc.

Good SEO on Google is a combination of several factors including proper keyword descriptions in the right places in your blog, good blog performance, uncorrupted links, good traffic metrics (e.g. the amount of time a visitor stays on your site (linger time), bounce rate), etc. These plugins as well as the Usability and Security Plugins help ensure good SEO.

All in One SEO Pack
Many of the original uses of the All in One SEO Pack are not incorporated into the base WordPress application, but there are still several SEO items that this plugin handles better such as titles. I find it very useful and among WordPress users many consider it essential for SEO best practices.

All in One Webmaster
This plugin will let you have a single point for inserting tracking codes for various search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo and with other options. It automatically inserts code in the WordPress header and footer files so the administrator does not have to manual edit the files.

Better Delete [Update 11-24-2010]
This plugin is almost a must have for optimized WordPress performance. WordPress is constantly saving revisions of posts in its database tables and this balloons the size of the tables creating all kinds of performance problems. You can use this plugin to shrink the size of the table and optimize WordPress performance. However, deleting the revisions is not enough because WordPress uses MyISAM MySQL database table structures. When you delete revisions from the tables, it leaves huge wholes in the table so the table is still very large. In order to shrink the size of the table you then run the second step of this program which optimizes (shrinks) the table back to normal. This is a great, must-have, plugin. It is a simple plugin to use, and so far it has worked very well for me. However, since it does delete and optimize the database, use it with some care.

Broken Link Checker
Since my blog is all about links, I want to make sure that the links that appear in my blogs are not broken as the blog ages. This is a handy plugin that will check links and report back any broken links. This is an invaluable plugin that will help keep your posts clean and user friendly.

FD Feedburner Plugin
I want to make my RSS feed as user friendly as possible so I let this plugin and Feedburner do all of the heavy lifting. If you haven’t used Feedburner, Feedburner keeps track of how many users are tracking your feed, which posts they are looking at, and how your blog is trending. It also lets you place Adsense in your feeds (Feedburner is owned by Google) and if you like, set up multiple feeds under your one account.

Google XML Sitemaps
There is a better chance that Google will visit the right pages in your blog if you give it a XML Sitemap assist. You’ll have to register with Google and verify ownership of your blog (Google will lead you through these steps) before you can take advantage of Sitemaps, but it is well worth the effort and will improve the SEO of your site.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
I put tags on my posts. This plugin will use the tags and other information to find posts that are related to each other and displays these posts so visitors can easily find posts that they may also be interested in.