All essential free and premium wordpress plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. There are plugins to help you make your website more social media optimized and SEO friendly and help convert more of your visitors into new leads… you name it.
WordPress plugins can provide killer functionality to a WordPress website – but be careful when you choose which ones you install. People’s particular experiences with WordPress plugins will be different. WordPress gained a top position in the online market because it is an open-source and entirely free platform.
Further down the road, web developers create free and premium WordPress plugins. The core of WordPress is designed to be lean, maximize flexibility, and minimize code bloat. Plugins offer custom functions and features so that users can tailor their sites to their specific needs.
Choosing the right WordPress plugins can be critical for your website profits, online success, and not lastly, your budget. Let me inspire you and make things easier and more effective with these great free and premium WordPress plugins.
» WordPress Plugins Categories
Below are 70+ essential free and premium plugins. Most of them would be valuable to any WordPress site, although a few more are essential only for specific niche sites. In any case, check them out and decide for yourself if they’re essential or not. The essential types of plugins you need to have will be presented here, packaged into categories.
- WordPress Plugins: BACKUP, CACHE & SECURITY
- WordPress Plugins: CORE FUNCTIONALITY
- WordPress Plugins: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
- WordPress Plugins: SOCIAL & COMMENTING
- WordPress Plugins: POSTS, FORMS & OTHERS
- WordPress Plugins: PHOTOGRAPHY & GALLERIES
- WordPress Plugins: VIDEO
- WordPress Plugins: E-COMMERCE
- WordPress Plugins: STATISTICS
» Insider Secrets to WordPress Frameworks
» Premium WordPress Themes Providers
Backup, Cache & Security WordPress Plugins
As you know, the heart of WordPress is its database, but unlike photos and videos, you won’t find other (content) files to back them up, even when using an FTP program. WP-DBManager allows you to optimize the database, repair the database, back up the database, restore the database, delete the backup database, drop/empty tables, and run selected queries. You can create a backup of the database that can be emailed to you to keep your work safe. This WordPress plugin can also be set up once, and you can forget all about it; it will work alone.
BackupBuddy is a premium (paid) plugin that can easily back up, restore, and migrate WordPress sites. It can back up your entire WordPress, install and restore it with a single click, or migrate from one domain or server to another in a few clicks. BackupBuddy schedules and backs up your data to an Amazon S3 server or an e-mail or an FTP / FTPS account, restore your WordPress site with your themes, widgets, and plugins on the same server, or migrate it to a new server with a new name and domain. With ongoing development, frequent updates, extensive documentation, and support, BackupBuddy is one of the best premium backup plugins.
W3 Total Cache is the most popular and complete WordPress caching plugin available. It can improve your website’s performance by caching the pages and objects and minifying the databases by content delivery network support. It uses a memory-based cache (Memcached), which appears much faster. The downside is that Memcached isn’t available on most shared hosting providers. W3 Total Cache can use HTTP compression (like GZIP) to shrink your pages, but it goes beyond that – it will minify your JavaScript and CSS code, stripping out comments, spaces, and other things that don’t affect how the code works. These things reduce the time it takes to download your web pages.
» WP Super Cache
[/one_third] [two_third_last]WP Super Cache is another very fast WordPress caching plugin that generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Instead of loading the heavy PHP scripts of your blog, your visitors will be served with static HTML files which will make your blog appear to load faster. More important, your blog’s queries to your host’s server will be less intensive avoiding possible deactivation of your site from your hosting account in the future.
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» WP Smush.It
[/one_third] [two_third_last]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. Each image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different, just install it.
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» Really Simple
CAPTCHA
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As the name suggests, the implementation of this plugin is simple. Really Simple CAPTCHA does not use PHP “Sessions” for storing states, unlike many other PHP CAPTCHA solutions, but stores them as temporary files. This allows you to embed it into WordPress without worrying about conflicts. If you’re using the Contact Form 7 plugin, you should definitely install the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin which is specifically created for this contact form management WordPress plugin. Because of this, it cannot work as a standalone CAPTCHA plugin, but must be combined with some other plugins instead.
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» WP-ReCaptcha
[/one_third] [two_third_last]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. reCAPTCHA is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University, then acquired by Google. It is very interesting that by solving CAPTCHA tasks created by this plugin, a visitor is helping in the process of digitizing of books.
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» Akismet
[/one_third] [two_third_last]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. Each comment Akismet has to check is sent to the Akismet servers to check if the message is spam or not. But Akismet contains more like: comment, comment user IP, user agent, referrer, post permalink, blog URL, blog name, blog language, user role and the contents of the $_SERVER system array. Since data is sent to Akismet servers, you have no control over it anymore. In these days where privacy of users is a great concern, this kind of thing can be considered very dangerous.
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» BulletProof Security
[/one_third] [two_third_last]BulletProof Security protects your blog from hacking attempts like code injection, SQL injection, base64, XSS, CSRF, CRLF and RFI using .htaccess level protection. All these protection comes in free versions of the plugin. Pro version have additional security measures. This WordPress security plugin allows you to instantly create and activate .htaccess website security with a few clicks without having to know anything about .htaccess files. The Master .htaccess files are pre-made and the plugin writes .htaccess code specific to your website.
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» Wordfence Security
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Wordfence Security is a free security plugin that includes a firewall, anti-virus scanning, malicious URL scanning and live traffic including crawlers. Wordfence is the only WordPress security plugin that can verify and repair your core, theme and plugin files, even if you don’t have backups. Wordfence is now multisite compatible.
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» Better WP Security
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Better WP Security is another one of the best WordPress security plugins to use. The dashboard of the plugin makes any user happy because there’s nothing really to do in it. All the default settings and options of the plugin are the best for any normal site. Nonetheless, all the settings are easily customizable to suit the requirements of any users. Some of the best features of this plugin: detects any vulnerabilities within the core WordPress, Theme and Plugin files and automatically fixes them, automatically bans troublesome bots and malicious programs injecting the site, hides or displays a different version of the installations, high prevention of brute force attacks. Upon multiple login attempts, the plugin bans the individual IP or all the IPs from a specific hosts.
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» Secure WordPress
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Secure WordPress improve the security of your WordPress by removing error information on login pages, adds index.html to plugin directories, hides the WordPress version, block any bad queries that could be harmful to your WordPress site, and much more.
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» Limit Login Attempts
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Limit the number of login attempts possible both through normal login as well as using auth cookies. By default WordPress allows unlimited login attempts either through the login page or by sending special cookies. This allows passwords (or hashes) to be brute-force cracked with relative ease. Limit Login Attempts blocks an Internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making a brute-force attack difficult or impossible.
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» P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
[/one_third] [two_third_last]P3 Plugin Performance Profiler creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time. Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them. By using the P3 plugin, you can narrow down anything causing slowness on your site. This plugin uses the canvas element for drawing charts and requires requires Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, or IE9 or later. This plugin will not work in IE8 or lower.
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Core Functionality WordPress Plugins
[one_third]» WordPress Importer
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Using WordPress Importer plugin you can import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file. If your exported file is very large, the import script may run into your host’s configured memory limit for PHP. A message like “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted” indicates that the script can’t successfully import your XML file under the current PHP memory limit. If you have access to the php.ini file, you can manually increase the limit; if you do not (your WordPress installation is hosted on a shared server, for example), you might have to break your exported XML file into several smaller pieces and run the import script one at a time.
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» WP-PageNavi
[/one_third] [two_third_last]WP-PageNavi replaces the next/previous buttons with good looking paginated buttons. Customizable and absolutely essential. WP-PageNavi provides an excellent technique for user-friendly navigation with a list of the page numbers for posts. This enables the visitor to navigate their way through your blog with relative ease.
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» Jetpack
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Jetpack is a WordPress plugin consisting of several features (gravatar hovercards, spelling and grammar, extra sidebar widgets, custom CSS, contact form, mobile theme, and many others). Even though you could find individual plugins that matches some of Jetpack’s features, using one plugin – instead of many – will result in a lighter load on the blog server. Jetpack is a plugin that connects to WordPress.com and enables awesome features, powered by their cloud infrastructure.
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» WP Greet Box
[/one_third] [two_third_last]WP Greet Box plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer URL. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URL’s) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.
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» Revision Control
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Revision Control plugin allows the user to set a site global setting (Settings -< Revisions) for pages/posts to enable/disable/limit the number of revisions which are saved for the page/post. The user may change this setting on a per page/post basis from the Revisions Meta box.
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» TinyMCE Advanced
[/one_third] [two_third_last]TinyMCE is a standalone platform that converts text-input fields into an editor instance with many user-friendly controls that are commonly associated with word processing software (Micosoft Word, OpenOffice Writer). WordPress includes a WYSIWYG editor by default, but the TinyMCE Advanced plugin adds additional functionality and potential for customization. TinyMCE Advanced plugin includes: Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Advanced List, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras.
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» WP Minify
[/one_third] [two_third_last]WP Minify is one of several plugins designed to speed up the loading of your site. It basically takes all of your CSS and JS files and removes all of the extra space and combines them into one file, making it both smaller to download and requires less HTTP requests. Although many other plugins can do the similar job, but none of them are not as precise as WP Minify. Just install it and you surely will notice a huge difference in loading speed. Still, if you are not satisfied with the performance, you can deactivate WP Minify in 2 simple steps.
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» Ultimate Google Web Fonts
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Ultimate Google Web Fonts is a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to instantly access all of Google’s open source web fonts, preview and use them with any theme. List of available fonts is updated from Google automatically, and currently there are more than 650 fonts to choose from. With it’s unique system for previewing fonts on any WordPress theme, it is fun and easy to use. You can take full control over typography in your theme in a matter of minutes. This one is particularly easy to use for non-technical users. Just select the font you want to use, select which element you want to assign it to, and save.
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» Dynamic “To Top”
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Dynamic “To Top” WordPress plugin adds an automatic and dynamic “To Top” button to easily scroll long pages back to the top. It features an intuitive control panel to style and adjust to each website’s need. The button only appears for JS enabled browsers and can be optionally disabled for mobile visitors. You can also use it to create a hand-crafted menu that links to pages, posts, categories, or anything within your site.
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Search Engine Optimization WordPress Plugins
[one_third]» WordPress SEO by Yoast
[/one_third] [two_third_last]WordPress SEO helps you write better content. It forces you to choose a focus keyword, when you’re writing articles, and then makes sure, you use that focus keyword everywhere. Each post and page you write will have have a meta box where you can enter your title, meta description and keywords. The cool part about this section is that it automatically shows you a snippet preview of how your description will look in search engines. With the WordPress SEO plugin you can control which pages Google shows in its search results and which pages it doesn’t show. Other features: XML Sitemaps, RSS Optimization, Breadcrumbs (create an easy navigation for both users and search engines), edit htaccess and robots.txt files, Social Integration, Import and Export functionality.
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» SEO By Squirrly
[/one_third] [two_third_last]SEO By Squirrly helps you write content that is SEO and also human friendly. You’ll get to improve your rankings, while providing your readers with great content. It works well with WordPress sites that already have Yoast or All In One SEO. Some features include: headline suggestions based on your SEO keyword, finds you keywords and topics that your customers actively search for, gives you SEO advice as you’re typing your articles, tracks all the aspects of your content marketing strategy, monitors your progress week by week, plus more. The best things is: you don’t have to be an SEO expert to use it. Squirrly will help you write great content, will show you where your WordPress needs improvements and it will even help you learn all about content marketing and SEO strategies through email trainings. From my point of view, for the first time, Yoast has a serious competitor!
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» All-In-One SEO
[/one_third] [two_third_last]All-In-One SEO has a substantial set of features and it’s a very popular choice for handling SEO. You have to take some additional steps to get the maximum benefits from this WordPress plugin. With All-In-One SEO Pack Pro you can set site-wide defaults in WordPress as well as customize the search engine settings for each individual WordPress post and page. Some features include: No Index on pages and posts, No Follow on pages and posts, exclude individual pages and posts from your XML sitemap, Google, Bing and Pinterest webmaster tools verification, Import/Export module, Search results preview.
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» Smart SEO
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Smart SEO is a simple SEO plugin that can make your blog SEO friendly with the SEO Scores it generates for every single page. It has a pretty simple and effective admin panel that can seamlessly integrate into your existing WordPress admin panel.
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» Google XML Sitemaps
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Google XML Sitemaps will generate a special XML sitemap, which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask to index your site. 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.
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» WP Realtime Sitemap
[/one_third] [two_third_last]WP Realtime Sitemap creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from it’s own options page in the WordPress admin panel. It makes easier for your site to show all your pages, posts, archives, categories and tags in an easy to read format without any need for template modification or HTML/PHP knowledge in a page.
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» SEO Friendly Images
[/one_third] [two_third_last]SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according to the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well. ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your images to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match. TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear when mouse is over the image.
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» SEO Slugs
[/one_third] [two_third_last]SEO Slugs makes your permalinks shorter by removing unnecessary common (stop) words such as a/the/or/what/or/can, resulting in shorter URLs and a better rank. The reason behind taking away the stop words is that the search engines do away with them anyway. In cleaning your slugs from stop words, you’re doing the search engines (and you!) a big favor. Changing your slugs to a keyword-packed, eye-catching version is not exactly a piece of cake, but it ain’t rocket science either. This is useful if you do not want to use previous SEO plugins.
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» SEO Smart Links
[/one_third] [two_third_last]SEO Smart Links can automatically interlink your content to key pages deeper into the site improving both search engine rankings (by using relevant anchor text in the links) and search engine crawling of your site. The plugin figures out what keyword phrases it can use to link to corresponding posts, pages, categories, tags (or any other taxonomy) and all happens automatically according to the options you set. If you want more manual control you can also specify a custom keywords and every time select words or phrases appear on your page, SEO Smart Links will automatically convert them into text links to pages you want.
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» Redirection
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is especially useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.
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» Broken Link Checker
[/one_third] [two_third_last]There’s a lot of ways to find broken links – you can examine all the pages on your blog, and click through on the links. But that’s cost you a lot of time. Broken Link Checker has a lot of settings in order to tune it’s work fine for you own needs. Broken Link Checker will save you a massive amount of time eliminating broken links, including links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, custom fields (optional), detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects. Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
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» Google Maps
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Google Maps is THE quickest and easiest way to view a map of an area and get directions fast. Harnessing that power onto your own WordPress site has been a bit of a chore in the past… especially for the most “un-techy” of users on your multisite installation. This elegant, powerful WordPress plugin allows you to simply create as many Google Maps and insert them into post, pages or your sidebar – letting your site visitors get directions in seconds. A MUST HAVE for local business owners!
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» WPtouch
[/one_third] [two_third_last]WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with Ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from the most popular mobile web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices and tablets.
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POSTS, FORMS & OTHERS WordPress Plugins
[one_third]» Special Recent Posts
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Special Recent Posts (SRP) is a very powerful plugin for WordPress which displays your recent posts with thumbnails. You can dynamically re-size thumbnails to any desired dimension, drag multiple widget instances and configure each one with it’s specific settings. You can also use custom PHP code or shortcodes to insert the widget in any part of your theme. It’s the perfect solution for online magazines or simple blogs and it comes with more than 30+ customization options available.
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» Yet Another Related Posts
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. YARPP uses an ingenious algorithm to determine which posts and pages are the most relevant to the current post. By giving your visitors the opportunity to easily read related content on your website, you can increase your visitors’ time on your website, and thus improve the chances of a purchase, or the visitor contacting you. Also, you can include related post links in your blog’s feed and customize the display options that subscribers see.
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» Drop-Down Post List
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Drop-Down Post List plugin allows you to easily display drop-down boxes containing the posts for specified categories (or all categories). You can use this plugin by entering the trigger text in a post or page, or by adding the function call directly to your theme files. You can display as many drop-down boxes as you like, and you have a choice between a standard select box (with button), or a “jump menu” (as the visitor clicks on a post, they will immediately be taken to that page without having to click a button). Other options are also available.
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» Contact Form 7
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the email contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. The trick is that you don’t need to make extra settings: just create your contact form with the fields that you want and you are done. I love this fully featured plugin, and best of all it has a free version.
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» Gravity Forms
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Gravity Forms is hands down the best contact form plugin for WordPress. Gravity Forms is the most customizable contact form plugin out there. Plus, there are bridges that can help you integrate that same contact form information with email marketing software such as MailChimp, AWeber, and so on. You can create any variety of forms, collect any array of data, allow for file uploads, setup notifications to route to different email addresses, and place the form on any page or post at the click of a button. Plus you can include hidden fields that transmit data like IP address, use conditional forms, dynamic pre-population of form fields, and lots of other stuff.
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» AJAX Contact Forms
[/one_third] [two_third_last]AJAX Contact Forms is a slick jQuery-based premium WordPress contact form plugin powered by AJAX that brings style to your plain contact form and reduces page loading. While it’s not as elaborate as the Gravity Forms plugin, it gets the job done. Make as many forms as you like, and customise them, all via the WordPress admin panel.
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» Hello Bar
[/one_third] [two_third_last]While I don’t recommend using Hello Bar all the time, if you have a specific call to action that you want to get the word out about, this simple web toolbar that sits across the top of a website is an elegant solution. You can customize the color of your bar, the text font, text color and a few other options so that it blends perfectly with your site. Hello Bar also supports A/B testing.
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Social & Commenting WordPress Plugins
[one_third]» ShareThis
[/one_third] [two_third_last]ShareThis widget is a quick and easy sharing solution for your site to keep your audience engaged in your content and increase traffic to your site. You can also customize your widget for seamless integration to your site, have the option to use small or large buttons, add counters and place the widget in a clear location for your users to share. Have access to 120 social channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Like, +1, email and more.
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» Sociable
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Sociable adds a bar of icons of different social networking and bookmarking sites that you can choose for your posts and pages. 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.
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» Sharebar
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Sharebar adds a dynamic and fully customizable vertical box to the left of a blog post that contains links/buttons to popular social networking sites.
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» AddThis
[/one_third] [two_third_last]With AddThis, your users can promote your content by sharing to over 330 of the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn). They also support address bar sharing in modern browsers. The share button is small, unobtrusive, quick to load and recognized all over the web.
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» Comment Luv
[/one_third] [two_third_last]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 more. With CommentLuv Premium WordPress plugin you’ll reward your readers and have fine grain control over dofollow, keywords in the name and the ability to add Twitter names to comments. It includes some of the most advanced anti spam features to protect you from bots and sophisticated heuristics to prevent human spam which has been proven to dramatically decrease the amount of spam that a blog gets.
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» Disqus
[/one_third] [two_third_last]With a few quick steps, Disqus can turn your old comment system into a new way to engage your visitors. From small blogs to massive websites, Disqus is the easiest way to build active communities. It’s free to use and works with virtually any type of websites. A powerful commenting system that helps you to build an active community of users by using features like Realtime Comment System, Social Integration, The Community Box, and more.
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» SEO Facebook Comment
[/one_third] [two_third_last]SEO Facebook Comment plugin will insert a Facebook Comment Form, Open Graph Tags and all Facebook Comments into your WordPress Database for better SEO. Among many advantages, you will have all your WordPress comments widgets and plugins still working since all the comments will also be on your database. Also, even if Facebook goes down or slow, it won’t affect the loading of your site content. What makes this plugin shine is that it is very low server resources intensive.
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» Ultimate Facebook
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Ultimate Facebook might be the only Facebook plugin you will ever need. Include features like: auto-post to your page, registration and login, Facebook comments, BuddyPress profiles support and more. This one stop, do-it-all Facebook plugin makes it easy to integrate just about everything that is possible between your WordPress site and Facebook. The Ultimate Facebook plugin eliminates the use of multiple plugins, and takes care of everything, including posting updates on a Facebook page.
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» OpenID
[/one_third] [two_third_last]OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account. XRDS-Simple is required for the OpenID Provider and some features of the OpenID consumer.
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» Subscribe To Comments
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Subscribe to Comments is a robust WordPress plugin that enables commenters to sign up for email notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification email address.
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Photography & Galleries WordPress Plugins
[one_third]» NextGEN Gallery
[/one_third] [two_third_last]NextGEN Gallery is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin, and one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time, with over 7 million downloads. It provides a powerful engine for uploading and managing galleries of images, with the ability to batch upload, import meta data, add/delete/re-arrange/sort images, edit thumbnails, group galleries into albums, and more. It also provides two front-end display styles (slideshows and thumbnail galleries), both of which come with a wide array of options for controlling size, style, timing, transitions, controls, lightbox effects, and more.
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» Media Grid
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Media Grid allow you to create unlimited responsive and filterable portfolios with ease. The plugin uses the latest CSS3 and jQuery tecnologies to adapt each portfolio to it’s container. No matter if is wide or short, the grid will be always displayed correctly. In responsive themes, you can choose to use the automatic re-sizing system or set a relative width to keep the grid items always on the same size – they will be placed in the best way possible to ensure the best layout. Media Grid is designed to adapt each portfolio to any situation and is mobile optimized.
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» SlideDeck
[/one_third] [two_third_last]SlideDeck 2 enables you to build stunning content sliders for your WordPress site without any coding. Add images, text and video, embed your own custom HTML, or even dynamically pull content from your favorite sources, like Instagram, YouTube or RSS feeds. Now your sliders can automatically re-size to fit neatly on the page, regardless of the size of your screen or device.
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» Lightbox Gallery
[/one_third] [two_third_last]The Lightbox Gallery plugin changes the view of galleries to the lightbox. Features include: mobile ready, socials sharing, sidebar toggle, integrated Facebook comment plugin, 3 layout view supported (Preview Left, Preview Top, Grid), filter galleries by category name, preview images in a gallery when mouse over on a gallery, support widget with many options, create unlimited galleries for each category. You can also make regular images appear in a lightbox.
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» Social Gallery Photo Viewer
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Social Gallery Photo Viewer plugin is a fantastic new way to engage visitors to your WordPress blog by adding the ultimate lightbox featuring social media buttons (Facebook like, Facebook Send, Pin it, Tweet This and now LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Tumblr) as well as Facebook or Disqus Comments. 40+ CSS 3 animations available, 11 preset modes, fully customisable.
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Video WordPress Plugins
[one_third]» Social Video
Locker
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Social Video Locker allows you to quickly and easily setup videos on your site using the web’s most popular video services. Visitors must share any URL you want before they can watch the video. You can lock any YouTube or Vimeo video behind social buttons, no way to play until social actions are completed. Supports 4 different social networks and 5 buttons, includes 10 different overlay image effects with 2 color schemes.
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» Vimeo SEO User Playlist
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Vimeo SEO User Playlist with jQuery for WordPress allows you to turn an unordered list of Vimeo links into a video playlist. The PHP script makes the Vimeo list on a fly and uses the latest Simple Api. There are many options which can be set in the plugin and in the jQuery function. Includes the new HTML5 player (iframe) if the browser supports HTML5. This is the only Vimeo script available with search engine optimization (SEO). Almost drag and drop. A great future is that you will only have to set the width of the player and the height settings will be auto adjust So no more messing with advanced CSS settings.
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» YouTube Embed
[/one_third] [two_third_last]YouTube Embed WordPress plugin helps you easily manage the growing complexity of YouTube embedding. It provides a spectrum of basic and advanced features of the YouTube embedded player and will have you posting videos in seconds after installing it. All you have to do is simply paste an unformatted YouTube link on its own line (shortcodes are also supported). Embed a responsive video, YouTube channel gallery, or playlist gallery. Add video thumbnails, analytics, SEO, caching and more.
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» Slider PRO
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Slider PRO is one of the most powerful slider plugins for WordPress on the market. The slider is fully responsive and mobile-ready. It provides 15+ skins, 150+ options, 100+ possible transition effects – from simple “fade”, “slide” or “swipe” effects to more complex “slice” effects, and much more. Also, the slider’s administration area is very powerful and uses the default WordPress design, which WordPress users are already familiar with. You can easily add YouTube, Vimeo and HTML5 videos inside the layers. Automatically load data from posts, pages and custom post types, based on any taxonomy.
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» RoyalSlider
[/one_third] [two_third_last]RoyalSlider is a responsive image gallery and HTML content slider plugin with touch-swipe navigation. The plugin is mobile-friendly and allows creating completely custom slideshows and CSS3 banner rotators with images, videos or HTML content in slides. You can also dynamically populate data from Flickr, 500px, or featured posts of any post type. For photo gallery you can enable vertical or horizontal thumbnails, enable lazy-loading or fullscreen. Carousel also supports YouTube or Vimeo videos that allows you to create video galleries. RoyalSlider is focused on performance, stability and providing best experience for user with any device.
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» Viper’s Video
Quicktags
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Viper’s Video Quicktags allows any XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more. Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box – easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid, unlike with the code provided by most video sites.
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E-commerce WordPress Plugins
[one_third]» WP eCommerce
[/one_third] [two_third_last]WP eCommerce is one of the plugins that has been around since 2006 and has been popular for several years. Before many of the other e-commerce options for WordPress existed WP eCommerce was on the scene. The plugin itself is available as a free download, with a variety of upgrades and add-ons available for purchase. WP eCommerce includes features like integration with dozens of different payment gateways, integrate with many popular WordPress plugins, use built-in marketing tools to sell more, shipping is easy with built in shipping tools and integration with popular couriers, secure check-out with SSL, manage your orders and catalogues with powerful built-in tools, extend your e-commerce site with additional modules, integrate with WordPress multisite, and much more.
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» Easy Digital Downloads
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Easy Digital Downloads is a plugin to selling digital and other non-physical products. Rather than attempting to provide every feature under the sun, Easy Digital Downloads makes selling digital simple and complete by providing just the features you need.
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» WooCommerce
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Using WooCommerce you can sell both physical and digital goods in all shapes and sizes, offer product variations, multiple configurations, and instant downloads to shoppers, and even sell affiliate goods from online marketplaces. WooCommerce gives you complete control of your store, from taxes to stock levels to customer accounts. Add and remove extensions, change your design, and switch settings as you please. It’s all under your control. If security is a concern, rest easy. WooCommerce is audited by a dedicated team of developers working around the clock to identify and patch any and all discovered bugs.
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» Cart66
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Cart66 is a simple to use yet powerful e-commerce plugin for WordPress. You can sell electronics, digital downloads, videos, music, web hosting, legal services, collect membership fees, and tons more. Cart66 is a WordPress e-commerce plugin that makes selling as simple as placing a product on any page or post on your WordPress site. With Amazon S3 integration you can easily deliver your digital products, even large files like videos or an entire album of MP3’s. With easy PayPal integration you will be collecting sales right away. Or, set up your own merchant account and collect payments without your buyers ever leaving your site.
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» MarketPress
[/one_third] [two_third_last]MarketPress is the easiest to use, best designed and most powerful e-commerce and shopping cart plugin available for WordPress today. Developed from the ground up to make it simple to setup a stylish online shop, MarketPress has all the features you need, including: multiple payment gateways (PayPal Express Checkout, Authorize.net AIM, Google checkout, 2CheckOut, Moneybookers, eWay shared payments, Cubepoints and more), works great with any WordPress theme, fully internationalized by the developer crew. Sell real objects, or digital downloads (with limits and tracking) with ease. MarketPress is also 100% WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress compatible – so you can use it to start your own Etsy or Ebay style network of stores.
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» Jigoshop
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Jigoshop is an e-commerce plugin developed by professionals with years of experience delivering online shops for global brands. Add functionality to your Jigoshop with premium themes and extensions. Detailed order and stock reporting via graphs and dashboard widgets, one-step-checkout, filterable products, bundles of short codes and widgets.
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Statistics WordPress Plugins
[one_third]» Google Analytics
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Google Analytics track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author and category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and page views. This plugin uses the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking offers. Option to manually place the tracking code in another location and automatic Google Analytics site speed tracking are available as features.
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» Slimstat Analytics
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Slimstat Analytics is a WordPress plugin to track real-time activity log, server latency, heatmaps, email reports, export data to Excel, full IPv6 support, and much more. Compatible with W3 Total Cache, WP SuperCache and most caching plugins. Accurate IP geolocation, browser and platform detection (courtesy of MaxMind and Browscap). Is available in multiple languages. Incorporate World Map that works on your mobile device.
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» Clicky
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Clicky is a real time web analytics service. This means that when you login and view your stats, you are seeing up to the minute data on the traffic to your web site. Most services don’t let you see what’s happening “today” until the day after. You can view almost any report with up to a full year’s worth of data. However, doing so just gives you the total sum for any individual item over that entire date range. What if you want to view up to a year’s worth of history for any individual item? This is possible with just a single click, and is one of the most useful features of Clicky.
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» Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Google Analytics by MonsterInsights allows you to track your blog easily and always stays up to date with the newest features in Google Analytics. This plugin uses the universal or the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking code Google Analytics offers. Gives you incredibly nice visitor metric dashboards right in your WordPress install. Have the option to enable demographics and interest reports. Possibility to ignore any user level and up, so all editors and higher for instance. Option to anonymize IP’s for use in countries with stricter privacy regulations. Tracking of your search result pages and 404 pages. Full debug mode, including Firebug lite and ga_debug.js for debugging Google Analytics issues. Like all WordPress plugins, Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is only available for self-hosted WordPress sites.
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» Google Analytics +
[/one_third] [two_third_last]Everybody loves Google Analytics. So a great feature of a WordPress MU platform is to allow individual bloggers to be able to simply insert their own analytics code, so they can track their blogs performance. However, there’s one big downside to this. Usually it means that you can only allow your users to track their own stats, while flying blind yourself. Well, not any more – Google Analytics + plugin allows you to simply enter your ‘UA’ code into a new field in Site Admin/Options as well as allowing your users to enter their code in Settings/Google Analytics. And, they will both work together. And if that’s not enough, the plugin can restrict access to the individual stats to paying users only (if you wish).
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These are the essential free and premium WordPress plugins for those who want a truly optimized and profitable website. Do you use the same plugins? Did you know alternatives you would recommend some of you can’t live without? Give me a shout-out in the comments below. Thanks!
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SEO and digital marketing specialist, I bring expertise in driving online visibility and optimizing organic search rankings. Leveraging my skills in keyword research, on-page optimization, content marketing, link building, and AI tools, I have consistently delivered measurable results across diverse industries.