Before I give you my real list, let me tell you that there are some basics that don’t even deserve to make this list because if you’re running a blog without them, you’re simply working too hard. Plugins like Askimet, WP Lockdown, Theme Switcher, WordPress.com stats, the WordPress.com stats smiley remover and WordPress Database Backup.

Delete Duplicate Posts WordPress Plugin

Simply put, this plugin does exactly what it’s name implies. It gives web masters like me the opporunity to quickly scan tens of thousands of postings in databases to ensure there are no duplicates. It’s wonderfully powerful when you have a thousands of feeds to maintain, and only a few hours to do it in. It also happens to be from my close friend, Montreal web designer Christopher Bavota.

WP Auto Tagger

Oh man … I can not stress what a dream this plugin is. Tags are like keys to SEO gold, they’re one of the few things that a blog owner can do well and immediately see amazing results in the search engines but they’re such a pain in the ass to write. Basically a tag is what your article is about, but in popular single words and catch phrases. What WP Auto Tagger does is great, it breaks down your article and suggests the best tags, automatically. That’s a huge time saver.

Syntax Highlighter

This bad bay is the Jonas brothers of WordPress plugins. Sure it’s fairly pointless and a text editor could do the same job but when it comes to saving time (and money) it’s brilliant. What it does is takes a bunch of rough gobbly gook code like this:

$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
$pcount = 0;
$storycount = 0;
$textdate = date(“F jS”, mktime(0, 0, 0, str_pad($month, 2, “0″, STR_PAD_LEFT), str_pad($day, 2, “0″, STR_PAD_LEFT), $year));

echo $textdate;
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {

if (!$first) {$title = $item['title'];$first=1;

$content .= “<h3><a href=’”.$item['link'].”‘ title=’”.$item['title'].”‘>”.$item['title'].”</a></h3>”;
$content .= “<p>”;

if ($item['link_enclosure']) {
$content .= “<a href=’”.$item['link'].”‘ title=’”.$item['title'].”‘><img alt=’”.$item['title'].”‘ src=’”.$item['link_enclosure'].”‘ class=’alignleft’></a>”;
}

and turns it into …

[source lang="php"]$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
$pcount = 0;
$storycount = 0;
$textdate = date("F jS", mktime(0, 0, 0, str_pad($month, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT), str_pad($day, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT), $year));

echo $textdate;
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {

if (!$first) {$title = $item['title'];$first=1;

$content .= "<h3><a href=’".$item['link']."’ title=’".$item['title']."’>".$item['title']."</a></h3>";
$content .= "<p>";

if ($item['link_enclosure']) {
$content .= "<a href=’".$item['link']."’ title=’".$item['title']."’><img alt=’".$item['title']."’ src=’".$item['link_enclosure']."’ class=’alignleft’></a>";
}
[/source]

When it comes to saving time, that’s a huge helper.

WP Super Cache

It simply terrifies me how many people are not running this plugin or a similar flavor of it. It makes your site safer, easier to manage and much faster for the end user. I’ll also mention that by running it you can use a host like BlueHost for $7.95 a month to run dozens of websites instead of spending hundreds a month to run just one site on complex, over priced servers.

Enforce www. Prefix

Actually, I’m going to cheat here and tell you that this and Canonical URL’s are plugins you should have for massive SEO curb appeal. Basically Enforce www. Prefix forces your website to always use the correct SEO address and Canonical URL’s tell’s Google that your article is the source, so even if people repost it you get credit.

Google XML Sitemaps

We all want Google to come to our site right? Well, let’s make it easy for them! Sitemap will provide Google with a free pass to all your content, no matter how deep your links are.

Get Image from Post

People love pictures and with this simple plugin your website will be able to post pictures as part of your excerpt. Speaking of excerpts, Get Better Excerpts will allow you to pull complete sentences or words from your excerpts.

SEO Friendly Images

Between this and SEO Smart Links, I’ll be honest most websites are on auto pilot. The SEO Friendly Images ensures your images have the proper tags to make the most of search engines, while Smart Links adds valuable data to your hyperlinks.

WordPress Admin Quick Menu

I might be a little bias but this is truly my favorite plugin. It allows you to add your own menu items to the WordPress Admin client, basically creating shortcuts between your website and important things like AdSense and Analytics. It’s completely customizable and saves endless frustrations between myself and clients but providing them immediate access to critical links.

Download Counter

Just like Analytics lets you know who’s visiting and where they’re going, you’ll want to track what people are downloading from your website and how often. This saves a fortune in report generation time, by simply allowing me to tell my clients weekly how often software has been downloaded.