I want to share with you some of my favorite WordPress plugins that I use regularly on WordPress blogs. There are more plugins that I use often but these 8 plugins are the standard ones. I use them on all my WordPress blogs or websites.

• Akismet – The best plugin to keep out all that nasty spam on your blog. Its standard in the WordPress installation so you don’t have to download it. You only have to sign up at Akismet.com to get de API key.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – I’m a bit of an analytics geek. I just love all the stats. This plugin, by Joost de Valk, is I think the best plugin to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site. You should see the video to check out all the features in this plugin.
• Gravity Forms – The only premium plugin in this list. But is worth the money. It’s a great plugin to make contact forms. But it’s also very easy to make big advanced forms.
• Redirection – A great plugin to track 404′s and to make 301 redirections. You don’t want your visitors to get a 404 on a page, do you? This plugin will find those 404′s and then you can redirect the visitors to the correct page. There is just one thing that I don’t like about this plugin and that is the User Interface. I always have to search. I hope that will improve soon.
• WP-DBManager – A nice plugin to maintain the database with all the data on it of your blog. You can schedule back-up’s or do it manual. There is an option to optimize the database. So it stays clean.
• WordPress SEO – If you’re already a bit in to WordPress and SEO then you already know All in one SEO. This plugin is really All in one. The feature list is just to long to post it here. One thing I really like is the Google search result snippet previews. It really helps you make a meta description and a good SEO title. Just delete All in one SEO and al the other SEO plugins you’re using right now and start using this one.
• W3 Total Cache – Nobody likes to visit a slow site. W3 Total Cache will help you with speeding up your site. A great plugin with too much options. Just start with the standard options and measure the difference with Pingdom.

Last but not least. My number one favorite plugin is Hello Dolly. It’s the plugin that makes WordPress so awesome! Did you know that Louis Armstrong made a song about the plugin?