Top Free Wordpress Plugins That Make Your Blogging Easy

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If you have a WordPress site you are lucky because you have thousands of plugins to choose from that help you customize your blog for your specific needs . However, having such a huge selection to choose from also makes it difficult to determine which ones are best for your website or blog.

Below I listed some of the best FREE WordPress plugins to install on your website or blog.

1. Maintenance Mode


The Maintenance Mode plugin is awesome!! It adds a landing page to your website that will be seen by all visitors that are not logged in. Also you can modify the landing page, use one of the basic templates or use the default countdown page.


With this plugin can do maintenance on your site, like move your sidebar widgets, or anything else you want to rearrange. And your visitors won't see an unfinished website.


2. Theme Test Drive


Theme Test Drive is another amazing theme that will let you try out or test out different themes on your website without actually having to make the theme the actual theme on your website.

As a logged in user you will be able to see what a theme looks like on your website while your visitors will still see your old theme.


3. Simple 301 Redirects


When we make changes to the URLs of the pages or posts on our websites, we often forget that the URL is what people link to. When you make changes to URL's, the URL become broken links so when people click on these broken URL or follow those links they get an 404 error page.


This plugin can help if you made this mistake. This plugin can easily add a redirect that will be useful to your future visitors and to Google also.


4. SEO Smart Links

Do you inter-link your articles? You should. Linking within an article to other articles is a great way to build Page Rank throughout your site and it’s a great way to get readers to find your other articles on similar subjects. This plugin will interlink keywords to your other articles for you.



5. Tweet Old Post


Tweet Old Post will randomly tweet a post from your archives to Twitter automatically. The frequency can be set to whatever is convenient for your needs. It is awesome for people that post everyday and see constant streams of traffic to their website from Twitter.



6. W3 Total Cache


WordPress is dynamically generated from a database which make WordPress extremely slow. To improve the speed of your WordPress website is through caching.


W3 Total Cache creates a cache of the pages on your website so that your server doesn’t need to create them every time a new person visits your website.

There are a lot of caching plugins online but but Wordpress's W3 Total Cache is one of the best.


7. Digg Digg

A great tool to use for attracting new visitors to your website is social networking sites. Digg Digg adds social sharing buttons to your site for as many of the more popular social networking sites you want. Don't over do it and add too many sharing buttons so try to keep it below half-a-dozen.


8. BackWPup


I have lost vital data and the past and it sucks. So backing up everything is critical for any one with a webiste. The BackWPup plugin makes it easy to schedule and create offsite backups which will ensure that you never lose data from your website. By offsite, I mean off of your website’s server. This is a great tool to use to prevent hacking or even against server problems.

With this plugin you get your databases emailed to you a weekly basis and I get full backups of yoursites sent to your Dropbox account every month.




9. WP Smush.it


The WP Smush.it plugin is another amazing plugin. This plugin will optimize your images for the web as you upload them through the WordPress media manager. You don’t have to do anything different than you usually do and the images on your website will load quicker. You can also go back and “smush” your existing images. Keep in mind, that visitors often leave sites that take too long to load.



10. After Post Content Box

Is a simple way to add content that will appear after every post but only on the single post pages. You can add an email opt-in box after posts regardless of the theme or blog configuration without having to touch the code every time you wanted to make a change. The After Post Content Box plugin will let you manage this content.


11. Lightbox Plus

WordPress has a fantastic system for uploading images and automatically adding thumbnails. But, if you just click on a thumbnail, you are taken to the full size image but that’s it. Lightbox Plus creates a great looking lightbox that appears over your website content and allows your users to flip through the other images within that post or page.

It is great for smaller screens and mobile devices. And this particular plugin also has some preset lightbox styles that look really awesome.


It doesn’t matter what you want to achieve on your blog, there is probably a WordPress plugin that will help you get it done.


I hope this list helps you select the right ones for your website or blog. These plugins can can make managing your website blog a breeze. But remember if you add too many plugins to one website it may slow down your site. Review the list and see which ones are the most vital for your particular needs.

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