Our Top 10 Free Wordpress Plugins & Widgets
admin June 2nd, 2008
When we first started setting up blogs our knowledge was limited to messing round with the layout and CSS. After a few weeks we gained confidence and started to experiment with plugins and widgets that didn’t come as standard with Wordpress.
Below is a list of our 10 favourite Wordpress Plugins that we have found through trial and error and are extremely impressed with. Feel free to add your own suggestions and tell us if we’re missing something important….
1) Title Tag Editor
This plugin lets you customise all the title tags in your blog - from the static pages to the posts. This allows you to target each page more effectively for search engine optimisation without having to stick with the often non-descriptive titles that Wordpress uses by default.
2) 3D Flickr Spinner
A fun way to display your Flickr photos on your website or blog. It allows the user to click on the spinning cube and takes them directly to your Flicker account. You can also restrict the images that are being displayed by adding in certain keywords to the configuration area. Scroll down the page a little and look at the sidebar and you’ll see it working on our site.
3) Simple Forum
Easy to use and install, this plugin provides an excellent forum facility to your blog. Look at one of our Glasgow Restaurant blogs to see this in motion
4) Who Links To You
This shows your visitors just how good your site is by displaying a blogroll of all the sites that link to you, should hopefully your users confidence that the content in your site is worthy of someone else linking to it!
5) Askimet
Comes preinstalled with wordpress or can be downloaded from the link above. Make sure you activate it though, I didn’t for the first few weeks and was inundated with spam comments. Once Askimet is activated it stops all the spam filling up your inbox and lets you view and delete everything in one go saving a lot of time and irritation.
6) Secure Contact Form
Impressive contact form with a security question which means you are getting a human sending you contact requests and not just spam! easy to configure and works like a dream.
7) Google Analytics
Possibly the fastest and easiest way to add Google Analytics to your blog. No coding whatso ever, just activate the plugin, add in your user account code (which the plugin handily has a link to) and away you go.
Fancy Tooltips
Fancy tooltips replaces the plain old alt and title attributes for images and links with a prettier version that you can easily customise wit css.
9) Wordpress Polls
Use this plugin to add user intraction through the form of polling. A good way to get users participating in your site and hopefully keep them coming back to check result!
10) Event Calendar
Easy to use, install and configure. Lets you add a calendar of events to your site - great if your blog is for something like a bar, band or live music venue.
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