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30 Useful WordPress Plugins, Every WordPress Site Must Have

The most popular WordPress Plugins of all time with over million downloads are here. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms available since last 10 years. It’s powerful enough to be a complete CMS, has every feature or function a blogger could dream of (either built in or available via plugins or custom functions), and it’s free and open source.

The WordPress Plugins, I feature in this post roundup are manually selected from a dynamic list that filters by various variables (such as average rating and number of downloads). That way we called Useful WordPress Plugins for every site, here you can find only new and relatively unknown plugins.

Useful WordPress Plugins

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Useful WordPress Plugins For WordPress Sites

In this post we will show 30 top free WordPress plugins, which are very useful for every WordPress site. Below you can find thirty  fantastic plugins. Most of them would be valuable on any WordPress site, though there are a few included that are more essential only for specific niche sites. In any case, check them out and decide for yourself if they’re essential or not.

1. Advanced Settings

I’ve always been puzzled by what I perceive to be missing settings in the WordPress core. Fortunately, the Advanced Settings plugin does a great job of filling in many of the gaps, including (but not limited to):

  • Remove comments system
  • Insert author bio on each post
  • Add description and keywords meta tags in posts (SEO)
  • Get the blog description and add a description meta tag
  • Hide top WP admin bar
  • Remove HTML comments
  • Easy FeedBurner configuration
  • Insert google analytics code
  • Display page loading time
  • Add thumbnail support
  • Set JPEG quality
  • Fix post type pagination

The plugin’s author is working on even more settings in the future, so stay tuned!

Advanced Settings

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2. SEO Plugin by Squirrly

SEO Plugin by Squirrly helps you write rich content that will be found by potential customers on search engines, research and analyze keywords that will give you a better chance of being found on google, it helps you measure the social signals that come to your site from various social networks and with one click you can check the SEO improvement of each article.

SEO Plugin by Squirrly

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3. Barc Chat

It’s the easiest way to add real-time commenting to your site! Barc’s simple tool combines social networking, instant messaging and customer support – and it’s all completely free without any ads!

Barc Chat

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4. Broken Link Checker

Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but that might be quite a task if you have a lot of posts. You could use your webserver’s stats but that only works for local links.

Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin

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5. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a great for wordpress, its very simple and flexible. It allows you to flexibly design the form and mail. You can manage multiple contact forms as well.

Contact Form 7 wordpress plugin

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6. Dagon Sitemap Generator

This plugin 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 its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Dagon Sitemap Generator wordpress plugin

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7. Efficient Related Posts

There is a problem with related posts plugins, and Efficient Related Posts is fixing that by approaching the problem from a different direction and offering a very different solution. Basically, current related post plugins build the list of related posts on the fly when the user needs to view it.

Efficient Related Posts wordpress plugin

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8. Google Analytics WordPress

When you have a website, you want to track how many visitors you have, where they come from, what they do on your site and much, much more. Google Analytics is the de-facto standard for measuring this, and much more. Adding Google Analytics to your website is as easy as pie with the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.

Google Analytics WordPress Plugin

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9. Google XML Sitemaps

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin

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10. Humans.txt

A plugin to create a humans.txt file that credits the developers and designers of a website.

Humans.txt WordPress Plugin

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11. Old Post Promoter

Old Post Promoter, is a plugin designed for WordPress by the Blog Traffic Exchange. The primary function of the plugin is its capability to promote older blog posts by reviving them and returning them to the front page and sending them back in to the RSS feed.

Old Post Promoter WordPress Plugin

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12. OnePress Social Locker

Social Locker is a set of social buttons and a locker in one bottle. It allows you to lock a part of content on a web page until a user clicks one of the social buttons (Facebook Like, Tweet Button, Google +1) and help you to get more likes/tweets/+1s, traffic and customers!

OnePress Social Locker WordPress plugin

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13. WordPress Pinterest Feed

This plugin allows you to display a Pinterest feed on any WordPress page or post using a short code. Each short code can display a separate list of most recent pins from a username or board. Shortcode options include Pinterest username, board, and pin count. A global/default settings section is also included with the plugin.

Wordpress Pinterest Feed Plugin

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14. Post-Plugin Library

This plugin provides a library of essential routines for the Post Plugins: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, Popular Posts, and Recent Comments. It does nothing on its own but is required if you use the other plugins.

Post-Plugin Library WordPress Plguin

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15. Quick Adsense

QuickSense offers a quick and flexible way to insert AdSense or any Ad code into a blog post. It comes with a simple settings page, and it does not overwhelm you with complicated options.

Quick Adsense WordPress plguin

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16. Really Simple CAPTCHA

Contact Form 7 allows you to insert a CAPTCHA into your contact form to prevent bots from submitting forms. Contact Form 7 utilizes Really Simple CAPTCHA as its officially-sanctioned CAPTCHA module, so you will need to install the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin before you use CAPTCHA in your form.

Really Simple CAPTCHA WordPress Plugin

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17. RSS Footer

This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, which you can edit like this:

RSS Footer WordPress plugin

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18. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

SEO Smart Links WordPress plguin

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19. Smart 404

When a page cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find a matching page, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if a matching post can’t be immediately discovered.

Smart 404 WordPress Plugin

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20. WP-Optimize

WordPress comes with a very extensible framework that allows you to add comprehensive and powerful functionality to your Blog system. WP-Optimize plugin is written to simplify your daily WordPress works simpler. WP-Optimize is a WordPress 2.7++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks. Additionally you can rename any username to another username too.

WP-Optimize

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21. wpSEO

wpSEO optimiert WordPress Blogs für Suchmaschinen. Automatisch und effizient. Ziel: Autoren konzentrieren sich auf Inhalte, wpSEO auf das Ranking.

wpSEO Plugin

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22. WordPress Popular Posts

WordPress Popular Posts is a highly customizable widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog.

WordPress Popular Posts Plguin

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23. WP Super Cache

A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

WP Super Cache

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24. Tumblr Importer

Import posts from a Tumblr blog.

Tumblr Importer WordPress Plguin

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25. Advanced Random Posts Widget

Easily display random posts in a widget. Allows you to display them with thumbnails, post excerpt, specific category and more. This plugin will enable a custom, flexible and advanced random posts widget. Allows you to display a list of random posts with thumbnail and excerpt also you can display it from all or a specific category.

Advanced Random Posts Widget

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26. Akismet

Akismet Possibly the best way in the world to protect you from web spam and filters out your comment and track-back spam for you, so you can focus on more important things.

Akismet wordpress plugin

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27. AuthorSure

AuthorSure makes it easy to implement Google’s authorship markup on your WordPress site. All you need to do is download and install the plugin, and then sign up to the free membership site to get access to tutorials to help you set things up perfectly on your site. AuthorSure works for single and multi-author sites, and can help you get your face to appear on your category, tag and other taxonomy archive pages.

AuthorSure wordpress plugin

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28. Digg Digg

Make it easy for your readers to share your articles. The Digg Digg bar makes it as easy as pie…

Digg Digg wordpress plugin

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29. AddThis Welcome Bar

Welcome visitors with a personalized greeting based on their social network preferences. Invite them to take specific actions like sharing, following, or visiting a page.

AddThis Welcome Bar

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30. WP Content Copy Protection

WP Content Copy Protection is a simple plugin that uses multiple techniques in copy-protecting your blog content. Some of the most common copy methods, such as right click, image dragging, and keyboard copy shortcuts such as CTRL A, C, X, U, and P are disabled with this plugin.

WP Content Copy Protection

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