Some people have recently been asking me to write another WordPress plugin list, so I thought I’d better get to work and put a new one together.  I’ve been scouring the internet to find some of the best WordPress plugins for you to use on your website.

Here are my top 15 WordPress plugins that I have found.

Top 15 WordPress Plugins

1. AddThis

2013 looks set to put more emphasis on social media and social sharing, so it is important to make all your pages easy to share.  The ‘AddThis’ plugin makes this easy to do.

Just install it and set it up to show a wide variety of social sharing buttons (330 currently available) on your posts and pages, including; Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.

You can also sign up for a free AddThis.com account and see how your visitors are sharing your content.

2. AddThis Social Sign In

Another great plugin from ‘AddThis’ is their ‘Social Sign In’ plugin.  This makes it easy for people to log into your website, without having to sign up, by using their favourite social media account.  Your readers won’t have to remember any passwords again, as they can simply log in with their Facebook, Twitter or Google info.

3. WooCommerce

If you plan on selling anything on your website, then ‘WooCommerce’ is THE plugin for you!  This excellent WordPress plugin by WooThemes makes it easy for you to transform your site into a fully functioning eCommerce store.  Check out the video above to see some of the excellent features it offers.

4. Wordfence Security

I can’t stress how important security is to your website!  It only takes one hacker or malicious piece of code to ruin all the hard work that you have done.  That’s why ‘Wordfence Security’ is a great plugin to use.

This free WordPress plugin includes a firewall, URL scanning and anti-virus scanning, as well as the ability to verify and repair your core WordPress, theme or plugin files should something change.

5. MapPress

Should you need to display an interactive map on your site or in one of your posts, the ‘MapPress’ plugin will be one that you will want to install.  Just add an address that you want to map on your site and your visitors will be able to get directions directly from your blog.

6. WP SlimStat

Don’t want to rely solely on Google Analytics for your website statistics? Then this WordPress plugin may be for you!

‘WP SlimStat’ allows you to see your website statistics in real time.  You can; see who is on your site right now, monthly pageviews, visitor duration, top landing pages, top search terms, world map of visitors, and much, much more!  There is even an extension to this plugin called ‘WP SlimStat Shortcodes’ that allows you to display some of this information on your site to your readers.

7. WooSidebars

Another excellent WordPress plugin by ‘WooThemes’ is ‘WooSidebars’.  This great plugin lets you set up different widgetized areas of your site, without the need to edit any code.  This is perfect of you want different widgets to appear on different parts of your site.  Check out the video above to learn more about this brilliant plugin.

8. Q and A

Every good website has a ‘Q and A’ (or FAQ) section where people can go to get answers to common question that they may have.  This WordPress plugin makes it really easy for you to set up your own interactive FAQ page.

Check out our own ‘FAQ’ page to see how we used this plugin.

9. WP-Print

You wouldn’t think it, but having a printer friendly version of your website’s posts and pages is a good thing to have.  A lot of us may only view pages digitally on tablet or mobiles, but there are still plenty of people that print off web pages.  Some might want to store information locally, or follow a tutorial where they don’t have internet access.  Whatever the reason, this plugin makes it easy for you to add a “printer friendly format” on your site.

10. BuddyPress

This brilliant plugin lets your users sign-up and create their own profile, post messages, make connections, interact in groups, and much more!  Essentially ‘BuddyPress’ lets you create your own social network on your site.  Build a community around your business, sports team, local club or other niche community.

11. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

This great little WordPress plugin is arguably the best on this list as it lets you see what impact your plugins have on your site.  Speed is everything when it comes to websites, as you want your pages to load as fast as possible.  If your website takes too long to load, then you will end up losing traffic.

The ‘P3’ plugin scans your site to see what impact (in terms of load time) each of your plugins have.  This is great because you can then get rid of the WordPress plugins that are slowing your site down.

12. Plugin Organizer

A great companion to the ‘P3’ plugin is the ‘Plugin Organizer’.  This allows you to change the order in which your plugins are loaded and allow certain plugins to be loaded on different pages.

Say you had a plugin that took a while to load, you could set it to load last, therefore allowing the majority of the page to appear before people got bored and navigated away.  Perhaps you only need that plugin on your homepage, you could disable it on all your other pages, resulting in faster load times.

13. WP Super Cache

Sticking with the “speed” aspect, the ‘WP Super Cache’ is a great WordPress plugin that helps make your site much faster.  It does this by caching your pages as HTML files and delivering them to visitors, instead of the much slower PHP scripts.  It takes a bit of setting up, but there is a lot of help to guide you through it.  It’s well worth it, as this will help to speed up your site quite a bit.

14. Tweet Old Post

Just because you are creating new content for your site, it doesn’t mean you should forget about your old posts.  This is where the ‘Twee Old Post’ plugin come in.  Here you can set it up to tweet out a link to one of your old posts that you wrote automatically.  This way, you can drive traffic to your site by promoting posts that your followers may have not read before.

15.  YouTube Channel Gallery

If you have your own YouTube channel, why not display your videos in your website’s sidebar.   This great little plugin allows you to display a YouTube video and a gallery of thumbnails for a YouTube channel.

There are lots of useful options that you can select within this plugin.  You can set videos to play automatically, different aspect ratios, video quality settings, number of videos to show and much more!  Very useful if you want to incorporate your videos on your site.

Don’t forget to check out our other WordPress plugin lists to find other useful plugins to use on your site:

• 20 Great WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Plugins You Should Use On Your Blog
• Top 10 Best WordPress Plugins Of 2012
• 5 Free WordPress Plugins To Supercharge Email Subscribers

Do you use any of these WordPress plugins?  What has your experience been with these?  What other WordPress plugins would you recommend to anyone reading this?  Let us know by leaving a comment below!