20 Free Useful WordPress Plugins

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL.

It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. If you use WordPress as your publishing platform, you’ll find many useful tools that’ll help you improve your productivity and make sure your WordPress site is running smoothly.

Today I’ll show you a number of great plugins that will enhance your wordpress website. These plugins are all free to download from the official wordpress plugin directory.

Peter’s Collaboration E-mails

Enhance the “Submit for Review” feature for Contributor users. This plugin enables automatic e-mails to the relevant users at the different post status transitions: when posts are pending; when they are approved or scheduled; and when their statuses are changed from “pending” back to “draft”.

EDITORIAL CALENDAR

The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

Content Audit

Lets you create a content inventory right in the WordPress Edit screens. You can mark content as redundant, outdated, trivial, or in need of a review for SEO or style. The plugin creates a custom taxonomy (like a new set of categories) that’s visible only from the admin screens.

Edit Flow

Edit Flow empowers you to collaborate with your editorial team inside WordPress.

Codepress Admin Columns

Customise columns on the administration screens for post(types), pages, media, comments, links and users with an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. This plugin will give you many additional columns. You will have full control over all columns for pages, posts, posttypes, media, links, comments and users.

WordPress Tweaks

WordPress Tweaks is a powerful yet simple plugin to help you push the boundaries of WordPress by fine-tuning its many aspects. This multi-purpose plugin specializes in simple toggle-on/off changes and dropdown selections. It adds many useful settings pertaining to comments, posts, media, the administration back-end, and much more.

Event Organiser

Event Organiser adds event management that integrates well with your WordPress site. By using WordPress’ in-built ‘custom post type’, this plug-in allows you to create events that have the same functionality as posts, while adding further features that allow you to manage your events. This includes the possibility of repeating your event according to complex schedules and assign your events to venues.

Custom Admin Branding

The Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to brand and customize the WordPress administration area for clients or for personal use. You can display custom images and styles for the login screen, admin header and footer.

Private Messages For WordPress

The Private Messages For WordPress allows users of WordPress blog send private messages (PM) to each other. Users will have their own inbox and outbox. Administrators of blog can control total numbers of items in mailbox of each user group (Administrator, Editor, Author, Constributor and Subscriber).

Dashboard Notepad

This dashboard widget provides a simple notepad. The widget settings allow you to choose which roles can edit the notes, and which roles can merely read them. You can display the contents of your notepad using a template tag and/or shortcode.

Pricing Table

WordPress Pricing Table plugin will help the admin to publish pricing table on WordPress page or post content. WordPress Pricing Table plugin has full featured but easy to use administration option to create pricing table.

Email Address Encoder WordPress Plugin

A lightweight plugin to protect plain email addresses and mailto links from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities. Has effect on the posts, pages, comments, excerpts and text widgets. No UI, no shortcode, no JavaScript — just simple spam protection.

User Spam Remover

User Spam Remover is a plugin for WordPress that automatically removes spam user registrations and other old, never-used user accounts. It also blocks the notification e-mail that WordPress normally sends to the administrator whenever a new user registers (annoying when that registration is spam!) and logs it instead. The plugin adds a configuration panel so that all of these options can be turned on or off, and it logs and fully backs up all user accounts that it deletes, so that you can restore them if you need to.

WP-CMS Post Control

Post Control from WordPress CMS Modifications gives you complete control over your write options for every user level/role. It not only allows you to hide unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc. but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content.

User Role Editor

With User Role Editor WordPress plugin you can change user role (except Administrator) capabilities easy, with a few clicks. Just turn on check boxes of capabilities you wish to add to the selected role and click “Update” button to save your changes.

ThreeWP Activity Monitor

Displays a multitude of user actions to keep the site administrator informed that all is well and that the blog or network is not being abused.

WP-DBManager

Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database.

W3 Total Cache

Improve site performance and user experience via caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.

Simple:Press

A feature-rich, completely integrated and scalable forum plugin for WordPress.

User Switching

This plugin allows you to quickly swap between user accounts in WordPress at the click of a button. You’ll be instantly logged out and logged in as your desired user. This is handy for test environments where you regularly log out and in between different accounts, or for adminstrators of sites who need to switch between multiple accounts.