As I’m writing this, there are more than 40,000 plugins in the official plugin directory at WordPress.org, so sure you have a lot of options to choose from. I admit it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly which ones are the most useful, have the fewest bugs and make your website optimised than before.

I have chosen my list with plugins that I will use for the time being and hope it will help you too in finding the right set for your website or even tell me about a better alternative that you’ve tested yourself. 

CONTENT PLUGINS

Foo Gallery – Foo Gallery is the most intuitive and extensible gallery management tool ever created for WordPress.

Some of the features:

  • Gallery custom post type
  • Use built-in media library to manage images
  • Drag n Drop reordering of images and galleries
  • Built-in gallery templates
  • Built-in Extensions Store
  • Built on an extension framework
  • Custom CSS for both galleries and albums
  • Copy to clipboard shortcodes
  • Visual shortcodes in rich text editor
  • Gallery picker to insert shortcode
  • Page usage metabox with one-click gallery page creation
  • NextGen importer tool (albums and galleries)
  • Multisite Support

Latest Posts Widget –  Is a light widget designed to do one thing and do it well: display the most recent posts from your site with various options like excerpt, featured image, date by sorting & ordering feature.
Features: 

  • Option to change the ordering of posts.
  • Option to show post thumbnail & set dimension by width & height.
  • Set how many posts to show.
  • Option to show the post excerpt and how long the excerpt should be.
  • Option to show the post date.
  • Option to show the comment count.
  • Multiple widgets.

Lazy Load – Lazy load images to improve page load times and server bandwidth. Images are loaded only when visible to the user.

TRAFFIC GENERATION & SOCIAL SHARING

Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover And Post – Provides facility to pins your blog posts, pages and images into your Pinterest account boards.

Features

  • Show Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover
  • Show Pinterest Pin It Button In Post
  • Show Pinterest Pin It Button In Page
  • Pinterest Pin It Button Settings
  • Customizable Button Color On Hover
  • Customisable Button Size On Hover
  • Enable / Disable Pin button On Mobile & Portable Devices
  • Multilingual – Translatable in Any Language

POWr Twitter Feed – Twitter Feed helps you grow your Twitter following, get more Likes and Retweets. Combine and display multiple @handles and #hashtags in a single feed

Free Features

  • Display posts from any Twitter feed.
  • Adjust the priority for different feeds to display your favourite content.
  • Follow any @handles or #hashtags.
  • Custom fonts, colours, backgrounds, and more.
  • Adjustable sizing and spacing.
  • Supports text in any language.
  • Mobile responsive on any device.

Social Share Buttons by Supsystic – Social share buttons to increase social traffic and popularity. Social sharing to Facebook like and share, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks

Features:

  • Over 15 Social Networks
  • Fully Responsive
  • Add Sharing Buttons in Different Locations
  • Professional Templates of the Social Media Icons & Share Buttons
  • Choose pages to show social share buttons
  • Simple share buttons configuration and design
  • Customisable design and animation effects
  • Shortcode support
  • Different Buttons Placement Option
  • Content Lock

If there are any plugins that you think deserve to be mentioned, please let me know!