If you using WordPress with self hosted installation I assume you are using one or more WordPress plugins. Correct, right! WordPress is a very flexible publishing platform and CMS. But much of this flexibility is that you can add extra functionality by installing various plugins.
We all have our favorite plugins, and what plugins we use depends on what we want to accomplish or what function we want to add! I have been using WordPress for 6 years and have over the years tried tons of plugins and there are loads of great plugins to use, both free and premium.
But today I take a closer look at the most popular free WordPress plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory. But by using a great tool from ManageWP.
With this tool, you can obtains informative statistics about the plugins that been most downloaded, new and upcoming plugins, you can compare plugins, best new plugins and more. All this is hard to discover using conventional methods such as (WP.org repo).
In today’s article I highlight 5 free WordPress plugins that have been downloaded over 10 million times, which is extremely impressive numbers. I am sure you are aware of these plugins and probably use many of them on your own WordPress website. I do!
Here is the five most popular and most downloaded plugins of all time .
Akismet
Akismet is one of the best services to protect your WordPress website against spam comments. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service and automatically checks all comments and filters that look like spam. You’ll need an Akismet.com API key to use it, and keys are free for personal blogs. Akismet have been downloaded over – 26,000,000 times.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a simple to use WordPress plugin. With this plugin you can easily create multiple contact forms for your website. Customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. It supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering plus much more Contact Form 7 have been downloaded over – 22,000,000 times.
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is the most used SEO plugin. With this plugin you can automatically optimize your WordPress blog for search engines such as Google. It include a lot of features and options such as XML sitemap support, Google Analytics support, advanced canonical URLs, fine tune Page navigational links. All in One SEO Pack have been downloaded over – 20,000,000 times.
Google XML Sitemaps
With Google XML Sitemaps you can create and generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google to better index your blog. With a sitemap it is more easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your website. It notifies all major search engines every time you create a post. Google XML Sitemaps have been downloaded over – 15,000,000 times.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
With this popular SEO plugin you can improve your WordPress SEO. Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. This is a helpful and great plugins that goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization. WordPress SEO by Yoast have been downloaded over – 14,000,000 times.
Downloads over 10 million times is very impressive and in addition to the five above-mentioned plugins, there are two plugins that also has passed 10 million downloads. It’s Jetpack and NextGEN Gallery with 13,000,000 and 11,000,000 downloads.
Which or what plugins do you use on your WordPress website?