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Ten Free Wordpress Plugins That You Should Install

This is the seventh and final part of A Beginner’s Guide To WordPress in which I discuss the use of plugins. Plugins are what make WordPress truly flexible and extensible and they provide you with lots of power over how you want your WordPress site to work.

There are literally thousands of plugins that have already been written which you can download and install today for free. Check out the WordPress Plugin Repository to get a sense of just what you can potentially achieve.

Installing and Activating Plugins

In your WordPress core files there is the directory “/wp-content/plugins” – this, as the name suggests, is where the files for your plugins reside. The traditional way to get a new plugin up and running is to download it, upload it to this directory, navigate to the “Plugins” area in your WordPress Admin panel, and then activate and configure the plugin.

Recent versions of WordPress have made this process much simpler as you can now search for and install plugins without ever having to leave the WordPress Admin area. To do this, navigate to the “Plugins > Add New” link, search for something that you’re interested in, and you should then see several results appear with some useful information about the plugin (e.g. the rating it has been given by other users, a description of its function, and a link to the plugin’s website).

You can install the plugin simply by clicking the “install” link on the right-hand side under the “Actions” column.

Deactivating and Deleting Plugins

You can deactivate and uninstall plugins whenever you choose – however, you need to be careful when doing so. Removing a plugin can cause problems in the functioning or appearance of your site, so ideally you need to test this on a local installation of WordPress first.

When you deactivate a plugin you simply switch it off – it hasn’t been deleted, but remains available for you to switch back on again at any time. By deleting a plugin you’re actually removing the plugin files from your web server.

Decent plugins should tidy up after themselves and remove any entries they have made into your WordPress database without messing up your site. However, this is not always the case, so you need to be very cautious when thinking about removing a plugin.

Ten Free Plugins To Consider

OK, now that we’ve covered some of the basics, let’s start having some fun. Below is a list of the ten useful and free plugins that you might want to install on your new WordPress site.

Akismet

I’ve mentioned this plugin a few times in this guide already, but it’s worth reiterating again – you really need to install this! If you don’t you’ll eventually start receiving lots of spam which you’ll have to waste time filtering through. Akismet comes preinstalled on your blog, so all you have to do is activate it – there’s no excuse

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin is useful as it generates an XML-Sitemap for your site that can be submitted to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com. This site map is updated each time you add new content to your site and it automatically informs search engines of the updates that have been made. Very handy!

WP-DB-Backup

This plugin is very useful as it enables you to backup your WordPress database with minimum fuss. You can then save the backup either to your hard drive or somewhere secure on your server (it’s probably a good idea to do both for enhanced security). A particularly nice feature is that you can schedule daily backups and then have the generated file emailed to you.

WP-Super Cache

This plugin is particularly useful if you receive a big spike in traffic. Getting on the front page of Digg or some other site that is likely to send a lot of traffic can easily bring your site to its knees – you’ll either exceed the amount of requests that your web host allows (and thus your site probably wont be displayed when people try to access it), or your site will start to run slowly. WP-Super cache helps to address by enabling your site to run much more efficiently when such scenarios occur.

Sociable

The Sociable plugin is very useful if you want other people to share your site’s content across other social media sites. This can potentially result in you receiving healthy amounts of traffic to your site as more people become more aware of your content. Once installed, it will automatically add some social bookmarking links on your posts and you’ll have a choice of from 99 different social bookmarking sites. I’d recommend choosing 7-8 (at most) that are most relevant to your site/target audience and stick with those.

Global Translator

This plugin can improve the amount of traffic that your site receives as it automatically translates your site into 41 different languages. This obviously makes your content available to a wider range of people which ultimately can result in more people visiting your site and reading your content.

WP-Stats

WP-Stats is a useful plugin that can inform you about how many people have visited your blog. Once installed, it will automatically be added to your WordPress dashboard – this is a nice feature as each time you log into your WordPress Admin area you can get a quick overview of how your blog is doing and how many visits you have received.

All In One SEO Pack

This plugin enables you to optimize your site for the search engines – for instance, it will automatically create a description tag for your blog posts and pages based on what you have written (something that search engines use when ranking pages). You can also easily add your own description, title, and keywords for each post on your site. Another nice feature is that the plugin takes into consideration issues with duplicate content on your site and takes steps to remove the negative impact this can have on search engine rankings.

WP-Pagenavi

This plugin enhances navigation around your blog content and is especially useful if you have a large site. For instance, by default you will have links at the bottom of your blog page that say something like “Newer Posts” or “Older Posts”. This is fine, but it can be frustrating if, for example, your reader wants to jump to page ten of your blog posts. This plugin address this and allows your readers to move around in a much more flexible and intuitive fashion.

WordPress Related Posts

WordPress Related Posts allows you to display posts that are relevant to the current one that is being read. This can be useful for presenting other content to your readers that they may not be familiar with, but would be interested in. It can also be a a good way of presenting some of your older content that hasn’t been read for a while. It’s often well worth including something like this at the end of your blog posts, just to give your reader some other options.

Conclusion

So that’s the end of this beginner’s guide to WordPress. I hope you found some value in the course and that you now have a good overview of what WordPress is and how you start going about using it. I’ll be starting some more advanced guides very soon on the site (in particular, building your own Wordpress themes and plugins), so stay tuned for more!

Table Of Contents

1. What Makes Wordpress So Great?
2. Understanding How Wordpress Works
3. Five Essential Things You Need For Building A Wordpress Blog
4. How To Complete A Fresh Wordpress Install
5. Wordpress Posts, Pages, And Other Concepts
6. Seven Points To Consider When Choosing A New Wordpress Theme
7. Ten Free Wordpress Plugins That You Should Install