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I’m actually using a lot of plugins on this blog (much more than 10) and I’ve tested more than 70 since I’ve started blogging . It’s time to make a list of the best Wordpress plugins I came across during my Wordpress blogging experience.

1 ) Askimet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. It was developed by the founding developer of Wordpress, maybe that’s why it’s the only anti-spam plugin that really works for me. Thanks to it I filter 98% of spam. I’m a statistics maniac and counted how many comments that this plugin marked as spam, were real comments.The result was that it makes not more than 2 “errors” every 100 spam comments. Anyway you have always the possibility to check all comments that were marked as spam, and “de-spam” real ones.

2 ) Adsense Deluxe - Awesome plugin which let’s you add Adsense blocks inside your blog posts or templates. Recently I wrote an article about how to include and execute Javascript in single posts thanks to Adsense Deluxe. Have a look at this page and scroll down until you see an Alexa Graph. The Alexa Graph is updated automatically evey day because it’s a Widget. Usually you can include in Widgets only into Widget ready Wordpress themes. I included it inside a single blog post by using Adsense Deluxe.

3 ) Recent Posts - Display recent posts in your sidebar or anywhere else on your blog.

4 ) Related Posts - Display related posts to an article you have written. Related posts can be displayed at the beginning or end of each post.

5 ) Subscribe to Comments - I’ve installed this plugin less than a week ago and I already love it. Readers can subscribe to a comment feed for a certain article and will receive an email eveytime a new comment is posted there. The great thing is that the Admin (me in this case) can see which comment feeds your readers have subscribed to. If you have an article with 10 different comments from 10 different people and all of them subscribed to the comments feed, you could leave a new and interesting comment to get your readers back to your blog (they would receive an email regarding the new comment).

6 ) Ultimate Tag Warrior - It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like). From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.Once you’ve got your tags entered; you enter a realm of interesting ways of doing things with your tags. At the complicated end, AJAXy search is included with the download (it may need some customisation to match your theme). At the simpler end, you can automatically have tags included at the top and bottom of your posts without making changes to themes.

7 ) Wordpress Video Plugin - Surely the best and easiest to use video plugin ever. To add a video to a post, all you have to is writing something like this: Youtube: ["youtube" id]. This plugin works for all major video hosting sites (Google Video, MyVideo, Clipfish and so on). Have a look at the Matt Cutts Video Collection I’ve made thanks to it.

8 ) PostViews - Enables you to display how many times a post/page have been viewed. It will not count registered member views and since I’m the only registered member on my blog, the number of views you can see at the bottom of each article are REAL.

9 ) Top Commentators - Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment! Readers with the most comments are displayed on your Wordpress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one).

10 ) Theme Switcher - Allow your readers to switch the theme of your blog! This is also great for Wordpress designers who want to test their themes if they are not able to make a “local Wordpress installation”.