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Free Best Wordpress Plugins - The Top and Must Have
Best Wordpress plugins? Wordpress has countless cool plugins, but not all are important to your blogging success.
This article presents a list and explanation on awesome ones you need including the best Wordpress forum plugin.
Free Wordpress Plugins
Wordpress is so pupular for the many features it allows. There are several Wordpress plugins and add-ons that you can use to present your site better and improve it performance, including monitoring your site performance.
And most are free to use and work really well.You can get a plugin for almost anything you want to do with your blog.
And where you can not get a plugin for a task, you can write your own codes and customize your template/theme to work the way you want it to assuming you're good with HTML and CSS.
You shouldn't install every plugin you hear of because it's free, too many plugins on your blog can increase your site loading time which will affect your blog's ranking at the search engines.
So install only the best wordpress plugins that are important to your blog's performance.
All the Wordpress plugins here are available at Wordpress site so I didn't bother creating links to them. Just visit the site and you'll find all or any you want to download.
The Top Must have Wordpress Plugins
Akismet : Akismet Wordpress plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it.
Akismet now comes with the Wordpress software. All you have to do is activate it with your API key, which you will get from Wordpress. See the video at the end of this article.
All in One SEO Pack : The all in one SEO pack Wordpress plugin optimizes your Wordpress titles and permalinks for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
A good alternative to this is the HeadSpace2 SEO Wordpress plugin. It practically takes care of optimizing every aspect of your blog's meta-data.
WP-DBManager: The WP-DBManager Wordpress plugin Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.
Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. You can have your entire Wordpress database emailed to you daily.
Wp-cache Wordpress plugin : Very fast cache module. It's composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. In essence allowing your site to load faster.
KB Linker : Looks for user-defined phrases in posts and automatically links them. Example: Link every occurrence of "Wordpress" to wordpress.org. Page inter-linking is great for SEO and increases page views.
A good alternative to the KB linker Wordpress plugin is SEO smart links
More on the Top Best Must have Free Wordpress Plugins
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.
Broken Link Checker: This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.
Contextual Related Posts: Show user defined number of contextually related posts usually below every posts. This has same benefits as the KB linker plugin.
RSS Footer: The RSS Footer plugin allows you to add important information to the footer of your RSS content, ensuring that readers who may not visit your blog are also priviledged to the information.
The information you include could range from a simple thank you message to readers for subscribing to your feed, your social media profile buttons, newsletter signup and so on.
Google Analytics for WordPress : : Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.
It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, and track image search queries.
ReplyMe : This Wordpress plugin automatically sends email to a commentator on your blog when he or she gets a direct response to his or her comment. It could be when you reply to a particular comment directly or when fellow readers do.
This helps to bring repeated visitors to your site and improve interaction on your blog.
Best Wordpress Plugins you should consider that are also Free
This Wordpress plugins segment features plugins that are great but you can decide against. Though I advice you consider them.
WP Nofollow Categories: WP Nofollow Categories adds nofollow attribute to all category links throughout the blog. It will also add noindex tag to category page. This will effectively remove the category pages from SEO point of view.
The goal is to flow the page rank to other pages on your site like posts and tags while avoiding duplicate content issue.
SEO Slugs: Removes common words like 'a', 'the', 'in' from post slugs to improve SEO.
CommentLuv: Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.
Top Commentators Widget: Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site.
Subscribe to Comments: is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail 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 e-mail address!
Feedburner cirulation : The Wordpress Feedburner circulation enables you to display your Feed subscriber count. If you have a good number of subscribers this is great for credibility.
Widget Context : This plugin allows you to choose which widgets you want to show in a particular page. This means you can choose to show only widgets related to a particular page on each page.
Pretty Link: The Pretty link plugin is a URL shortener and more. One of the features that sets it apart from other URL shortener is that it include your domain name in the link it creates.
If I try to shorten the URL:
mywebsite.com/blogging-for-dummies.html
I'll expect to have:
mywebsite.com/blogging or something like that. The point to note is that it keeps your domain name in the after link.
It comes very handy when sharing audio or video content you produce. You can also customize and track the clicks from such link.
Still More on Best Wordpress Plugins
StatPress: Real time stats for your Wordpress blog.
Twitter Tools: A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter.
Thank Me Later: Thank Me Later (TML) will automatically send an e-mail to those who leave a comment at your blog.
Use this plugin to say 'Thanks' to your visitors, and prompt them to further engage with your blog.
Wordpress Thread Comment: Enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.
Contact Form 7: It can manage your multiple contact forms and you can also customize the mail and the form contents with just a simple markup. The form supports CAPTCHA, Ajax-powered submitting and Akismet spam filter.
Whydowork Adsense: Insert Adsense code in your pages without modifying the template. Show different ads for articles older than 7 days (or as old as you wish).
WP - Polls : Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress's blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable.
Best Wordpress Forum Plugin
Simple Press : Adding forum to a blog is a good way to increase your blog community and create more interactions among readers.
When you decide to include a forum to your blog, the simple Press Wordpress forum plugin is one of the best to use. It's been around many years.
A good alternative is the Mingle Forum Wordpress plugin.
How to Use Wordpress Plugins
It is very easy to install any of these best Wordpress plugins on your blog. You can either install Wordpress plugins directly from your dashboard or use an FTP client.
The video below directs you properly on how to use Wordpress plugins to optimize and customize blog.
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