I get a lot of questions about plugins. What are they? How do they work? Why doesn’t this one work? Which one will do [insert very specific action]? Since you are all quite interested in plugins, I thought I’d make a LIST of all my favourite plugins. Because who doesn’t like lists?!? Here they are:

My Top 10 WordPress Plugins

1. BackupBuddy: in my humble opinion, the most important plugin you’ll ever install. Run scheduled full and database-only backups of your website, send it to your remote stash, migrate to a new server, and/or restore seamlessly. It’s awesome. And imperative.
2. Akismet: One of the best plugins around for combating comment and contact form spam. Plus they have a really nice sliding scale!!
3. Sucuri: Best WordPress security software that I have found yet. One-click hardening, remote malware scanning, and email alerts, to name a few of the many spectacular features of this plugin. Worth every penny.
4. WordPress SEO by Yoast: FREE! and awesome SEO plugin by Yoast. I super love this plugin and use it (and the previous three) on all my sites.
5. Open external links in a new window: because you want to give folks valuable links to resources outside of your website, right? Sharing is caring but not at the expense of loosing fans.
6. Google Analytics Dashboard: See a quick overview of your website statistics from your dashboard. How cool is that?
7. Regenerate Thumbnails: for those times when you change your theme and/or media sizes. Totally takes care of your image size for you. Awesome!
8. SeedProd Coming Soon Pro: Simply and beautifully put your site into maintenance mode while applying updates, etc, without loosing site conversions! Create custom branded and designed splash pages that connect to AWebber, MailChimp, etc while you work. Also plays nice with search engines (read: Google). Love it.
9. nrelate Related Content: Keep your blog readers happily reading down the bunny trails of your site with this related content plugin. Oh, and it’s really pretty & clean, too.
10. Opt-in skin: When you want your opt-in forms to work harder, split test designs with this plugin!

Whew! That’s my list and I’m sticking to it (well, at least for now until I find something else new and shiny…)!

Now it’s time for participACTION (pretty sure I just violated a trademark law there, at least here in Canada)! Which one of my top 10 WordPress plugins seems the most interesting to you? Which one do you want to get to know better? Let me know in the comments and I’ll write a future Wink dedicated entirely to the installation, configuration, and maintenance of that plugin!