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If you are using a WordPress for your web development, you might consider having a plugins installed. The benefits on installing a plugins for WordPress is that it makes a developers life easier and you can concentrate on greater and important things, such as focussing on security, user experience and your website’s aesthetics.

This article contains a run down of top 20 simple, fast, easy to use and lightweight WordPress plugins, that you can use on your next website development.

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1. Akismet

— Akismet is a WordPress plugin which enables you to filter and checks your comments against the Akismet web services to see if they look like a spam or not.

2. Tweetmeme

— Adds a button on your blog which easily lets you retweet you blog posts.

3. Sexy Bookmarks

— Adds an attractive socila bookmarking menu to your post, pages, index or any combination of the three.

4. Contact Form 7

— Contact Form 7 is just another contact form. Simple but flexible. It can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

5. Really Simple CAPTCHA

— Really Simple CAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins. It is originally created for Contact Form 7 plugin.

6. WP Super Cache

— WP Super Cache is a very fast caching engine for WordPress that generates a static html file from your dynamic WordPress blog.

7. WP-DB Backup

— WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress databases tables. You can also backup other tables in the same database.

8. Add to Any

— Add to Any is a WordPress plugin to help your readers to share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious and other social bookmarking sites.

9. All in one SEO Pack

— Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization)

10. NextGen Gallery

— NextGen Gallery  is a full intergrated gallery plugin for WordPress with slideshow option. The gallery can handle multiple galleries and the simple administration system at the back end is so simple and easy to use.

11. Google Sitemap Generator

— This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

12. WP-PageNavi

— Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.

13. GTranslate

— This plugin uses Google Translate automatic translation service to translate your web page with Google power. With 58 available languages your site will be available to more than 98% of internet users.

14. Video Playlist and Gallery Plugin

— Post your videos, photo galleries/flash slideshows easily and in seconds.

15. Smart YouTube

— Smart Youtube plugin allows you to insert full featured YouTube videos into your post, comments and in RSS feed.

16. SI-CAPTCHA for WordPress

— Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.

17. BuddyPress

— Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress.

BuddyPress will let users register on your site and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more.

18. Visitor Maps

— Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online. Includes a Who’s Online admin dashboard to view visitor details. The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more. No API key needed. Easy and Quick 4 step install.

19. WP Greet Box

— This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url.

20. Breadcrumb Navxt

— This plugin generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress powered blog or website. These breadcrumb trails are highly customizable to suit the needs of just about any website running WordPress.