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wordpressDo you have your own beloved WordPress blog? Here are my fave plugins. Please share you own.

Last Update: 10.03.2023

Changes:
Added: WP Dark Mode,
Removed:

  1. Admin Trim Interface – customize wordpress admin pages.
  2. Advanced File Manager – no need to use your host’s FTP to view and modify files. Awesome.
  3. Aksimet – Usually comes with fresh WP install, well worth signing up to keep spam comments off your site.
  4. Amazon Affiliate Tag (Amazify) – adds your Amazon affiliate ID to any links to Amazon products – you can just use the generic link to the products but then get credit if people click through and purchase from your site.
  5. Auto Excerpt Everywhere – If you would like your Home, Archive, and Category pages to show an excerpt with a thumbnail (featured image or first image in post), this does it automatically – no need to create featured images or excerpts manually.
  6. Auto Featured Image (Auto Post Thumnail) – If you typically use the first image in your posts as the featured image, this plugin will automatically set the featured image for you without your having to choose it.
  7. Automatic Post Tagger: Similar to apps that recommend related articles, this creates tags for you based on content.
  8. Auto Post Thumbnail – have lots of posts that have no featured image, but your new theme requires it? This plugin goes through your posts and sets the first image as the featured if there is not already a featured image. Nice.
  9. Autoptimize: optimizes html, java-script, css, and can add CDN for you if you know your CDN blog root directory URL
  10. Better Search Replace: Does what it says, no sql required.
  11. Blubrry Powerpress: My favorite podcasting helper.
  12. Broken Link Checker: Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
  13. Catch-IDs: shows post/page/media/links/category/tag ID on the list pages for these items. Essential if you need to know the ID.
  14. Child Themify: The quickest and easiest way to create a child theme. Check out this helpful how to video.
  15. Classic Editor: God I hate the new WordPress Block Editor. Install this plugin, maintained by WordPress, and you can have your old editor back. Ahh.
  16. Delete Multiple Themes – if you have too many themes installed, and would like to delete more than one at a time, this is your product. Note that this is not compatible with Minimal Admin plugin, which you can disable when you use this plugin.
  17. Disable Comments – Deletes and removes comment functionality from existing posts, pages, and media. Nice.
  18. Disable Gutenberg – Disable wordpress block editor, use Classic editor. Ahhh.
  19. Disable Trackbacks – Globally disables trackbacks to cut down on spam. Very, very few people legitimately use trackbacks and spammers love them, so it’s worthy tradeoff.
  20. Drop Caps – Creates drop caps for your posts.
  21. Easy Table of Contents – Awesome
  22. Easy Smooth Scroll Links – if you link to an anchor inside the same page, your site will scroll smoothly to it, it’s a real neato effect. Many effects to select from. No jquery or javascript required.
  23. Enable Media Replace – upload a better image, will do all the remapping etc. Nice.
  24. Enhanced Meta Widget – Works great even though it has not been updated since 2010. Many more options than other meta widget replacements.
  25. EWWW Image Optimizer – optimizes your images on upload, and can also bulk optimize your existing media library. Very nice.
  26. Glossary – add words to your custom glossary, allows for custom link and popovers with definitions. I’m still looking for one that just lets me import definitions based on an online dictionary.
  27. Google Analyticator – easily add GA to your site.
  28. Google Analytics Dashboard – Google Analytics graph integration in your dashboard.
  29. Google Tag Manager – if you are advanced enough to add Google tags to your site, you can use this. If not, don’t worry about it.
  30. 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.
  31. Grab and Save – Download images from your WP media library in one swoop.
  32. GZip Ninja Speed Compression – allows you to quickly compress and GZip your site
  33. Infinite Scroll – only works with certain themes, but replaces pagination for adding more as people scroll down
  34. Imsanity – automatically reduces the size of images that are larger than the specified maximum and replaces the original with one of a more “sane” size. Site contributors don\’t need to concern themselves with manually scaling images and can upload them directly from their camera or phone.
  35. iThemes Security – there are a few good security plugins out there, I prefer this one. I learned the hard way that brute force protection is a must!
  36. LearnDash – the best LMS plugin (not free) out there. Better than Woo Sensei because it has more quiz types, and is just more innovative. Integrates with myCred too.
  37. Lightbox with Photoswipe – I’ve had so many issues with lightbox plugins not working on my site – some didn’t pick up the captions consistently, some didn’t pick up all the images on the page, some didn’t show controls and pretty much locked up the browswer tab, This one just works. I’e not enabled any slideshow or animation tweaks, but the default animation is good enough if all the other stuff works.
  38. Media File Renamer – By updating the name of the image / media, this plugin will rename physically the filename nicely, update all the references to that media in the associated post if there is any
  39. Media Tools – imports and attaches all external referenced images in your posts, finds the first attached image to post and sets it as the featured image, add post thumbnail support to your site, set additional thumbnail sizes.
  40. Nextend Social Login: Allow users to create accounts or log in with their social credentials (Facebook, Twitter, etc).
  41. Open Graphite – Control how your content is viewed when shared on social media. Especially if FB fails to pick up your featured image correctly. This plugin replaced Facebook Thumb Fixer for me.
  42. Plugin Organizer – some great common sense improvements to the plugin admin screens. My favorite is, when viewing ALL, it moves the deactivated ones to the bottom of the list.
  43. Podlove – may replace Blueberry as my favorite podcast app. Now with support for chapters! Awesome.
  44. Post Tags and Categories for Pages – adds the ability to use your existing Tags and Categories on Pages. All WordPress functions based on tags and cats will like Archives will now include your pages. Nice video tutorial.
  45. Postie – advanced features for posting by email. Great for photo sites where you just want to email in your new photos.
  46. Public Post Preview – allows you to share a draft post with your contributors without publishing it – it’s secretly published, you just share the URL.
  47. Reference 2 Wiki – using simple double square brackets, add a link to the wikipedia page for the text.
  48. RefTagger – Transform Bible references into links to the full text of the verse.
  49. Regenerate Thumbnails – don’t like the default size of thumbnails in WordPress (150 x 150 px)? You can regenerate them all after adjust the size in Media Settings. Nice.
  50. Remove Query Strings From Static Resources – This plugin will remove any query strings from static resources like CSS & JS files, and will improve your speed scores in services like PageSpeed, YSlow, Pingdoom and GTmetrix
  51. Reposter Reloaded – Reposter Reloaded recycles your posts on a schedule of your choosing. Reposter Reloaded will find the oldest post in a specific category, and re-date it with the current date and time. It does this on the schedule of your own choosing or randomly, which can be as frequently as every 6 hours or as spread out as 21 days.
  52. Resize After Upload: Allow yourself or others to upload any size image, it is resized after upload down to a size you prefer.
  53. Restrict Widgets – allows you to show or hide widgets based on page or post type, category, etc.
  54. Shareaholic – Doesn’t slow downloading like many other social share plugins. I use classic view – doesn’t have many configure options, but I love the default buttons. Finger friendly for iPad too.
  55. Shortcode Exec PHP – add boilerplate to your posts.
  56. Simple Custom CSS – I like this better than Jetpack’s Custom CSS because it is SCCSS saves the CSS across themes (not theme specific). If you change themes with Jetpack, it forgets the custom CSS (though you can retrieve it from the CSS versioning in Jetpack).
  57. Simple Footnotes – A simple way to add footnotes to a doc that link to one another. Autonumbering. Nice.
  58. Simple Post Template – rather than creating a post type or template, just plug it in and Post Type
  59. Site Speaker TTS – this text to speech synthesizer is free and awesome.
  60. Smooth Slider – there are lots of free slider plugins, I just like this one for its simplicity, though I had to add some custom CSS to make it format my way.
  61. Social Media Auto Poster – can be used in addition to SNAP so that you can publish to more than one social network without having to buy pro versions of either. You can also use Jetpack to do a third one I believe.
  62. Social Media Widget – unhappy with how your theme shows links to your Social Media pages? This simple and elegant plugin adds a widget.
  63. Social Networks Auto-Poster (SNAP) – autopost to your Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. Does this better than Jetpack.
  64. Social Media and Share Icons – when you need floating follow buttons, this will do it
  65. SumoMe – you know those annoying subscription popups that sites use? This is the one. You need to do it too.
  66. Taxonomy List Widget – Lists your tags with widget, includes post counts.
  67. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore – Auto-backup into the cloud (Amazon S3 (or compatible), Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, DreamObjects, FTP, SFTP, SCP, WebDAV, OpenStack Swift and email) and restore with a single click. Backups of files and database can have separate schedules.
  68. Use Google Libraries – allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google’s AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly (so you are using their CDN for common stuff)
  69. W3-total-cache – Dreamhost tech told me this is one of the best cache plugins out there. It covers all of your cache, compression, and minifying. WARNING: If your server does not have enough memory, this will KILL your site. I no longer use it.
  70. Worth the Read – Adds reading time to your articles, as well as progress bar. Nicely configurable. Free!
  71. WP Dark Mode – Creates a floating dark mode CSS toggle.
  72. WP Editor – replaces the Appearance > Editor function with a little more help. Not perfect, but better.
  73. WP Limit Login Attempts – simple captcha for login to prevent brute force attacks
  74. WP Page Navi – If your theme lacks a good pagination widget, this one does it all.
  75. WP Supercache – 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.
  76. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARRP) – I used to use Contextual Related Posts , but for some reason, it stopped giving good results. This one works, and has a Pro version too.

Other WordPress Tools

  1. WXR File Splitter – Importing your WP site to a new host? XML file too big? Use these directions to split your file, including the WRX File Splitter (download wrxsplitter.zip from me if no longer available, I promise, no virus/adware)

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