Nowadays, just about everyone can consider themselves a blogger. The
tools and plugins made available online are making it even easier to
break into the blogging scene. Competition is rife and you might do well
to get help from any source you can find. One of the ways is to get
yourself plugins that will help make certain processes smoother for you
and your readers. There are plugins for various purposes including to
aid caching and image optimization, SEO, anti-spam, commenting,
content-sharing, bookmarking and so on.
In this article, I have compiled a list of WordPress plugins that
WordPress users might find a use for. Instead of searching in the
Internet jungle, take your pick from the list of plugins below. The
plugins are free unless stated otherwise.
Shortcut to:
Speed Up & Caching Plugins
CloudFlare ensures better protection of your blog from spammers. It
shows the correct IP addresses of commentors who are commenting on your
blog. You can protect your site from online spammers and hackers, and it
helps your website load faster as well.
Hyper Cache Extended is a very
flexible
and easy to use caching plugin for the WordPress platform, designed
mainly for users who run their blog on low resource hosting providers.
If you want real speed then Quick Cache is the plugin you must have.
This plugin takes a snapshot (or cache) of each and every page of your
blog and serves these snapshots to the visitors during every visit.
If your website has a number of images to load every time a visitor
visits your site but it takes a lot of resources loading them up, then
you should definitely consider this plugin. This plugin will ensure that
only the images on demand are loaded first, thereby saving valuable
bandwidth and improving user experience.
W3 Total Cache is the most complete WordPress caching plugin
available. It can improve your website’s performance by caching the
pages, objects, minifying the databases by content delivery network
support.
This plugin implements object level persistent caching which caches only the
data that WordPress explicitly asks it to cache, instead of the entire page.
This plugin reduces the file sizes of the images by using the
Smush.it API from WordPress. The images are compressed almost without
any loss and automatically in WordPress. It also has features to
compress multiple images in bulk.
WP Super Cache is a very fast WordPress caching plugin that generates
static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. So instead of
loading the heavy PHP scripts of your blog, your visitors will be served
with these static html files which will make your blog appear to load
faster.
SEO Plugins
This plugin is the first choice for new and inexperienced WordPress
users, who want their blogs to be fully Search Engine Optimized without
digging deep into SEO. It provides you with almost every function needed
in just a single page.
This Google XML SItemaps plugin generates XML sitemaps for your
WordPress blog, so that it becomes easy for crawlers like Google and
Bing, to index your site better.
This plugin enables you to add relevant robot meta tags to your
pages, unfollow some links and not index unimportant pages and archives.
Scribe is a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress which helps you reveal
profitable keywords, tweak your pages for ranking better in the search
results and build high quality links based on particular content that
you create.
This plugin is a great WordPress plugin that can make on-page
optimization easier than ever. It will take care of almost every single
on-page factors of your posts and can help your site rank higher in the
search results.
SEO Smart Links is a great plugin which can fully automate the
internal linking process of your WordPress blog. It also has the
capability to convert specific keywords as internal and affiliate links.
This is an all-in-one SEO plugin, that gives you a user-friendly
approach of on-page optimization for your WordPress blog. It is
available for free and has tools for almost every optimization required.
This is a very simple SEO plugin that can make your blog SEO friendly
with the SEO Scores it geneates for every single page. It has a very
simple and effective admin panel that can seamlessly integrate into your
existing WordPress admin panel.
This SEO Friendly Images plugin is a very helpful plugin that adds
alt and title attributes to all your images automatically and makes your
post W3C/xHTML valid as well.
This is one of the most complete WordPress SEO plugins available so
far. You can perform almost any SEO functionality for your blog with the
help of this invaluable plugin by Yoast. Not to be attempted by new
users though.
Anti Spam and Security Plugins
Akismet is possibly the best way to protect your website from web
spam. Akismet filters comments and trackback spam, so that you can focus
more on managing other important things. It runs on autopilot and
provides 24-hour protection.
AntiSpam Bee is a spam protection plugin that is made up of
sophisticated techniques to handle digital rubbish and protect your
website from every potential threat.
Growmap Anti Spambot plugin serves as an alternative for Akismet; it
adds a client-side generated checkbox to the comment forms. Users are
asked to confirm that they are not a spammer by just ticking the check
box.
This plugin serves as a
security
plugin and records the IP Addresses and timestamps of every login
attempt. If there is a number of failed login attempts within a short
period of time, then the login functionality is disabled for all
requests from that range.
This plugin prevents spam from automated bots by adding a CAPTCHA in comment, registration, login and lost password forms.
reCAPTCHA is most probably the most popular and widely accepted
CAPTCHA systems by all users. This plugin integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam
methods in WordPress as comment, registration and email protection.
Comments Plugins
Comment Luv helps you to increase comments and traffic to your blog
and also gives the opportunity to your blog of going viral in Facebook,
Twitter and Google Plus. It also reduces spam, shows stats of links
being clicked, allows commentors to use their name in comments, and many
more.
Disqus is a powerful commenting system that helps you to build an
active community of users by effective tools and features like Realtime
Comment System, Social Integration, The Community Box, etc.
This plugin allows visitors to leave comments on various posts on
your blog using their own Facebook account. It integrates into your blog
and any reader logged into Facebook will be able to comment into any
post of your blog.
IntenseDebate is a commenting system that has features such as
innovative discussion tools that can make conversations more fun and
increase reader engagement.
Livefyre is one of the best comment platforms that aims to replace
old and outdated comments systems with innovative and interactive
real-time conversations. LiveFyre is the easiest way to build an active
community and increase user engagement.
OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate
themselves on websites without creating new passwords. It enables users
to register or comment on WordPress blogs.
This plugin allows commentors to subscribe for email notifications to subsequent comments on a particular post.
This plugin enables users to edit their own comments within a certain
period of time. Users can also move, mark as spam, blacklist, moderate
or delete a particular comment.
Social Bookmarking Plugins
AddThis allows your user to share your content at 330 of the most
popular bookmarking and social networking sites including Facebook,
Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and many more.
Share Buttons make sharing articles in your site easy and simple, by
providing a drop-down menu with more than 100 social networking and
bookmarking sites to choose from and share to.
The ShareThis plugin allows the sharing of content from your site
through email and 50 different social networks including Facebook,
Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and many more. This plugin also has Facebook’s
Like button and Google’s +1 button for easy sharing of articles.
Sociable adds a bar of icons of different social networking and
bookmarking sites that you can choose for your articles. If they see
what they like, your readers can easily share the contents to many
bookmarking sites. You can choose to display the sites you want for
sharing from the control panel.
WordPress Social Bar adds a floating sharing bar to your articles in
your site. The bar which is always visible allows easy sharing of the
article by your readers to various social sites with just one click. It
is also fully customizable according to your needs.
Stats Tracking Plugins
Clicky is a real-time web
analytics
for tracking your website’s visitors. It has great features like Real
Time Analytics, Visitor Segmentation, Twitter Analytics, Mobile Version,
Video Analytics and many more.
This plugin adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google
Analytics tracking for your WordPress blog. It has other features like
event tracking for downloads, tracking of outbound links and linking
Adsense to analytics.
Statpress is a real-time tracking plugin that integrates into with
the WordPress platform enabling you to track the data of your visitors.
It also collects informations of spiders, search keywords, feeds,
browsers, OS etc.
It is a simple, clear and concise plugin that track stats for your WordPress blog with no additional load on your server.
Backup and Database Management
BackupBuddy is a complete solution, which can
backup,
restore and migrate WordPress sites with ease. It can backup your
entire WordPress as well as install, restore it with a single click, or
migrate from one domain or server to another in a few clicks.
VaultPress by Automattic is considered to be one of the best
WordPress Backup and Security plugins for "Every post, picture, and
page. Every comment, revision, and setting. Everything." in the market.
It is perfectly suitable for personal, professional, small and medium
business sites.
This plugin allows you to repair,
backup and restore your databases. It also supports automatic scheduling of backups and optimization.
WP-Optimize is a simple yet effective WordPress cleanup plugin, which
can clean your databases and optimize it without phpMyAdmin. It can
optimize databases by removing post revisions, spam and unapproved
comments.
Forms Plugins
AJAX Contact Form plugin is a simple jQuery based AJAX powered form
management plugin that seamlessly integrates into your WordPress platform. It also has a direct Twitter Messaging feature built in it.
Contact Form 7 plugin is a simple and flexible plugin that you can
use to manage multiple forms, customize and mail its contents. It can
also be punched with Akismet of CAPTCHA for spam filtering and so on.
It is yet another contact form plugin powered by AJAX, with sliding
effects and floating buttons. This plugin is under open source GPL
License, and is completely free to use without any restrictions.
Gravity Forms is one of the best contact form plugins that can enable
you to quickly design and edit forms right from your WordPress admin
panel. It has various features like conditional logic, entry management,
notifications, styles and layout, and many more that can give your
forms a unique feel.
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