There are many reasons to love wordpress. It is versatile, easy to use and powerful but perhaps best of all the thousands of plugins that are available to make your job as a developer, designer or even a SEO much easier. It doesn’t really matter what you want to achieve – chances are already there is a plugin out there for it. With that in mind we have complied a list of our top 10 essential plugins for 2011 – they all serve a variety of purposes, and help even the most seasoned wordpress professional or a newbie blogger. So whether you want to brush up on your SEO, move your site to a new domain with ease, or just make your site that little bit more user friendly then this post is for you.

Google Plus One Button

The Goolge Plus One Button lets you embed the new google plus one button anywhere on your site. Unsure what the buttons for? Read about it here.
The plugins is very versatile, it lets you display it in the following from the settings panel:

• Display Google +1 button in the posts, pages, single posts or everywhere.
• Display Google +1 button above the post ['Top'], below the post ['Buttom'], both above and below ['Both'], or floating left side of post ['Left'].
• Display Google +1 button in four different sizes (Standard, small, medium and Tall)
• Display Google +1 button using template tag or shortcode [twg_gpo_button] at any desired position.

Subscribe to comments

The Subscribe to Comments Plugins is a great plugin that allows blog commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries.It is great for generating repeat visitors and reigniting conversation on old posts. It also has an inbuilt subscription manager allowing users to unsubscribe when they wish, change email address and block notifications.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

The WordPress SEO plugins by Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins available. It is crammed full of features and really handles all aspects of your On site optimization. You can change title, tags, meta description on a per post/page basis which ensure great flexibility. It can generate .xml sitemaps and handle permalink structure.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

The yet another related posts plugin allows you to link to other related posts at the end of other posts on your site. Using an algorithm, it automatically selects which ones are relevant. It’s useful because it increases the usability of your site – and encourages visitors to stay on the site and learn more about you. Its also simple to install and doesn’t require any changes to your wordpress template.

Redirection

The Redirection plugin is perfect for tying up lose ends on your wordpress site. It can detect 404 pages – that are bad for usability. And lets you implement
301 redirects without having to play around with .htaccess. It is a very useful plugin if you have a site that is constantly changing, or you are migrating from one domain to another.

WP DB-Manager

WP DB-Manager is a great plugin for managing your wordpress MySQL database. You can optimize it, back it up, repair it and a whole bunch of other things.It’s great for simple backups, and also great if you want to get down and dirty. You can also schedule backups to be emailed to you, which makes the all important backing up of your site simple.

Ultimate Follow Me

Sometimes the simplest plugins are the best, and that’s definitely the case with the Ultimate Follow Me plugin. It allows you to quickly and easily add your social profiles in a wordpress widget. You can also add your RSS feed link too. No uploading individual icons. Just install this plugin, type your profile URL’s in and it does the rest for you.

Duplicator

The Duplicator plugin makes it easy to take a full copy of your wordpress site from the wordpress admin dashboard. It is ideal if you are developing a wordpres site locally, and then want to push it onto the live web with ease.

WP Total Hacks

This plugin let’s you customize your wordpress core options. Here is a list of just some of the things you can do:

• Add a favicon.
• Change admin header logo.
• Change admin footer text.
• Change login logo.
• Deactivate selected meta boxes for Posts & Pages.
• Deactivate selected dashboard widgets.
• Remove unnecessary meta tags.
• Change default email address.
• Remove Update Notification for all users except Admin User.
• Delete default contact methods from user profile.
• Customize limit the number of allowed revisions.
• Disable auto save.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

Trying to get your blog organized? Want to stick to a more structured posting system rather than just as and when? Then the WordPress editorial calendar is for you.It’s perfect for organizing your blog, and knowing when posts are going live.
You can try the demo here

Think we’ve missed any? What are your some new favorite plugins?

Jonathan Moss is a tennis blogger and wordpress enthusiast, he works in IT Support for Integral IT.