As 2013 travels down the history book EWT analysts take a look at the top 45 most downloaded WordPress plugins in the past 12 months.
Plugins are the fundamental ingredients that constitute a flowering website – If you are running your website on a WordPress self hosted platform you will understand what I mean by that term. Whether you are managing a cooperate/business or personal/commercial blog, we all help ourselves with one plugin or the other.
Statistics has shown that more plugins was added to the WordPress data base in 2013 than in the preceding years. Likewise, more bloggers and webmasters (esp. in Africa & Asia) uses the WordPress self hosted platform making it the most popular CMS across the globe.
The stats are quite incredible. Aren’t they? “What plugins did they use?” remains a question we need to tackle in the following section.
45. The Events Calendar —Download
Helps you create and mange events easily on your WordPress self hosted platform.
44. Share Buttons by AddToAny —Download
A social sharing service provided by AddToAny that adds social sharing functionality to your website.
43. UpdraftPlus – WordPress Backup and Restoration —Download
This Plugin helps you perform a complete backup or restoration of your self hosted WordPress site into a cloud service such as: Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email, DreamObjects, etc.
42. WP e-Commerce —Download
Convert your self hosted WordPress site into an e-Commerce site with this free plugin. Customers can buy products, services and digital downloads from your website.
41. Regenerate Thumbnails —Download
Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings -> Media) after previously uploading images or have changed to a theme with different featured post image dimensions.
40. Google Analytics for WordPress —Download
Easily track and monitor your WordPress site stats using info provided by Google Analytics.
39. Really Simple CAPTCHA —Download
A dependent captcha module that can be called up by other plugins. Note: This plugin does not function on it’s own.
38. Theme My Login —Download
This plugin themes the WordPress login, registration and forgot password pages according to your current theme. It creates a page to use in place of wp-login.php, using a page template from your theme. Also includes a widget for sidebar login.
37. Disable Comments —Download
This plugin allows administrators to globally disable comments on any post type (posts, pages, attachments, etc.) so that these settings cannot be overridden for individual posts. It also removes all comment-related fields from edit and quick-edit screens. On multisite installations, it can be used to disable comments on the entire network.
36. BuddyPress —Download
Just stay where you are, you can have it all – BuddyPress adds a social networking functionality to WordPress site. Users can create profiles, post messages, make connection, create and interact in groups. In the part 1 and part 2 of ‘How to Create a Social Network with WordPress’ we covered the basics of setting up this plugin.
35. WP-Statistics —Download
Track visitors and visit statistics of your WordPress site.
34. Advanced Custom Fields —Download
Advanced Custom Fields is the perfect solution for any wordpress website which needs more flexible data like other Content Management Systems.
33. Responsive Add Ons —Download
In compliance with the recent WordPress theme guidelines, this plugin ensures that themes functionality is limited to design, layout and structure and that anything that falls outside of this is developed as a plugin.
32. ShareThis: Share Buttons and Social Analytics —Download
Adds the ShareThis share buttons to your website. Also allows you to monitor how often people share your contents.
31. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) —Download
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) displays pages, posts, and custom post types related to the current entry, introducing your readers to other relevant content on your site.
30. Fast Secure Contact Form —Download
Easily create and add forms to WordPress. Fields are easy to add, remove, and re-order. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin, and also send a meeting request to talk over phone or video.
29. WP Multibyte Patch —Download
Multibyte functionality enhancement for the WordPress Japanese package. 日本語の説明を読む
28. WP-PageNavi —Download
Replace ‘older’ and ‘newer’ links with numeric page navigation system.
27. Comprehensive Google Map Plugin —Download
A simple and intuitive, yet elegant and fully documented Google map plugin that installs as a widget and a short code.
26. Wordfence Security —Download
Wordfence Security is a free enterprise class security plugin that includes a firewall, virus scanning, real-time traffic with geolocation.
25. Breadcrumb NavXT —Download
This plugin generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress powered blog or website. These breadcrumb trails are highly customizable to suit the needs of just about any website running WordPress.
24. Quick Cache (Speed Without Compromise) —Download
Speed your website loading with this easy-to-use cache plugin.
23. MailPoet Newsletters (formerly Wysija) —Download
Send newsletters, post notifications or autoresponders easily from your WordPress site.
22. W3 Total Cache —Download
Similar to Quick Access, W3 Total Cache plugin improve your site speed and delivers your contents faster.
21. Meta Slider —Download
Meta Slider is a flexible, easy to use slideshow administration plugin that lets you choose between 4 jQuery sliders.
20. Broken Link Checker —Download
This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.
19. bbPress —Download
A free plugin that will install forum functionality into your WordPress site.
18. Better WP Security —Download
This plugin helps you secure your WordPress site.
17. Facebook
Add Facebook social plugins and the ability to publish new posts to a Facebook Timeline or Facebook Page. Official Facebook plugin.
16. WP Super Cache —Download
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
15. Google Analyticator —Download
Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics in your WordPress Site.
14. Contact Form —Download
An easy to use plugin that let you implement contact form to any page or post in your blog.
13. Captcha —Download
This plugin allows you to implement super security captcha form into web forms.
12. BackWPup Free – WordPress Backup Plugin —Download
Schedule complete automatic cloud backups of your WordPress site.
11. TinyMCE Advanced —Download
Beef up the WordPress TinyMCE content editor with a plethora of advanced options.
10. Ultimate TinyMCE —Download
Adds advance editing functions to the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.
9. WooCommerce – excelling eCommerce —Download
Convert your WordPress site into an online store with this simple plugin.
8. NextGEN Gallery —Download
Create decent galleries with this free plugin.
7. WPtouch Mobile Plugin —Download
Want to create a mobile site on WordPress? Here is your chance. WPtouch Mobile is a free plugin that helps you setup a mobile site on WordPress with 1,2,3 touches.
6. Akismet —Download
A war has long be declared between spammers and webmasters. This plugin helps you fight spam on your comment section.
5. WordPress Importer —Download
Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file.
4. Google XML Sitemaps —Download
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, etc crawl your site faster and more effectively.
3. Jetpack by WordPress.com —Download
Supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features such as: Email subscription, CSS editor, Hovercard popups, etc previously only available to WordPress.com users.
2. All in One SEO Pack —Download
No SEO knowledge is required – All in One SEO Pack is a WordPress SEO plugin to automatically optimize your WordPress blog for Search Engines such as Google. Even as a total novice, you can use custom titles, custom url, advanced canonical URLs, fine tune page navigational Links on your blog posts. This plugin also helps you avoid duplicate articles submitted to you as a guest post.
1. Contact Form 7 —Download
Let your customers, clients or readers contact you from your WordPress site. Contact Form 7 is an Ajax contact form with easy to use interface. Can easily be embedded into any page.
+1 WordPress SEO by Yoast —Download
Sitting at the top of our list is ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast’ plugin. This plugin helps you improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site. Though the functions are a bit similar to that of All in One SEO Pack, the premium supports offers more.