WordPress is my favourite blogging platform and my blog runs on it. It has more than 13 million users in total and the self-hosted WordPress has been downloaded more than 5 million times. Plugins are a big part of the WordPress community. Over the years I have used many of the WordPress plugins. WordPress plugins help you make a better blog and get more reader interaction. There are in total 4,245 plugins and these have been downloaded 22,152,788 times. This is a tribute to the top 18 most downloaded WordPress plugins. Each of these 18 has been downloaded a minimum of 200,000 times.
• All in One SEO Pack - Automatically optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization) - Downloads 1,603,368
• Google XML Sitemaps - Create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog - Downloads 954,459
• NextGEN Gallery - A full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option - Downloads 715,819
• WordPress.com Stats - You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system - Downloads 712,71
• WP Super Cache - A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files - Downloads 492,637
• Contact Form 7 - Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible – Downloads 393,916
• Wordpress Automatic upgrade - Allows a user to automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation to the latest one - Downloads 288,600
• Sociable - Automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites to your posts, pages and RSS feed - Downloads 284,117
• Viper’s Video Quicktags - Allows easy and XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more - Downloads 254,807
• Simple Tags - The successor of Simple Tagging Plugin and is THE perfect tool to
perfectly manage your WP tags - Downloads 254,353
• WP-DB-Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database - Downloads 250,795
• Google Analytics for WordPress - Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics - Downloads 239,837
• Google Analyticator - Same as the one above, enables Google Analytics tracking - Downloads 229,970
• Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button - Helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and over 100 more - Downloads 226,056
• WP-Polls - Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post / page - Downloads 222,196
• Sidebar Widgets - Adds "Sidebar Widgets" panel under Presentation menu – Downloads 221,024
• podPress - A dream plugin for podcasters using WordPress - Downloads 207,491
• WP-PageNavi - Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog -
Downloads 204,005

From the top 18 plugins "Wordpress Automatic upgrade" and "Sidebar Widgets" are the classics which are no longer needed as they are a part of WordPress now.

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