WordPress Plugins 2013 – Top 8 Free Plugins!

HTML5 Speech Search

HTML5 Speech SearchOh yeah! Its a great plugin too. In search forms, you get to see the small mic icon in it (Check out mine on the top!). Its only compatible with webkit browsers (Well, all the new browsers are compatible, except mobile browsers). This plugin is very much recommended by me! There is nothing to configure at all, Just enable the plugin and check out your search boxes.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Jetpack by WordPressOf course, Its a popular plugin which has a lot of free items that you would love to use instead of searching for alternative plugins. It contains some basic features that you can use with it.

  • Publicize
    It enables you to automatically share your post to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, tumblr & Yahoo.
  • Notifications
    The same notifications toolbar from WordPress.com in which you can track the notifications of your blog hosted at WordPress.com
  • WordPress.com Stats
    Wallah, the best plugin that you can have to track the number of page views & visitors to your blog in which you can see it from your dashboard itself with a nice graph attached to it. It does have detailed information too with exact number of page views of each posts.
  • Jetpack Comments
    Its basically an alternative comment system that enables users to login via WordPress, Facebook, Twitter when commenting on a particular post. Its a great alternative for Disqus.
  • Subscriptions
    This is a great alternative for Feedburner Email Subscription as each new post will be sent to the subscribers via WordPress.com
  • Post by Email
    If you are a traveler or if you cannot access your blog’s dashboard every time to make a post then this is a great choice. It will generate a special email id for you to sent and whenever you want to post something to your blog then you just email to the email id that your provided with Subject as your Blog post’s title & message as your content.
  • Carousel
    Its just like the NextGen gallery plugin, It allows to to put up a slideshow for the default WP gallery that you add.
  • Sharing
    It enables you to add a lightweight share icons for your post without depending on other plugins or custom codes. It has a lot of option to choose from and its like your wordpress widgets, as you can drag and drop to an area to activate them. Developer? Of course you can use custom stylesheet to personalize.
  • Spelling & Grammar
    Of course, All the WordPress users use this and its already enabled. Title itself says it all.
  • VaultPress
    Well, if you don’t have a backup solution then you can choose VaultPress by Automattic as they are the best while choosing a backup solution. Their plans starts from 15$/month for each WordPress site you have. You can get to know about their features too if your interested!
  • Gravatar Hovercards
    While moving your mouse to the pictures of users in the comments and if those people have a profile in Gravatar then it will show more info about that particular person. Its very neat solution for bloggers who use the default wordpress comment system.
  • Contact Form
    I love it! Its sleek, fast, matches any themes and more over, its so fast! I had been using another contact form plugin but after checking out this option in Jetpack, Its superb! Demo? See my contact form!
  • Tiled Galleries
    Allows you to add a beautiful layout for all/selected pictures in a way as you don’t have to use any external graphics editors. Its amazingly fast, beautiful and loading of images are improved since its hosted in WordPress.com CDN service (Its free!)
  • WP.me Shortlinks
    Haven’t you got your own personal short link domain hosted just for your blog or business (like mine – tpk.co.in) or don’t like bit.ly like URLs? Then here its for you as you can use their free wp.me short-links which is quite short. After you activate, in every post you can see “Get Shortlink” icon in it to get yours!
  • Shortcode Embeds
    No need to open up the editor and paste the default embed codes from sites, as wordpress allows you to use a simple shortcode to embed your content. With just one simple code & the URL of the content, you can embed it in your posts!
    Available shortcodes are: archivesaudioblip.tvdailymotionflickrscribdslidesharesoundcloudvimeoyoutubepolldaddy, and wpvideo (VideoPress)
  • Mobile Theme
    I happen to use this feature, and I am quite impressed with this service. It makes your own Mobile theme for free and yes its fast. Only disadvantage is that the pages you have with custom templates wouldn’t work & you cannot customize further the CSS of it.
  • Beautiful Math
    Helps you to write some complex mathematics equations. You can read more about it by referring their documentation.
  • Extra Sidebar Widgets
    It gives you the options to have RSS box, Facebook Like Box, Twitter box & Image Widget embedded on any of your sidebars on your theme.
  • Infinite Scroll
    Its a handy option that turns your blog page into a scrolling one. Similar method is used in popular site like Mashable as the older entries are shown when you scroll down. Just like Facebook & Twitter!
  • Photon
    Very good service in which it uploads your images on your blog as well as the external links that you have linked inside your posts to be served from WordPress.com CDN & its FREE! It helped me save huge bandwidth bills and made my sites faster too! Only problem I have experienced is that, it takes some time to upload to their servers for the first time and until its uploaded, you would get a broken image.
  • Enhanced Distribution
    It pings various search engines to index the new post that you make every time automatically without using any of your server’s load in real-time.
  • Mobile Push Notifications
    When a new comment is posted on your blog, then WordPress will send a push notification to your iOS device in almost real-time. You need to have WordPress for iOS app installed & your blog added to that app. The App is free and its there in the Apple Store.
  • JSON API
    Using this, the connection to your blog will be secure and allows any application (that you specify) to use your blog in many different ways.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Its a nice plugin that gives you full details about the plugins load time in a beautiful graph. After you have scanned, you can see which plugins take lots of time and can be deactivated or re-install accordingly. The scan takes about 1-2 minutes. This plugin was made by Godaddy.

Ad Injection

Yeah, the best advertisement plugin that I have ever used for putting ads in between any wordpress posts or pages or both! I have heard some negative reviews about this plugin, but trust me! once if you have setup this plugin properly, it works like charm! and it even works when your using it with W3 Total Cache! This plugin doesn’t take any server load once you have the cache plugin activated. There are various settings to make use of and definitely I recommend this plugin to everyone! Demo? This blog uses it and you can see an ad above somewhere 😉

Author hReivew

Author hReviewAah, Yes, Bloggers review on products or services like I do! And Google does enables you to have AggregateRating based on schema.org which indeed enables you to put star ratings on a particular blog post shown in Google. Well this is the free plugin, which allows you to put ratings and also a box aligned by your choice to have some more details about the review. I do use this plugin, you can see live in action by visiting to one of my reviews : CloudFlare Review. Currently the plugin is having two versions, Free & Paid. You can get to know more about it by visiting this site.




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February 6, 2013
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