October 4, 2024

WordPress plugins you never knew you needed.

There are lots of post about the top wordpress plugins, but they all seem to have very similar list. Since I’ma plug-in junkie I thought I’d give you a list of plugins I’ve found that don’t show up on the “top list” very often but should.

After The Deadline – Adds a contextual spell, style, and grammar checker to WordPress. Write better and spend less time editing

Freebie Images: Free Stock Images Plugin – Spice up your blog with high quality free stock photos & images created by professional photographers and illustrators: Easy to use search interface with advanced filtering and Drag & Drop functionality. Great way to easily add stock images, I just wish you could upload them to the local media library instead of just linking.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 – The purpose of this plugins is to strengthened our on page SEO by adding new internal linking to the blog post using the most popular keywords used by visitors to find the blog post from search engine ( incoming search terms ). If you get over 4k hits per day there is reports of this plugin causing high CPU usage

Smart 404 – Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.

WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more! Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins.

Tweet Old Post – Tweet Old Posts randomly picks your older post based on the interval specified by you. The primary function of this plugin is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic.

Author Box Reloaded – It allows also the author to define links to the external websites like Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, Netlog, LinkedIn, Drupal Association and WordPress.Org (included). Those external websites are very simple plugins and you can check the included ones to see how to make your owns. At the front-end those will appear as clickable icons.

Thank Me Later – a plug-in which will automatically send a thank you email to readers after they post a comment. It can be set to send the message a time after the comment was posted (an hour, day, week, month, etc). It is effective as it will remind readers of their comments and gets them engaged with future discussion and your blog.

Share and Follow – Designed for average users to use, ideal for developers who want to save time, this plugin gives links to the most prominent Social Networking sites for sharing and following, presented in many different formats

Jason Benway

Christ follower, husband, father, IT geek, and Xbox gamer

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20 thoughts on “WordPress plugins you never knew you needed.

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  3. I'm a WP junkie too and some of these I hadn't seen. Thanks for mentioning them. 🙂

  4. This is the post I was going to comment on – thank you for opening up Disqus to us un-disqussing people 😉

    You have some good plug-ins there, a couple which I already use and a few I'm going to check out. Just wanted to note on the “plug-in junkie” concept. I used to be the same,but managing literally dozens of WP blogs soon broke that addiction. Plug-ins are an added pain when it comes to upgrading WP. You need to rely on their coders to release new versions on time. They're also an additional hacking window. Not saying not to use them, just that I'm using them more cautiously and more sparingly now.

  5. With multi user wordpress coming in Version 3, that should make
    managing a lot of sites and their plugs much easier.
    I try to only install plugins that are on the wordpress plugin site.
    Not the developers.

    Thanks for stopping by hope to see more comments from you.

  6. From the list you have, I downloaded the freebie images, the greet box and Thank Me Later. I just installed them today, so I'll let them run a while and see how they pan out. Thanks again!

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  8. I stopped using WP Greet Box, even that it was cool. Thank me later is awesome, but I'm not sure if it works with Disqus or not? (most, if not all, commenting plugins don't work with Disqus)

  9. Thanks for stopping by and for the ReTweet.
    why did you stop using WP Greet box? performance or you felt it didn't
    add enough value?

    Your correct most plugins don't work with Disqus, I've been
    questioning the value of disqus lately. But when I look at all the
    additional plugins I would need if I wanted some of the feature set. I
    just stick with Disqus for now.

    jb

  10. I stopped using WP Greet Box partly because I didn't need it for now. I'll probably test it out again at some point to see if it gets clicks and does add value, since it is a cool plugin.

  11. Josh, they have After the Deadline as a Chrome extension and I love it. I’m using the Zemanta extension to pull images, but sometimes I think I could find better one. I’ll look into Freebie Images plugin. Thanks.

  12. Freebie Images: Free Stock Images Plugin is great. But I use Windows Live Writer to compose my posts rather than in WordPress page. It would be great if similar addons are available for Live Writer too!

    1. I agree, a live writer plugin would be nice.
      What I’ll do a lot is write the post in live writer, then post it to a draft and finish editing it with the wordpress editor with any additional plugins I have (seo,featured image,etc)

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