Best free WordPress plugins you must have
Everyone who have build websites using the CMS (Content Management System) WordPress, have their own favorite plugins that they use again and again and is a must-have for all their sites. Here are a list of all the WordPress plugins I use for all my websites.
AdRotate
AdRotate is the perfect system for managing ads on your website. With this plugins you will be able to add your ads, group them and create blocks. You can also enable tracking of your ads and see a full statistic report of which ads that are clicked on and a calculation of the CTR (Click through rate).
Akismet
WordPress have one disadvantage over other CMS – it is very exposed to spam (which is because WordPress is so popular). But there is a solution to avoid spam on WordPress – just install Akismet and it will scan all comments for spam and report this to you. You must approve the comments before they are used. Akismet i default installed in all new installations of WordPress today.
Download Akismet for free here.
Exclude pages from navigation
Have you ever created pages that you didn’t want to show in the navigation menu? All pages is showed in the navigation menu of WordPress by default. With this plugin you can choose to hide some of the pages from the navigation menu.
Fancier author box
When you have a WordPress blog it is very important to link your posts to your Google+ profile by using Google Authorship. With this plugin you can show an author box in the bottom of each of your posts, and there link to your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ profile. This makes it easy to establish Google Authorship on WordPress. This author box is very beautiful and free.
Google Analytics for WordPress
This plugin adds the Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress site. It is very easy to begin with, because you simply just login to Google Analytics and authorize the use of the tracking code. Another advantage is that you can easy setup tracking of clicks on outgoing links.
GD star rating
If you want people to be able to rate your articles and showed the rating in Googles search result page, this is the WordPress plugin for you. Showing rating stars in search result page is more eye-catchy and may lead to an increase in the number of visitors.
NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
This WordPress plugin is amazing. When you publish a posts on your WordPress blog, it will automatically post it to different social networks, e.g. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious etc.
nrelate Related Content
Show a list of related posts to a post with this WordPress plugin. This is a very good method for increasing the number of page views and decrease the bounce rate.
Paypal donations
With this plugin you can enable your visitors to donate an amount of money to support your site. See an example of this plugin in the right menu of this site. The donated money will be payed to your Paypal account.
WordPress SEO
This is a great SEO plugin for WordPress. The plugin is developed by the famous SEO expert Joost de Valk (called Yoast). It will solve the most common SEO issues and analyze each post you write and come with recommendations to how you can increase the SEO value of the post. It also solves the missing META description in WordPress, which is very important for SEO.
Pretty Link Lite
With this WordPress plugin you can shrink and track URLs on your site. Can also be used for hiding affiliate links on your WordPress site.
Peter’s Post Notes
Add internal notes in the admin section for each post, e.g. ideas for improving the article. Can be very useful if you have some notes you don’t want to share with your visitors.
Download WordPress plugin here.
Hupso Share Buttons for Twitter, Facebook & Google+
Add a row of share buttons for a lot of social networks – not only Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Essential for all sites, to enable visitors to share your site.
Broken Link Checker
This plugin scans your site to find links that doesn’t work and images that are missing. It will then tell you on the WordPress dashboard. Increase the quality of your site with this plugin.
Subscribe to comments Reloaded
With this plugin you get a checkbox with your comment form where readers can subscribe to new comments.
Download it here.
You can find more plugins for WordPress here. If you have any suggestions to plugins, that is a must-have plugins, please feel free to post them in the comment section.
Great list. There is some plugins I need to check.
I have also made a list I normally use when making a blog (in danish) http://www.torbenbendixen.dk/mine-favorit-plugins-til-en-wordpress-blog/
Great list – I am already using many of them!
I have a question about the “nrelate Related Content” – do you find that these types of related content plugins tend to slow down the page load if there are hundreds of posts? It is a lot of searching.
I have been hesitant to try them out.
Thanks again for the list!
Be Well.
Paul.
I actually haven’t tested that, maybe I should. You can both get WordPress plugins that search the site for related content, and pkugins where you manually can set related content.Have you tried some of them?
So interesting.. thanks for sharing. Some of them are completely new for me. Keep writing.
I have been looking this kind of wordpress plugins. Great collection of wordpress plugins. Thanks for share.