I have probably tried over a thousand plugins in my lifetime for Wordpress. Every possible functionality that you could ever want.

But 99.99% of them are pretty much worthless. Pretty harsh, I know, but that’s the truth.

But let me attempt to explain before I give you my Top 5:

‘Performancing’ Pays Big Time

I’m a performancing nut.

That doesn’t mean that you have to be, but I most certainly am. I’m the guy that tweaks and tweaks and tweaks his blog to perfection… and then tweaks some more.

‘Performancing’ means, in a nutshell, speed and effectiveness.

It means that my ultimate goal is to have the fastest, most effective, most SEO friendly, most usable and visitor-friendly blog on the planet. My hope is that you can get to the content, find the content, and consume the content with little waiting time or distraction as humanly possible.

This means that any plugin that ultimately doesn’t have an extremely high value for the visitors in terms of functionality and finding content gets on the chopping block.

Essentially, if it’s “cool” but doesn’t do “much” it’s not worth it. In fact, the plugin may actually do a lot but may also not be worth it’s weight.

Plugins require more database calls, CSS styling, and often times can bloat or weigh down your blog by forcing your users to download more stuff for them to be useful.

That’s just the cost associated with using plugins. Some plugins are really heavy and are simply not worth their own weight, literally.

Some can really slow down your server, sucking precious time away from your visitors and having them stare at blank white pages for far too long.

I can’t risk that with my readers. I owe them speed.

I’m pretty dogmatic about this actually and will mercilessly uninstall any plugin that doesn’t meet my strict requirements.

Finally, I’m pretty handy with code, so if I can code it myself I’m going to do that. You see, most plugins are just simple ways to add code for those that do not have the coding chops. Most plugins are actually easily programmable by hand. I install plugins where I could not otherwise code them myself, either because they are outside my own capacity to write or because they are just so darn freaking good.

So, with all that in mind, here are my Top 5 Wordpress Plugins That I Can’t Live Without:

• Akismet – If you don’t have this then you don’t have a blog; you have a spambot farm instead.
• Faster Image Insert – This makes uploading images a lot faster. Saves me tons of time and I don’t have to wait for anything to “load.”
• FD Feedburner Plugin – I could easily do this myself but this is a quick and super-lightweight catch-all that has never failed me, so I give this props.
• WP-PageNavi – This is one of the best usability plugins ever. Pagination is, without question, the best navigational option for your blog readers. You can easily style it too. Pretty.
• WP Super Cache – Configured properly, this will make your blog quadruple it’s speed, and then some. I customize this plugin with some server configuration for maximum velocity. I’ve recently redone my entire server architecture and the results have been phenomenal.

I’ll be honest, I use another 4 Plugins on this blog but only because a few of them are specific to ChurchCrunch only and wouldn’t necessarily apply everywhere.

They are IntenseDebate, BBPress Latest Discussions (For our Forums), Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, and Wordpress Audio Player (For the ONE Podcast I have so far…).

The last one is unfortunate since it’s only used once, but I didn’t have time to find one better or create one myself. I’ll have to do that soon.

So, what are you sporting? Perhaps the more important questions are related to why you’re using them in the first place…

[Image from Lintmachine, TwoBigPaws, Ia4mad]