Whenever someone writes a post about their favorite WordPress plugins they usually list the most popular plugins everyone already knows about. In the interest of sparing the Internet from more praise for Akismet and FeedSmith, I’ve put together a short list of my four favorite WordPress plugins you may have never heard of.

Clutter Free

Clutter Free, by Mark Jaquith, is a simple little plugin that allows you to hide parts of the WordPress posting interface. I use it to hide parts of the admin this site’s theme doesn’t use like excerpts and custom fields.

TD Word Count

This is probably my favorite plugin on this list. TD Word Count adds a tab to your WordPress dashboard that provides you with detailed word count stats for your entire site. This plugin tells you the average number of words per post, the total word count for all of your posts combined and even provides a display of your posts you can sort by date, word count and title.

Theme Test Drive

From the “Why didn’t I think of this?” Department at i am jack’s design comes the Theme Test Drive plugin by Vladimir Prelovac. This plugin is essentially a theme switcher with one clever catch. When you’re logged into your site under the admin account you can see a totally different theme than what your regular visitors see. This is proving invaluable to me right now as I work on a new theme for this site. I’m a huge fan of this plugin and recommend it to all of the WordPress designers out there.

WordPress Reports

The last plugin on this list is WordPress Reports by Joe Tan. This plugin downloads visitor data from your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts then displays it all with charts. It’s like a one-stop shop for all of your nerdy statistical needs.