When you are looking for plugins to enhance your blog whether it is to optimize it, add features or functionality or keep it more secure one thing to heavily consider is the plugin ratings in the WordPress codex, ratings for a plugin are not reliable if there are only a handful of ratings and downloads, but once a plugin starts getting hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads and hundreds of ratings you can get a pretty good idea of which plugins are the ones you should be trying.
Below are a list of the top 5 rated plugins in the WordPress archive and are completely free, this list is current as of December 2012 and is of course subject to change but they are exceptional plugins regardless.
Google XML Sitemaps
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This plugin adds a sitemap.xml file to your WordPress blog so that search engines can easily and automatically find and index the content on your site. This is a fantastic plugin and I have used it for many blogs for over 3 years, but recently I switched to using the sitemap functionality in the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin which is also listed.
W3 Total Cache
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There is no better caching plugin for your blog, but W3 Total Cache comes with a little bit of administrative overhead and does require you to do some research to configure and set it up so that it performs optimally. It is an exceptional tool to tie your blog into using Cloudflare, MaxCDN and other caching networks so you can keep your blog performance at its best and it is highly recommended you pair the caching with a cloud content provider to keep as much load as possible off of your hosting servers. Cloudflare is free as is Incapsula and both are excellent choices to compliment W3 Total Cache.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
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All in One SEO Pack used to be the definitive SEO Plugin for WordPress, but YOAST trounced them with this incredible full featured SEO plugin. WordPress SEO by Yoast will import all your SEO data from All in One SEO pack and also serves as a Sitemap generator, an RSS feed updater and will also teach you how to optimize your articles by showing on post optimization tips and checks. There is no better or more fully featured SEO plugin for WordPress and if you haven’t used WordPress SEO by Yoast yet then I encourage you to look at it.
Add Link to Facebook
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This plugin lets you automatically publish your posts to Facebook directly from your blog, it is recommended if you use a Facebook fanpage and rely on Facebook but I use Dlvr.it and other services to auto publish my blog posts to Facebook instead of a WordPress plugin to help reduce plugin overhead. Still it is a good choice and simple to implement if you want to make sure when you publish blog posts they auto share on Facebook.
NextGen Gallery
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Finally the last plugin in our top 5 most popular WordPress plugins roundup is the NextGen Gallery. This plugin allows you to create galleries of images and gives you the flexibility to display images how you want to and this is a perfect plugin for blogs that use multiple images in articles.
What are your top plugins for WordPress share what you think are your top 5 and they could be reviewed here.
This is an original article from WP Cypher Copyright 2012
