Obviously we highly suggest you consider all of our own plugins, but we know that we will never provide the best of everything for you, and instead we are going to provide a list of endorsed plugins you should know about so that you don’t have to surf the thousands of plugins in the wordpress.org repository.

1. Page Links To – give you the ability to point/redirect any wordpress page you create to another place. For example, create a page that links to a zip file for download, or a page that redirects you offsite (ie. yourdomain.com/facebook -> facebook.com/yourdomain)
2. GD Star Rating – awesome plugin to get community websites going. Allows rating of blog posts, rating of comments, and rating of just about anything else on your site so people know who to trust.
3. Contact Form 7 – Currently the only forms plugin we would suggest. We do not approve of its “AJAX only submissions” because they cannot be tracked very easily in GA. Until we find or build a better plugin… use this for form generation.
4. WordPress SEO – the only SEO plugin you will ever need, also provides “breadcrumbs” functionality for developers. This plugin won’t let you down, we promise.
5. WP Maintenance Mode – whenever you do anything that may be dangerous to your site (upgrading plugins, changing themes, upgrading WordPress) you will want to use this plugin so you can test the website before visitors do. That being said… lets talk about backup next.
6. Backup Buddy – the one stop solution for WordPress backup. Make sure you make backups before doing any plugin/theme/core updates… we are not joking, always always always backup before updating.