My Favorite Free WordPress Plugins

If you run a blog using WordPress chances are you are also using plugins. One of the great things about the WordPress community is all the developers who create plugins. As I mentioned in this post, a plugin is a piece of software, or code, that sites on top of WordPress and extends its capabilities.

There are thousands and thousands of plugins currently available. You can most free plugins at the WordPress Plugin Respository. The only problem with have so many choices is knowing which plugins to actually use! Every blog has different needs and wants, so no two WordPress sites are going to run the exact same set of plugins.

Below is a list of the free WordPress plugins I use here at Faithful Bloggers.

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.”

I use Akismet to help fight spam and it does an excellent job at that! I’ve tried some other spam plugins but like Akismet the best so far.

Better WP Security

“Helps protect your Wordpress installation from attackers. Hardens standard Wordpress security by hiding vital areas of your site, protecting access to important files via htaccess, preventing brute-force login attempts, detecting attack attempts, and more.”

I first found out about this plugin when a client’s blog got hacked. My client hired WP Security Lock to clean up the hack job and introduced me to Better WP Security. I know install it on all my WordPress sites.

CommentLuv

“Reward your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. Encourage a community and discover new posts.”

This is a great plugin to help encourage other bloggers to comment on your site. It allows them to add a link back their blog when they leave a comment. Who doesn't a want link back to their site?

Duplicate Post

“Clone posts and pages.”

As the title of the plugin suggests, this plugin allows you to duplicate any post you have already written. I use this mainly for podcasts and Content We Love blog posts. This works great for any type of post that has the same format or layout. All I have to do is update the content and I’ll good to go.

RefTagger

“Transform Bible references into links to the full text of the verse.”

This is a nifty little plugin that automatically turn your Bible reference into links that pops up with the Bible verse when clicked! Very cool.

S3 Video Plugin

“Upload and embed videos using your Amazon S3 account”

Any video that I don’t upload to YouTube goes to my Amazon S3 account. It super cheap to host videos on S3 and this plugin make it’s easy to display them on any WordPress site.

WP Clean Up

“WP Clean Up can help us to clean up the wordpress database by removing "revision" "draft" "auto draft" "moderated comments" "spam comments" "trash comments" "orphan postmeta" "orphan commentmeta" "orphan relationships" "dashboard transient feed". It allows you to optimize your WordPress database without phpMyAdmin.”

This plugin helps to clean up your WordPress database. This helps to keep it nice and clean which leads to faster blog.

What free plugins are you using on your WordPress blog?