There are numerous WordPress plugins available to accomplish any given task. It takes a finite (seemingly infinite) amount of time to do the research on each individual plugin to attempt to figure out which are the best to use. That’s why I put together this listing. This will give the beginning… even the more advanced… WordPress users a much-needed time savings.
Before we dive into the plugin list, I want to share with you what I believe to be perhaps the BEST FREE WordPress theme available. It is called Suffusion. It is touted as “the Best, Most Versatile and Totally Free WordPress Theme.” I would tend to agree. The numerous options that this theme allows are somewhat overwhelming at first. However, if you will take the time to learn the well described and well documented options, this may be the ONLY theme that you will ever need for as many websites as you manage. And, the creator of this theme, Sayontan Sinha, provides quick and accurate support via the support forum if you have a question.
Without further ado, here is my recommended FREE WordPress plugin list:
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. Sign up for an AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content–which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more. It’s all free–even the pretty charts and graphs. | By The AddThis Team
Akismet – Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. | By Automattic
Anthologize – This plugin can be used to transform your blog content into an eBook, which can be offered to your blog subscribers for FREE. | By One Week | One Tool
BackWPup – WordPress Backup Plugin | By Inpsyde GmbH
Black Studio TinyMCE Widget – Adds a WYSIWYG widget based on the standard TinyMCE WordPress visual editor | By Black Studio
Broken Link Checker – Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. | By Janis Elsts
Disable Comments – Allows administrators to globally disable comments on their site. Comments can be disabled according to post type. | By Samir Shah
Facebook Comments – Facebook comments can be annoying to set up. This plugin makes it simple to add the Facebook comments system to your WordPress site without any hassle. You can also insert the comment box as a shortcode into any post, page or template and use your own settings for each time you do it! | By Alex Moss
Follow Button for Jetpack – Adds a floating follow button to Jetpack Powered sites.The same follow button which appears on WP.COM blogs. Use Follow Plugin if your blog isn’t powered by Jetpack. | By TheAdityaJain
GigPress – Provides a database for entering, managing, and displaying speaking engagements. It is a great option for speakers and artists. | By Derek Hogue
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. | By Arne Brachhold
iQ Block Country – Block visitors from visiting your website and backend website based on which country their IP address is from. The Maxmind GeoIP lite database is used for looking up from which country an IP address is from. | By Pascal
Jetpack by WordPress.com – Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users. | By Automattic
Page Links To – Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources. | By Mark Jaquith
SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well. | By Vladimir Prelovac
ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. | By Kalpak Shah@ShareThis
Social Media Widget – Adds links to all of your social media and sharing site profiles. Tons of icons come in 3 sizes, 4 icon styles, and 4 animations. | By Blink Web Effects
Suffusion Shortcodes – This plugin is an add-on to the Suffusion WordPress Theme. Suffusion offers you a lot of shortcodes, but if you move away from Suffusion, your content might not display properly due to the missing shortcodes. This plugin will ensure that the shortcodes are available even if you decide not to use Suffusion. | By Sayontan Sinha
Ultimate TinyMCE – Beef up your visual tinymce editor with a plethora of advanced options. | By Josh Lobe
W3 Total Cache – The highest rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress. | By Frederick Townes
Wordfence Security – Anti-virus and Firewall security plugin for WordPress. | By Mark Maunder
WordPress Importer – Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file. | By wordpressdotorg
WordPress Notification Bar – Global Notification Bar for WordPress. | By SeedProd
WordPress SEO – The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more. | By Joost de Valk
WP-TopBar – Create MULTIPLE TopBars that will be shown at the top of your website. TopBars are selected by a variety of options – includes scheduler, custom PHP, custom CSS and more! | By Bob Goetz
Wysija Newsletters – Create and send newsletters. Import and manage your lists. Add subscription forms in widgets, articles and pages. Wysija is a freemium plugin updated regularly with new features. | By Wysija
His son,
Gary Lee Millner
gary lee millner.com 