Best WordPress plugins – 18 most downloaded WordPress plugins ever

WordPress 3 is out now. It is my favorite blogging platform although this runs on Blogger. It has more than 13 million users in total and the self-hosted WordPress.org has been downloaded more than 5 million times. See a guide on how to install WordPress.

WordPress plugins are a big part of the community. Over the years I have used many of the best WordPress plugins. WordPress plugins help you make a better blog and get more reader interaction. There are around 5000 plugins and these have been downloaded more than 23 million times.

This post is a tribute to the top 18 most downloaded WordPress plugins ever (Akismet is not included as it comes with the default installation). Each of these 18 has been downloaded a minimum of 200,000 times.

• All in One SEO Pack – Automatically optimizes your blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization) – Downloads 1 million

• Google XML Sitemaps – Create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your blog – Downloads 1 million

• NextGEN Gallery – A full integrated Image Gallery WordPress plugin with a Flash slideshow option – Downloads 800,000

• WP.com Stats – You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WP.com’s stat system – Downloads 100,000

• WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine that produces static html files –Downloads half a million

• Contact Form 7 – Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible –Downloads 400,000

• Automatic upgrade – Allows a user to automatically upgrade the installation to the latest one – Downloads 300,000

• Sociable – Automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites to your posts, pages and RSS feed - Downloads 300,000

• Viper’s Video Quicktags – Allows easy and XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more –Downloads 300,000

• Simple Tags – The successor of Simple Tagging Plugin and is THE perfect tool to perfectly manage your WP tags – Downloads 250,000

• WP-DB-Backup – On-demand backup of your database – Downloads 250,000

• Google Analytics – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics – Downloads 300,000

• Google Analyticator – Same as the one above, enables Google Analytics tracking - Downloads 250,000

• Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and over 100 more – Downloads 250,000

• WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your blog. You can also easily add a poll into your blog post / page – Downloads 250,000

• Sidebar Widgets – Adds “Sidebar Widgets” panel under Presentation menu –Downloads 250,000

• podPress – A dream WordPress plugin for podcasters – Downloads 200,000

• WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation your blog –Downloads 220,000