WordPress is becoming more and more visual and that is noticed when looking at the new plugins released in the WordPress Plugin Directory. There are a lot of sliders, lightbox and social media plugins and fewer that handle the functionality or security. Of course, that can also be seen in this article where I tried to omit some visual plugins to make place for plugins that are really useful, especially the ones that provide security to a blog.
Typecase Web Fonts
Typecase makes working with web fonts on WordPress a glorious experience. With over 500 fonts from Google Web Fonts, Typecase is a unique and easy-to-use typography plugin that allows you to quickly browse, find, and select fonts to apply to your website.
Wordfence Security
Wordfence Security is a free enterprise class security plugin that includes a firewall, virus scanning, real-time traffic with geolocation and more.
jQuery Image Carousel for WordPress
A WordPress plugin implemented as a shortcode for creating a slideshow right from the posts screen.
Responsive Slider
The Responsive Slider plugin allows you to create slides that consist of linked (to any url) images and titles. The slider would then take those slides and present them as a jQuery-powered slideshow – at a chosen location within your theme, page, or post. In whatever order you want them.
Async Social Sharing
Simple social plugin that loads the third-party sharing scripts asynchronously after the page loads for optimal site performance.
Related Posts All in One – with Grid, slider and list styles
Improve your seo score in Google and Yahoo and other SE’s: Our plugin displaying related posts in a very great way to help visitors staying longer on your blog. You can use this plugin to increasing the page rank of your internal posts to improve your SEO score
Elegant, Beautiful 3 Designs: There are Three designs and you can shift between them as you like, every design has its own options to match your site needs, you can change the image sizes or displaying modes, excerpt length, CSS3 effects, use custom image field, etc..
Responsive Video Embeds
Automatically resize WordPress auto-embeds, including video and other iframes, in a responsive fashion.
Mini twitter feed
The plugin “mini Twitter feed” puts Twitter on your WordPress blog, you can add your tweets or the tweets from the folks you like, lists, queries…
You can display up to 100 tweets within 7 days (limit set by Twitter’s Search API). It displays tweets from your feed or from the Twitter Search, from a list or from your favorite users. It is very flexible and modular.
WP AD Gallery
Background Per Page
Flexible Posts Widget
The default WordPress Recent Posts widget is exceptionally basic. I found myself always in need of a simple way to display a selection of posts from any taxonomy or post type in a theme sidebar; hence, Flexible Posts Widget. Flexible Posts Widget extends the default widget with many per-instance options.
VéritéCo Timeline
Use the incredible HTML5 Timeline developed by VéritéCo on your website. As easy as writing a shortcode.
Easy Gallery Slider
Easy to use, but with many options. It is designed to be responsive, so the slider and images will dynamically expand or contract based on the container/browser size. Use it by shortcode or automatically displayed on posts and pages. The slides are pulled per post from the attached images (gallery).
HTML5 MP3 Player with Playlist
Allows WordPress users to easily use HTML5 the element enable native audio playback within the browser. It supports all browsers i.e. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE and Opera. HTML5 Audio Player with Playlist, Repeat, Random, Stream Seek, Volume Control, Timer, Next, Previous, Play-Pause option.
CleanSave
The best saving tool is now available on WordPress. Join top sites like MSNBC, CNN, Disney and Fox Sports and offer your users a simple saving experience that keeps them coming back to your site.
oik-nivo-slider
The [nivo] shortcode implements the jQuery Nivo slider, which is considered by some to be “The Most Awesome jQuery Image Slider”.
The [nivo] shortcode can be used to display a variety of slideshows with/without links.
It can be used to direct the user to any post/page/custom content type.
SocialPublish
SocialPublish is an easy to use service that automatically shares your blog post on Facebook and Twitter at the moment you publish it. While other plugins rely on RSS feeds and usually have 30 minute delays, SocialPublish immediately shares your blog post. Because SocialPublish is a service, you can easily set up an account and connect your social media accounts. You don’t have to do the hard process of registering Facebook and Twitter applications.
News Bar
News bar with latest tweets or posts from specified blog category
Easy Digital Downloads
Selling digital downloads is something that not a single one of the large WordPress ecommerce plugins has ever gotten really right. This plugin aims to fix that. Instead of focusing on providing every single feature under the sun, Easy Digital Downloads trys to provide only the ones that you really need. It aims to make selling digital downloads through WordPress easy, and complete.
WordPress Backup by Backuper.org
This wordpress backup plugin (aka Backuper) allows you to backup your entire web hosting account using cPanel and the built-in backup feature.
Some users will not be able to use this plugin (if your not using cPanel), we are very sorry about that but we have not been able to find a stable method to backup websites without cPanel.
Cookie Control
This a WordPress plugin implementation of the Cookie Control created by Civic UK.
Cookie Control is a mechanism for obtaining a user’s explicit consent for the use of cookies on their computer.
It was created by Civic UK because recent legislation requires websites to obtain explicit consent before leaving behind or reading files (mostly cookies) on user’s computers.
Pinterest Lightbox
With over 5 million downloads the NextGEN Gallery plugin is obviously widely used. The Pinterest Lightbox plugin enables a PinIt Button on each image automatically through your NextGEN Gallery. It automatically uses the caption, image URL, and page URL from NextGEN to sync with the Pinterest API. This plugin is very useful for photo-intensive websites.
Newsletter Manager
Newsletter manager allows you to create and send html, plain text or multipart email newsletters to your subscribers. The plugin supports unlimited email campaigns, unlimited email addresses, double opt-in anti-spam compliance, hourly email sending limit and much more. Opt-in form is available as HTML code, shortcode as well as standard WordPress widget. The import/export tool allows to create and restore backup of your subscriber list. Newsletter manager also lets you configuring multiple SMTP sender addresses.
Internal Link Builder
This plugin allows you to improve your internal link building on your site. By creating a list of keywords and URL, this plugin automates the process of creating internal links. No need to bother about you personally, will do it all automatically. And when you insert a keyword and a URL, the plugin automatically publish the link in all your articles in the archive, without you having to manually make the connections.
Get Off Malicious Scripts (Anti-Malware)
This Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware plugin searches for Malware and other Virus like threats and vulnerabilities on your server and it helps you remove them.
BotBlocker
Kills spam-bots, leaves humans standing. No CAPTCHAS, no math questions, no passwords, just spam blocking that stops spam-bots dead in their tracks.
Google sitemap plugin
Google sitemap plugin allows you to create and add sitemap file to google webmaster tools, get info about your site in google webmaster tools.
Social Essentials – Social Stats and Sharing Buttons
Social Essentials provides you with stats about social engagement as well as social sharing buttons to add to your posts and pages.
StatComm (StatPress Community)
StatPress Community (shortened to StatComm from now on) provides Realtime Statistics on your blog, collecting information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS and more.
Once the plugin has been activated, it will immediately starts collecting information. StatComm provides many views to analyze the incoming users on your blog, and also spy tools to find out their procedence. For users of other StatPress plugins variations, it provides a well known feature set and information.
Login Security Solution
Security against brute force attacks by tracking IP, name, password; requiring very strong passwords. Idle timeout. Maintenance mode. Multisite ready!
EasyRotator for WordPress – Slider Builder
EasyRotator for WordPress helps you create beautiful photo rotators and sliders for your WordPress site in seconds. Add rotators to posts and pages, or add rotator widgets to your theme. Choose photos and set links, select a layout, make customizations, and everything else is handled for you. Photos can come from your local computer, your WordPress Media Library, or Featured Images of recent posts.
Any Mobile Theme Switcher
This Plugin detects mobile browser and display the theme as the setting done from admin. Usefull for switch to Mobile Theme.
Easy Contact Forms
Easy Contact Forms. Easy to create. Easy to fill out. Easy to change. Easy to manage. Easy to protect.
Genesis Responsive Slider
This plugin allows you to create a simple responsive slider that displays the featured image, along with the title and excerpt from each post.
It includes options for the maximum dimensions of your slideshow, allows you to choose to display posts or pages, what category to pull from, and even the specific post IDs of the posts you want to display. It includes next/previous arrows and a pager along with the option to turn both on or off. Finally, you can place the slider into a widget area.
Advanced AJAX Page Loader
AJAX Page Loader will load posts, pages, etc. without reloading entire page. It will also update the URL bar with the url the user would have been going to without AJAX, this means the user can copy the url or bookmark it and return to the page they were visiting! This plugin will also add the page to there history for even more usability!
Multiple Sidebars
A wonderful plugin to easily create many sidebars. These sidebars can then select in the creation of a post / page / custom post type / category / taxonomy. We give an order, and select several at once. You will see all active sidebars instead of seeing just one.
