One huge advantage of using the WordPress platform for your blog is the sheer number of plugins available.

At time of writing there are 51,998 WordPress plugins to choose from!

There are 51,998 WordPress plugins to choose from - and most of them are free!Click To Tweet

And most of them are absolutely free!

Here are 17  timesaving WordPress plugins I couldn’t do without. And they're all free.

For each plugin I explain what it does and why it’s a timesaving plugin that I couldn't do without.

What It Does:

SEO Yoast is a free one-stop shop for optimizing your blog post for the search engines.

When you install this free plugin you get a module on the edit page of every post you write where you can see how your post measures up against the key SEO criteria.

Each SEO criteria is marked with a button that turns green when you meet that particular benchmark:

Why It’s So Useful:

It’s very useful having this module built into the edit page of every post you write – it changes SEO from something in the too hard basket to something that’s doable with about 15 minutes on each post.

What’s particularly useful is you can see at a glance whether a post has been optimized for SEO:

If you address each of Yoast’s SEO criteria every time you publish, your blog posts will be better optimized than the vast majority of blog posts out there.

Why?

Because most bloggers don’t optimize their posts for SEO.

What It Does:

Page Builder by SiteOrigin is exactly that: a plugin that builds your page or post.

To build your page or post just drag-and-drop elements such as rows, columns, and all manner of widgets.

In practice, you’ll probably only use three widgets for most of your posts: the Editor widget, the Image widget, and the Headline widget:

Why It’s So Useful:

I tried quite a few drag-and-drop WP page builders before coming across this one.

What’s really useful about SiteOrigin’s Page Builder?

The ‘Live Editor’:

It lets you edit the post or page while seeing the finished product in the same window:

What It Does:

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP presents a cut down version of Google Analytics that you can see right in your WP dashboard:

Why It’s So Useful:

Google Analytics is an amazingly detailed resource.

But the UI is so complex and daunting that most bloggers end up hardly using it.

This plugin makes GA much more user-friendly by presenting only the most commonly used metrics.

It will also save you a heap of time – see the key metrics at a glance from within the WP dashboard!

Of course, it’s no substitute for the real thing – if you want to set up goals and analyse segments, etc, you’ll have to go to the real Google Analytics.

What It Does:

This plugin excludes pages and posts from the four areas where pages and posts normally appear once you press publish: Archives, Feeds, Front Page, and Searches:

Why It’s So Useful:

When I’m adding a new post I don’t want people to see the half-finished post.

So I need to be able to hide it until it’s ready.

That’s what this plugin does. Just check the four boxes and the post you’re working won’t be visible until you uncheck them.

Couldn’t do without it!

What It Does:

Pretty Link takes those long, ugly affiliate links and changes them to something like: www.yourdomain.com/product.

Why It’s So Useful:

Pretty Link is super-easy to use and tidies up your affiliate links.

It also provides analytics so you can see which of your affiliate links are getting the clicks:

What It Does:

Blank Slate strips away all the usual WordPress elements from your page so there’s nothing to distract your visitor.

Perfect for a landing page!

In fact ‘Landing Page’ is one of the four options Blank Slate offers:

Why It’s So Useful:

I use this a lot when setting up 2-step content upgrades in my guest posts.

The visitor clicks on a link in my bio and gets taken to a ‘Blank Slate’ page containing a Thrive Leads optin link:

This plugin is very useful anytime you want a blank page with nothing to distract your visitor.

What It Does:

Insert Headers and Footers doesn’t insert headers and footers (as you might think from the name).

It inserts snippets of code (such as Google Analytics tracking code) into the header or footer of your WP site:

Why It’s So Useful:

There’s nothing flash about this plugin but it’s indispensable if you don’t feel comfortable messing around with your header.php and footer.php files.

What It Does:

This is a plugin that works on any Genesis Framework theme.

It simply removes the title from a particular page (note: it only works on pages, not on posts).

When would you need this?

Let’s say you have a Landing Page with a Heading.

By default WordPress adds a title, but this title will duplicate your heading:

The Title Toggle module appears at the foot of Edit Screen of every page:

Why It’s So Useful:

There’s nothing in WordPress that allows you to selectively turn off titles on individual pages, so this plugin is indispensable!

==> Note:

If you’re not using a Genesis Framework theme, there’s another plugin that does the same thing and works in any WP theme:

• Hide Title (this plugin lets you hide the title on both pages and posts).

What It Does:

This plugin does exactly what it says: it changes the default setting so that all your external links open in a new window (instead of changing the content in the existing window).

When I’m adding links to a blog post I nearly always want them to open in a new window (I find it really annoying when I click on a link and then get taken away from the article I’m reading).

Before I installed this plugin, this is what I used to do every time I inserted an external link in a blog post:

Step One:

Click on the Settings cog for the link:

Step Two:

In ‘Settings’, I would then check the box for ‘Open link in a new tab’:

Thanks to this plugin, those are two steps are no longer necessary.

Why It’s So Useful:

This plugin is a huge timesaver:

It removes two unnecessary steps in the workflow for publishing a new blog post.

What It Does:

This plugin simply re-directs your visitor from one URL to another.

It’s very simple to use: just insert the previous URL on the top line and the new URL on the line below, and press ‘Add Redirect’:

Why It’s So Useful:

I often have to change the URLs of my blog posts, either because they’re too long or because they don’t include my exact keyword.

With this plugin I simply change the ‘slug’ in the WP Edit screen for that particular post, and then add a redirection so that the old URL points to the new URL.

By the way:

Did you know that short URLs have a strong SEO advantage? Google much prefers shorter URLs over longer URLs and will reward shorter URLs with higher rankings.

What It Does:

WP Smush compresses your image files, reducing their file size so that your pages load faster.

When you’ve finished publishing a new page or post, click on the WP Smush tab under ‘Media’:

Then click ‘Bulk Smush Now’ to compress up to 50 image files in one go (you'll see the saving in file size on the right side):

Why It’s So Useful:

Load time is one of the 200 factors that make up the algorithm that Google uses to decide how to rank pages in the search results.

So it’s essential to keep your image files as small as possible so they load quickly.

I used to compress or optimize the image files for a blog post using an online service. It was yet another step in the workflow of putting together a new blog post.

What I love about this plugin is it completely eliminates that step – you just go straight ahead and add your image files as they are.

Then, once the page or post is live, you just press a button within the WPSmush plugin and the files are compressed for you.

Definitely a timesaving plugin!

What It Does:

This plugin is pretty straightforward – it allows you to schedule automatic backups of your WP database and files:

I have it set up to do a partial backup (DB backup, files, and plugins) every day and a complete backup (DB Check, DB Backup, Files, XML export, Plugins) once a week.

Why It’s So Useful:

It hasn’t happened to me yet, but it does happen – people lose their entire website.

Sometimes you can rely on your web host to keep a backup of your database and files but it’s a good idea to make your own copy.

What It Does:

Within WordPress (surprisingly) there is no function that lets you copy a page or a post.

Enter Duplicate Post:

Once installed you’ll see an extra tag, called ‘Clone’, underneath each post:

Why It’s So Useful:

Sometimes I create a page with a particular layout that took a long time to set up and I need the exact same layout for another page or post.

With this plugin, I can make a copy of the page or post and then change the content while keeping the layout – very useful!

Another timesaving plugin I wouldn’t be without.

What It Does:

This plugin is a widget that allows you to add a list of posts to the sidebar:

Just drag and drop the widget into your sidebar:

This plugin offers some quite advanced options for choosing which posts to pull into your sidebar:

Why It’s So Useful:

Displaying your recent posts in the sidebar of every page of your site gives them much more exposure.

Depending on what theme you’re using, you may already have a widget that does this.

But this one is better than most.

What It Does:

Shortcodes Ultimate gives you an easy way of adding smart features to your website without doing any coding.

These features include headings, dividers, spacers, pull quotes, labels, spoilers, and accordions.

When you install the plugin a new tab appears in the editing window for posts and pages:

Just click on that tab and you’ll be taken to this screen where you choose the element you want to add:

To give you an example, these two headers were created using the 'header' module within Shortcodes Ultimate:

Why It’s So Useful:

The design elements you can create with Shortcodes Ultimate are very slick and professional-looking and they lift the tone of your website.

A must-have plugin!

What It Does:

This is just an easy-to-setup, basic contact form (with built-in anti spam protection):

Why It’s So Useful:

I prefer this layout to some of the other free Contact forms...

...it takes less than a minute to get your contact form up and running.

What It Does:

Table of Contents Plus creates a ‘Wikipedia-style’ table of contents for a blog post: