Start your WordPress blog with these 12 free essential plugins, The plugins will get you started on the fly, simple and effective, requires very little amount of efforts and will certainly automate your blog and help you maintain good blog. I’ve divided the plugin into 6 categories
1- Security
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
What the plugin does is, limit the number of login attempts possible both through normal login as well as using auth cookies.
2- Advertising
The Google Publisher Plugin enables you to easily use Google’s products – including AdSense and Webmaster Tools – with your WordPress site.
Adding AdSense ads usually requires you to generate snippets in AdSense and paste these into your site, or to manually edit PHP files. This plugin lets you place AdSense ads using a simple point-and-click UI.
This beta version of the Google Publisher Plugin allows you to:
- Easily add AdSense ads to your site to make money from advertising.
- Verify your site with Webmaster Tools with just one click.
3- Social Networks
NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
The free version of this plugin automatically publishes posts from your blog to your Social Network accounts such as Facebook, Twitter. It also allow you to change the post type, either “link” or “image attachment” it’s essential for any website, and if you know how to use ITFFF you can combine them and get great results
This Massive plugin allow your users to connect with your blog with 23 supported social networks!
Great IMO
Shareaholic | share buttons, analytics, related content
This powerful app allow your readers to share on 30+ networks, showing the share count with customize share buttons. In addition to that it displays “related content” on all website pages if enabled.
Shareaholic also has a cookie notification feature to warn your viewers that your website uses cookie, which is required by some countries.
one of it’s great feature is the floating share icons.
A great tool to show and share your content and articles.
4- SEO
A great tool to build inlinks, you can easily add links (automatically) for keywords and phrases in posts, pages and comments and link them to corresponding posts, pages, categories, tags or any URL.
The best SEO plugin for WordPress, very advanced yet easy to deal with, the free version is quite amazing, hekp you get rid of useless links generated automatically with wordpress, gives you full control of your pages and content. help you find your focus keyword to make sure you stand-out in search results.
5- Comments
Comments indexable by search engines (SEO-friendly)
Support for importing existing comments
Auto-sync (backup) of comments with Disqus and WordPress database
Threaded comments and replies
Notifications and reply by email
Subscribe and RSS options
Aggregated comments and social mentions
Powerful moderation and admin tools
Full spam filtering, blacklists and whitelists
Support for Disqus community widgets
5- Engagement & Newsletters
Full & Complete contact form with advanced features for WordPress, with the support of custom fields, there are no limits to what it can do.
I’m going to quote the creator of this amazing pluin
A new and simple newsletter solution for WordPress. Finally!
Create newsletters, post notifications and autoresponders. Drop your posts, images, social icons in your newsletter. Change fonts and colors on the fly. Manage all your subscribers.
6- Advanced
If you’re a PHP developer, then this plugin is essential for your WordPress blog, you can write lots of php pages and simply include them with a short-code or snippit with that amazing plugin. In addition to that, you can simply run PHP codes within your posts!
If you’re an occasional PHP user, and would like to simply run a quick code of php on your sidebar, then this is a perfect plugin for you.