As a WordPress blog owner, it is imperative to make the most out of the wide variety of plugins available online. Since WordPress breathes and lives due to its plugins, using them at your advantage is a smart move. Of course, there are some who say that paid plugins are the real deal, but the truth is that free WordPress plugins are also extremely important & useful.
The following 17 plugins were deemed the most flexible, stable, usable and beneficial for most WordPress users. Don’t hesitate to make the most out of them in promoting your blog, optimizing your posts, enhancing your creativity or boosting your number of blog visitors.
1. Yoast SEO:
This is one of the most useful SEO plugins for your WordPress blog. Some of its benefits include: create better titles, block duplicate pages, optimize keywords and automatically add Meta tags. In addition to all that, Yoast SEO integrates Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Title tags for an improved SEO experience.
2. Flare:
This is by far the sexiest plugin out there, allowing you & your visitors to share your content with ease on all their social networks.
3. Disqus Comment:
This tool makes commenting a super easy & elegant activity; moreover, it provides you with additional advertising revenue opportunities and extra exposure in your niche.
4. Social Count Plus:
This is a very comprehensive social widget like Flare. The true benefit of Social Count Plus is that you can actually see total number of shares on each social network, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Steam, Sound Cloud and LinkedIn.
5. W3 Total Cache:
Another must-have plugin whose job is to optimize your blogs speed score. This tool minifies scripts, caches database queries and ads expired headers to static images and much more.
6. Authenticator:
Use this unique plugin to authenticate with ease when logging into your WordPress account. With authenticator, you get additional protection for your WordPress site or blog.
7. Better WP Security:
Why not enhancing your WordPress blog security? Make it harder for hackers & cyber criminals to hack your site using the WP security plugin.
8. WordPress Popular Posts:
You can now easily promote your favorite blog content and increase your exposure online by leveraging the benefits offered by this plugin called ‘WordPress popular posts’.
9. Simple Feed Stats:
If you are well aware of the tremendous power of RSS feeds, you do realize that you need a similar plugin to Feed-burner. With Simple Feed Stats, you can do much more than just offering some feeds ‘you can track your subscriber’s locations.
10. Auto Post Thumbnail:
Use this plugin to automatically generate unique thumbnails for your future posts. The image selected is usually the first one that appears in the post content.
11. CF Short-code:
This tool, which allows you to insert HTML code or other types of code inside your post, comes in handy, especially when you want to add custom JavaScript in a post.
12. File Monitor:
Use this plugin to monitor everything that happens in your blog. Hence, if someone adds a new comment or another admin posts something, you will be notified.
13. WordPress Backup to Drop box:
If you use Drop box, you could find this plugin quite useful. With this tool you gain the pace of mind that your posts, comments and data is all backed up automatically in your Drop-box account.
14. WP Smush.it:
Even if some people think that the Yahoo! Smush.it is not such reliable, you can definitely use this tool to optimize your blogs images.
15. Broken Link Checker:
If you are a SEO savvy guy, you know how important is for your blog to have no broken links whatsoever. Since Google updated their algorithm, sites and blogs with too many links are penalized. Hence, use this tool to find all broken links and remove them ASAP.
16. Widget Importer & Exporter:
This is a very useful WordPress free plugin that helps you move your personalized widgets from your blog to your website or vice-versa. If you are a developer or an affiliate marketer who uses more blogs at once, this plugin could be extremely useful.
As a WordPress blog owner, it is imperative to make the most out of the wide variety of plugins available online. Since WordPress breathes and lives due to its plugins, using them at your advantage is a smart move. Of course, there are some who say that paid plugins are the real deal, but the truth is that free WordPress plugins are also extremely important & useful.
The following 17 plugins were deemed the most flexible, stable, usable and beneficial for most WordPress users. Don’t hesitate to make the most out of them in promoting your blog, optimizing your posts, enhancing your creativity or boosting your number of blog visitors.
Author Bio:-
Cally Greene is a blogger and works with Sparks DUI Attorney as Online Consultant. She likes blogging about Social Media Strategies, Online Marketing and Legal Issues. You can follow her on Google+.
