WordPress is one of the most used and most advanced content management systems (CMS) in the world with more than 60 million websites using its framework to run their sites – including my website. WordPress began as a tool for bloggers and quickly became the most popular blogging system on the internet, and is arguably one of the best platforms for a websites onsite SEO available. Since then it has grown, and now entire websites rely on the software with 18.9% of the top 10 million sites in the world running WordPress.
WordPress is open source meaning all the code is freely available for developers to modify meaning a large number of templates and useful plugins/add-ons have been created for people to add on and enhance their website or blog with. Many of these plugins have an online marketing focus and can help to improve your website either by increasing conversion rates, improving SEO rankings or just improving the usability of your website.
I have tested a wide range of free plugins, here are the top 17 that I recommend you implement and test on your WordPress website which will help you with your overall online marketing efforts:
404 Page
Define any of your WordPress pages as 404 error page to allow the use of custom pages.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/404page/
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/
BackWPup
Schedule complete automatic backups of your WordPress installation. Decide which content will be stored (Dropbox, S3…).
http://wordpress.org/plugins/backwpup/
BAW Manual Related Posts
Allows you to set related posts manually and easily and display them after.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/baw-manual-related-posts/
Broken Link Checker
This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/
Change Your Admin Bar To Maori
This plugin will change your admin login so you are instantly greeted with the Maori greeting of Kia Ora and the current New Zealand flag – a little bit of Kiwiana inside your WordPress dashboard.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/change-your-admin-bar-greeting-to-maori/
Easy Tynt
Adds a link back to your website when people copy and paste information from your website.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-tynt/
EWWW Image Optimizer
Reduce file sizes for images within WordPress to speed up page load speed times.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/
Floating Social Bar
Floating Social Bar adds a floating share bar to your content to allow easy sharing of posts.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/floating-social-bar/
HeadSpace2
Controls almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including advanced tagging, Analytics, and dozens of plugins.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/headspace2/
NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
Automatically publishes and re-publishes blogposts to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Blogger, Tumblr, Delicious, Plurk, etc.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g/
Redirection
Allows you to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
Responsive Lightbox
Allows users to view larger versions of images and galleries in a lightbox (overlay) effect optimized for mobile devices.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/responsive-lightbox/
SEO Friendly Images
Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images improving traffic from search engines.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-image/
SEO Slugs
Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-slugs/
SumoMe
This plugin has a range of useful features such as popups, header bars and scroll bars all aimed at helping you increase your email subscribers.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/sumome/
Youtube Not Found
Finds invalid youtube videos (deleted or removed from youtube) embeded in your site and alerts you to it.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/youtube-not-found/
