My Top 25 FREE WordPress Plugins June 2013

Posted in Hosting

A few weeks ago I got the idea to setup a ‘simple’ WordPress website. And for useability sake? To add ‘a few’ wordpress plugins. Turned about to be a whole bunch of them.

My Top 25 FREE WordPress Plugins June 2013

404 to start | Send 404 page not found error directly to start page (or any other page/site) to overcome problems with search engines. With optional email alert.
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget | Help your visitor promote your site! The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services.
All In One SEO Pack | Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog
Automatic Featured Image Posts | Automatically creates a new post with an assigned featured image from every image upload.
backWPup | WordPress Backup and more…
Better RSS widget | Replacement for the built in RSS widget that adds an optional link target, shortcode_handler, and page conditionals.
Better WP security | Helps protect your WordPress installation from attackers. Hardens standard WordPress security by hiding vital areas of your site, protecting access to important files via htaccess, preventing brute-force login attempts, detecting attack attempts, and more.
Broken Link Checker | Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
Content Warning V2 | site-wide” content warning dialog to users
DP Maintenance Mode Lite | The DP Maintenance Lite plugin includes the possibility to add a maintenance mode with a sleek theme to your website.
Exclude Pages from Navigation | Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation.
Facebook Featured Image and Open Graph Meta Tags | This plugin will add the necessary Open Graph Meta tags to automatically set the posts’ Featured Image as the thumbnail for sharing on Facebook and LinkedIn. It will also set Open Graph Meta tags for title, description, URL, type, and site name.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP | This plugin will display Google Analytics data and statistics into Admin Dashboard.
Google Analytics for WordPress | This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, adding lots of features, eg. custom variables and automatic clickout and download tracking.
Google XML Sitemap for Videos | This plugin will generate a XML Video Sitemap for your WordPress blog.
Google XML Sitemaps | This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
iframe | iframe shortcode support
Livefyre Realtime Comments | Implements Livefyre realtime comments for WordPress
optincrusher | Build your email list fast(er) by adding an animated optin footer to your WordPress blog. Works with virtually any email service, including Aweber, iContact, ConstantContact, GetResponse, MailChimp, FeedBurner, RapidResponse and many others.
Sociable | Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
Social Author Bio | Social Author Bio adds bio box on posts with social icons
Tag Pages | Add tags to Pages, just as you would do with Posts
Use Google Libraries | Allows your site to use common javascript libraries from Google’s AJAX Libraries CDN, rather than from WordPress’s own copies.
WordPress Popular Posts | Showcases your most popular posts to your visitors on your blog’s sidebar.
WordPress Related Posts | Quickly increase your readers’ engagement with your posts by adding Related Posts in the footer of your content.
wp-jquery-lightbox | A drop in replacement for LightBox-2 and similar plugins. Uses jQuery to save you from the JS-library mess in your header.
WP Maintenance Mode | The plugin adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in users get full access to the blog including the front-end, depends of the settings.
WP to Twitter | Posts a Tweet when you update your WordPress blog or post to your blogroll, using your URL shortening service. Rich in features for customizing and promoting your Tweets.

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Note: this list was compiled for a specific project; MoneyMakesTravelFun.com … I’m sure there are many other cool plugins out there, but these are the ones I installed (not all are active).

Final note: this project has taken more than a week of my time. I could / should have outsourced it, but projects like these … make me realize the blisses of Empower Network again.