Wordpress is one of the most heavily used blogging platform in the world. According to Wikipedia "WordPress is used by over 16.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1 million" websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. (Source). Not only this, 48 out of Top 100 blogs are powered by Wordpress. These are amazing statistics for a software which is less than 10 years old.
A lot of blogs run on wordpress and as the blog grows , bloggers get and less time for managing routine tasks like deleting spam comments, managing old posts, optimizing database tables , managing various social network etc. In this post I will list 5 free plugins which will save you time and money (Time is Money after all)
GrowMap Anti Spam Plugin
Any popular blog owner will tell you comment spam is one big headache. Infact as the blog grows in popularity its starts facing more and more comment spam. If bloggers allow spam comments to be published, it can hurt their Google ranking and if they outright bock it, then legitimate comments will get lost in the sea of spam. So it is best to stop automated comment. GrowMap Anti Spam Plugin is an ideal tool to block spam comments. It is a deceptively simple plugin. It simply add a client side generated checkbox to your comment form asking users to confirm that they are not a spammer. It is much simple for the user as there a no complicated CAPTCHA codes to decipher. This technique is good enough to stop 90% of automated spam. This plugin had been rated 4.9/5 by the wordpress community.
SEO by Yoast
With every google algorithm update people have been sounding death knell for SEO. But the truth is that SEO will never be dead, yes it will evolve and tactics will change but SEO by itself will never be dead. Infact with increasing competition it is now more important than ever to focus on SEO. This SEO plugin by Yoast will help you in optimizing your posts for maximum SEO benefits. It makes optimizing title and meta dead simple. With advanced page anlaysis algorithm it makes keword density check a breeze. It also creates an XML sitemap and automatically pings search engines every time a post is published. So you can now spend more time in writing the post than optimizing it for Search Engines.
NextScripts Autoposter
If you want to grow your blog then social media presence is an absolute necessity. Facebook and Twitter combined have over a billion users. Add LinkedIN , Google+ , Pinterest and other social media sites and it soon becomes a headache to effectively manage all social media channels effectively. NextScripts Autoposter is an amazing plugin which automatically posts your wordpress content to various social networks. It supports all popular networks like FB, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr etc. And the best part is that it is under active development and additional network support is planned in near future.
Admin Manager Extended
The Wordpress Admin Dashboard is well organized and well laid out, but as the number of posts increase it can quickly get cumbersome. Current Admin Dashboard does not support inline editing and this is where this Admin Manager Extended comes into picture. It ajaxifies the dashboard and add inline editing options for modifying post properties, categories, taxonomies, comments etc. It also adds Drag and Drop feature for rearranging page order. Inline editing feature can be a real time saver when the number of posts run into 100's.
Wp DB Manager
As the content on your wordpress website grows, it starts slowing down the load time. Slow website load time is detrimental for growth of your blog. Infact increase in website load time is correlated with decrease in user engagement. So it is absolutely necessary that you make every effort to optimize the database. But optimizing database is cumbersome and time consuming. This is where Wp DB Manager comes to the rescue. It is like PHPMyadmin inside wordpress dashboard. It allows you to Drop/Empty Tables, Repair database, run selected queries all without leaving the Wordpress Dashboard. How's that for a time saver!!
I hope the readers will find this list useful. Did I amiss any plugins? If you have any suggestions then let us know in the comments section.
About Author: Ankit is an entrepreneur and founder of Appointzilla, a wordpress appointment plugin. He loves all things web and has special interest in internet marketing and Traffic Generation.