Best Free WordPress Plugins Of 2015 For WordPress Site

Plugins extend and expand the functionality of WordPress.  Build better WordPress websites with best free WordPress plugins of 2015.

Query Monitor

The next entry is a great tool for debugging sites and performance analysis. Query Monitor allows you to monitor database queries, hooks, conditionals, HTTP requests, redirects and more.

You can use it to analyze any page for query and PHP errors as well as filter them by components (core, plugin, theme) and check enqueued scripts and styles.

The plugin’s author is John Blackbourn — release lead for WordPress 4.1 — so you know you’re getting something. For more information and a glimpse behind the curtain, visit the plugin’s Github page.

Autoptimize

One of the many measures to speed up WordPress and reduce page load time is compressing your theme and template files. However, instead of using external tools for that, Autoptimize can do it automatically.

The plugin concatenates scripts and styles, minifies and compresses JS, CSS, HTML and has additional optimization options like moving styles to the site header and scripts to the footer.

To make it truly effective, combine Autoptimize with a caching plugin.

Maintenance Mode

While you are working hard to polish your latest site, why not give visitors a glimpse at what they can look forward to?

Easily set up a placeholder for your site and edit its content via WYSIWYG editor. That means you can add images, text, links and even code is fair game. Plus, the coming-soon screen works well on mobile, too!

Besides, a solid 5 out of 5 plugin rating with more than 100,000 installs is nothing to scoff at. If that doesn’t convince you, an alternative worth checking up is Under Construction WP.

Pluginception

Besides an awesome name, Pluginception is a real gem for anyone who likes to create plugins for their functions instead of lumping them all together in functions.php.

The plugin will quickly and easily create all necessary files and folders for new plugins at the touch of a button. All you need to input is your code. Awesome or awesome?

Ultimate Member

Ultimate Member is a true newcomer that made a pretty big splash this year. It offers awesome functionality for anyone looking to build a community around their website via a membership site.

The plugin’s feature list is impressive. What I like most are their beautiful user profiles that include header images, profile pictures plus description, personal info, recent posts, comments and more.

It also offers front-end user registration and login, member directories so members can interact with each other as well as content restriction for user-only content.

While the main plugin is completely free, they have paid extensions for important features such as social login, payment gateways, reviews, MailChimp, WooCommerce and more.

Fresh WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Site Design

First impressions are important. For that reason you should ensure your website makes a good one. Here are a few plugins which can improve your site’s design and functionality.

Swifty Bar

Woah, this one came of nowhere for me. I was very pleasantly surprised to find something this cool exists for WordPress (and for free to boot!).

I shouldn’t really have to explain anything, the above screenshot says it all.

However, I’ll try anyway. Swifty bar is toolbar sticking to the bottom of the screen that provides all sorts of important info for visitors browsing your content:

• Category
• Post title
• Author
• Time to read and progress
• Share options
• Previous/next post links

The plugin can easily replace any other social share options. You can also customize it to show different kinds of information such as the number of comments in the current article. It also supports custom post types.

Not only is this super useful but done quite elegantly, no? Plus, did I mention it’s free?

Portfolio

If you have some sort of portfolio to show to the world (and don’t we all these days?), the Portfolio plugin will help you do it in an elegant way.

Add images, titles, descriptions and more to each item and display your collection in different layouts. Portfolios can be added anywhere via shortcode and are fully responsive.

To see the plugin in action, watch this video:

Be aware though that the functionality is a bit limited out of the box. For advanced stuff you will need to invest in the premium version.

Tesla Login Customizer

Let’s face it, the WordPress login screen hasn’t changed all that much over time. If you think that’s a shortcoming, you’re in luck.

The Tesla Login Customizer allows you to style the screen completely to your liking without writing any code. Change colors and fonts, add logos, background images, animations and much more.

For the lazy among us, the plugin also comes with a handful of pre-made templates. And it sports additional features such as reCaptcha and user redirection after login.

Display Widgets

Sometimes it can be a good idea to have different sidebar content on different pages. Yet, writing conditional statements is a pain in the butt. If only there was a better way.

Luckily, there is. Display Widgets allows you to take control when and where widgets appear on your site.

Set conditional rules in the widget menu via check boxes to show or hide widgets on pages, archives, categories, taxonomies and languages (if you have WPML installed). Goodbye manual coding!

Alternative: Dynamic Widgets

If the above plugin doesn’t have enough options for you, Dynamic Widgets might be worth a look. It allows for even more conditional widget display such as by role, date, browser, mobile devices, URL and more.

Besides that, it supports several other plugins like qTranslate, bbPress and BuddyPress to name just a few. However, this plugin controls conditions from a central plugin page instead of the widget page, which I don’t like as much.

Compact Archives

ProBlogger arguably has one of the best archive pages on the web.

Several years of blog content perfectly displayed in a small space.

Well, now you can have the same for your blog thanks to Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner who has put together the aptly named Compact Archives plugin.

It will display your archive in a more ordered and space-saving form instead of the usual long list. So all of us can feel like Darren Rowse a little bit.

Awesome New Plugins For Content Creation

Content is and will always be the heart of any website. With content marketing growing in importance, it’s important to take all the help you can get. Here is some in form of plugins.

CoSchedule

I feel like I mention this one in a lot of articles lately. Maybe just because it is so good.

CoSchedule is an awesome editorial calendar for scheduling your blog content via drag and drop.

It has been around for a while, however, they recently added more functionality.

Besides scheduling when content will be published on your own website, you can now set up your social publishing as well.

Currently supported platforms are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Buffer, Google+ and Tumblr. In addition to that, users are able to coordinate a multi-author workflow through team messages.

Adding it to the list is a bit of a cheat since while, technically, the plugin is free, using it is bound to a monthly subscription.

However, it’s so cool I had to include it. Plus, the team behind the plugin also have a good blog.

Alternative: Publish to Schedule

In case you don’t opt for CoSchedule, this plugin might be a viable alternative. It does similar things, however, Publish to Schedule works more like Buffer, one of my all-time favorite tools.

The plugin allows you to set up a regular posting schedule for your blog. Every new blog post will then be added to the schedule and published according to it. No need to do it manually any longer.

Eli the Computer Guy also liked the plugin and made a video about it:

Definitely worth checking out.

TablePress

This plugin is friggin’ awesome! I stumbled upon it when I needed to add a table to a website and was just about to dust off my HTML knowledge.

TablePress makes it incredibly easy to create spreadsheets without any coding. You can embed them into posts, pages, widgets and more via shortcode.

Cells can contain any kind of data, including formulas, and it can be imported from HTML, Excel, CSV and JSON. Additional options for visitors like pagination, filtering and more are available.

Just Writing

The Distraction-Free Writing Mode is one of the cooler features in WordPress. With one click you get a clean and calm writing environment for content creation without distractions.

However, some might feel it is lacking a bit in functionality and you end up with a lot of going back and forth between normal editor and zen environment.

Just Writing to the rescue!

Not only does the plugin allow you to add more formatting options (e.g. alignment, font options, heading tags, paste as text and strikethrough), you can even completely customize the distraction-free writing mode:

• Remove fade effect and keep top bar visible at all times
• Add preview buttons
• Reorder buttons
• Set user-specific options
• Set DFWM as default

Control freaks will love it!

Title Experiments Free

So-called A/B split testing is a great way to gain knowledge on the effectiveness of different parts of your website. Torque already has an article about A/B split testing tools for WordPress for all those interested.

Since blog post titles are one of the most important factors for clickthrough, it is only good and proper that you use the best one.

How do you find them? By testing, of course. You can use this plugin to run variance tests.

Title Experiments allows you to add multiple versions of your articles with different titles to the loop. They will then be served up randomly to visitors and the plugin will track impressions and clicks.

The so-garnered information will easily let you determine a winner and settle for the better title. Rinse and repeat.

Pre-Publish Post Checklist

Ever published a fresh blog post and remembered right afterwards that you forgot to do something crucial?

With this plugin, that will never happen again!

You can create a to-do-before-publishing checklist that contains anything from “set featured image” to “fill out meta description” to “pray to the Internet gods for good ranking”.

Failing to check every item will result in a warning or keep you from publishing the post. Super useful for the more forgetful (or busy) among us.

Alternative: Requirements Checklist

The same idea, however, a different approach.

Instead of relying on your voluntary cooperation, the Requirements Checklist will actually check if you filled in different locations. If you didn’t, the Publish button won’t even show up!

At the moment, the plugin can track:

• Title
• Content
• Featured image
• Excerpt
• Categories
• Tags
• Up to 5 custom taxonomies per post type
• Focus keyword and meta description in Yoast SEO
• Title, description and keywords for All In One SEO Pack

Built-in compliance, love it!

FD Word Statistics Plugin

Do you ever wonder about the quality of your writing? Don’t worry, everyone is a bit insecure like that.

Plus, this plugin might be able to provide you with an objective-ish answer.

As you might know, the well-known Yoast SEO checks the readability of your content. It does so via the so-called Flesch reading ease score.

The Word Statistics plugin does the same, however, with three different measurements:

• Flesch
• Flesch-Kincaid
• Gunning-Fog

In practical terms, the plugin will count your words per sentence and syllables per word. From that data it determines how easily accessible your text is and displays the at the bottom of the WordPress editor.

Nice. Me write gooder from now on.

Marketing & SEO

If content is king, promotion is queen. Content creation is only one part, beating the jungle drum the other. The following plugins can help with that.

Naked Social Share

Probably a bajillion plugin options for social sharing buttons already exist. What could this one possibly have to add to the conversation?

Well, nothing since Naked Social Share is all about reduction. All it does is is let you add simple, unstyled social share buttons to different theme locations.

The plugin concentrates on functionality over design so that designers can style the buttons to their specific needs. Only minimal customization options are available, e.g. for the button order.

Sometimes less really is more.

Postmatic

Answering to comments on your site is a central part of promoting your content. Nothing is a better guarantee for traffic than building a loyal community.

Postmatic is a plugin I only became aware of when a site I am working with started sending me emails about comments under my articles and offered me to answer them via email!

How awesome is that?

No logging into the other site, not even having to go to the post URL, just hittingReply in my email inbox — what a cool way to handle comments and keep the conversation going!

Plus, the  plugin recently got another addition named Optins which offers several ways to invite commenters to hop onto your email list. Sign me up.

Source: http://torquemag.io