13 WordPress plugins that work (and won’t cost you a cent)

When I put together my site, I spent a lot of time hunting down plugins with the functionality I need, that perform well and look good. I tested many different plugins to find ones that work for my site, and ended up with the following 13 plugins which are all free, relatively easy to use, and play well with “Virtue”, the theme I’m using for jessicasingerman.com. I hope this list will help you out and save you some time while you build your blog or site!

1. Akismet: This filters your comments. It is the comment spam gold standard.
2. All in one seo pack: Search Engine Optimization
3. Alpine PhotoTile for Instagram: Allows you to place a widget of your Instagram feed or Instagram images in posts or pages with its shortcode generator. It is easy to customize and looks good.
4. Bitly Official WordPress Plug-In: Automatically generates short urls for sharing links on your site. You need to set up a (free) Bitly account for this to work.
5. Exec-PHP: Executes php code in your posts and pages. I used this to add my Mailchimp signup form to the body of a page rather than as a widget.
6. Kebo – Twitter Feed: Displays your Twitter feed as a widget. This one is easy to set up and looks clean on the page.
7. MailChimp: Allows you to add a signup form for your Mailchimp list. When people sign up using this form, it automatically adds or unsubscribes them from the list.
8. No Right Click Images Plugin: Prevents visitors from right-clicking and downloading images.
9. Royal Custom CSS for Page and Post: Allows you to add custom CSS for every page and post.
10. Share Buttons by AddToAny: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc… share buttons for your pages and posts
11. W3 Total Cache: Improves your WordPress performance by adding browser, page, object, and database caching.
12. WordPress Importer: This imports posts, pages, comments and more from a WordPress Export file.
13. WordPress Page Widgets: Allows you to customize which (if any) widgets are shown per page.