In this post I am going to reveal to you 21 WordPress plugins which I believe deserve attention because of the value they provide to the WordPress community. I hope you will find at least one WordPress plugin from this 21 which can be of benefit to you

I have written a description outlining the features of each plugin. Click Here to Preview to see a pop up preview of the wordpress plugin. You can download the plugin at the creators website by clicking on the plugin name.

So grab that cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy.

Affiliate Cloaking Made Easy

1. Pretty Link – This handy WordPress plugin makes cloaking your affiliate links VERY easy and the best part of all is that the shortlinks are created from your very own domain. Another stand out feature is the detailed report which Pretty Link prepares, outlining how many clicks a link gets, the browser of the person clicking and the operating system they are using. Highly recommended.

Easy 125 x 125 Ad Management For WordPress

2.WP125 – This exceptional plugin makes managing your 125 x 125 ads on a WordPress blog a whole lot easier and is a plugin many WordPress blog owners would enjoy using.
The following are some of the features it has to offer:
-Sets how long you want to run the ad for (X amount of days) and after this amount of time the ad is taken down automatically. A huge time saver!
-Tracks how many times an ad is clicked on
- Has the ability to display a placeholder ad of your choice with a link to your advertisers’ page for more information.

Effective Social Bookmarking Buttons

3.Digg Digg – A plugin that allows you to add a social voting button to your website. This makes it easier for readers to submit your content to social bookmarking websites. Supported sites: Digg, Reddit, DZone, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and Polladium.

Stylish Archives

4.Smart Archives Reloaded – In my opinion one of the best archive WordPress plugins available. This plugin allows you to create a clean, easy to navigate archive page on your site.

A Friendly Welcoming Message

5.Referrer Detector – This plugin identifies where any visitor to your site has come from and displays a greeting message based on this information. You have the ability to customize this greeting message to suit.

6.What Would Seth Godin Do – This plugin displays a small box above each post with the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” This message can be edited and will disappear once it has been viewed 5 times.

Sitemap Generator For WordPress

7.Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Allows you to create a search engine friendly sitemap on your website. This will make it easier for spiders to index new content and for users to quickly browse through previous posts that you have written.

First Time Commenter’s

8.Comment Redirect – Another useful plugin created by Joost de Valk at Yoast.com. This plugin allows you to redirect first time commenter’s to a page of your choosing. On this page you can ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed, thank them for commenting on your blog, or ask for them to sign up for your newsletter. The page you redirect them to is entirely your choice.

Speed up WordPress

9.WordPress Super Cache – This plugin drastically reduces the time it takes for webpages to load on your WordPress blog. With its super fast caching, your visitors will be able to load pages faster than ever. It also helps protect against massive traffic spikes from sites such as Digg.

Down for Maintenance

10.Maintenance Mode Plugin – Creates a splash page to inform visitors that your blog is currently down for maintenance. Administrators will still be able to edit the blog as usual.

Give Your Posts A Rating

11.GD Star Rating Plugin – Allows users to rate comments, posts and pages on your blog. This plugin increases user interaction with your content and helps you recognize which posts your readers like or dislike on your blog.

Discourage Copy Cats

12.WP-PreventCopyBlogs – Many bloggers may have to deal with content theft at some point in time. This helps stop content theft through a number of ingenious methods such as disabling both the right click option and text selection. A very good plugin to deter content thieves.

Spread the Comment Luv

13.Comment Luv – Encourage comments on your WordPress blog with this plugin. Comment Luv fetches the feed found at the commenter’s site URL and adds their latest post as a link below their comment.

Create a Magnificent Photo Blog

14.Yet Another Photoblog – Create a full featured photo blog in no time at all with this plugin. A perfect plugin if you have a collection of photos that you wish to share with the world.

Make your Blog Mobile Friendly

15.WPtouch – Automatically turn your WordPress blog into a fully compatible mobile blog that is viewable on the iphone, ipod touch, and Android touch. With the growing popularity of mobile devices used to access the internet, this is definitely a worthwhile plugin to use on your site.

16.MobilePress – Turn your WordPress blog into a mobile friendly blog viewable on a wide variety of mobile devices. You can show ads, customize the themes, and track visitors through analytics. Best of all, MobilePress is search engine friendly resulting in search engine spiders indexing the mobile pages of your WordPress blog.

301 Redirects

17.Simple 301 Redirects – Another useful plugin made by Scott Nelle. Simply set up a 301 redirect for any of your pages. For example, you can easily redirect example.com/page3/?q=ek to example.com/page3/. An ideal plugin to use if you have recently changed your permalink structure.

Controlled WordPress Pinging

18.MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Another exceptional plugin which is very useful for all wordpress blogs. This plugin allows you to limit how many times your blog send a “ping” within a short space of time. This will help you avoid being banned from ping services due to excessive pinging.

Elegant Slideshow of Featured Posts

19.Smooth Slider – This plugin allows you to create a dynamic slideshow of featured posts on your WordPress blog. Smooth Slider is text and JavaScript based, enabling the text to be indexed by search engines spiders resulting in maximum SEO benefit for your blog.

Add Sub Headings to Your Posts and Pages

20.Subheading – This useful plugin allows you to add a subheading below the title on your posts and pages. Once installed, an option to add a subheading on the post page is made available. These sub headings are also viewable on RSS feeds.

Make your Images Appealing

21.Flexible Lightbox – This plugin allows you to give a larger preview of an image that you have on your site. This plugin has provided the pop up images which are viewable on this page. The best part of all is that it adds the HTML automatically to all inserted images. Click on the preview button to see what I mean.

That concludes my top list of 20 exceptional wordpress plugins. If you think I’ve missed one, or have any suggestions of your own then I would be delighted to hear about them in the comment section below!