Welcome to Part 2 of Free Plugins: The Thrill of the Hunt!

As we know, the back-end is just as vital as the front end!  Of course, if there was no back-end, then we wouldn’t have a front-end!  Here are My Favorite, Free, Back-end Plugins!

Caching

• WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh. A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

Backups

• UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration by David Anderson. Backup and restoration made easy. Complete backups; manual or scheduled (backup to S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email + others).

Security

• iThemes Security by iThemes.com. Protect your WordPress site by hiding vital areas of your site, protecting access to important files, preventing brute-force login attempts, detecting attack attempts and more.
• Wordfence Security by Wordfence. Wordfence Security is a free enterprise class security and performance plugin that makes your site up to 50 times faster and more secure.
• Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening by Daniel Cid. The Sucuri WordPress Security plugin is a security toolset for security integrity monitoring, malware detection and security hardening.
• Gatekeeper  by jamiewilson. Gatekeeper allows administrators to take a WordPress site offline while leaving it accessible to authorized users for maintenance, testing, etc. Redirection, whitelist, and blacklist. Very cool! Used on leiker. I redirected a website to the previous html website in the same directory while I was developing the new WordPress website.

Search Engine Optimization

• WordPress SEO by Yoast. Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.

Browser Compatibility

• Browser Specific CSS by Adrian Hanft. The Browser Specific CSS Plugin allows you to easily target specific browsers and operating systems from your theme’s stylesheet using regular css.

Custom Plugins

• WP-CopyProtect [Protect your blog posts]by Chetan Gole. Protect your blog content from getting copied. A simple plug-in developed to stop the Copy cats.
• WP Courseware by Flyplugins. WP Courseware is a learning management system for WordPress that allows you to publish a course in a matter of minutes. It’s as easy as drag and drop! VERY AWESOME! Check out this cool blog post by Chris Lema where he shows how to do a full implementation from scratch! http://chrislema.com/wpcourseware
• Add From Server by Dion Hulse. Outdated by Handy! Plugin to allow the Media Manager to add files from the webservers filesystem. Note: All files are copied to the uploads directory.
• MailChimp for WordPress Lite by Danny van Kooten.  Lite version of MailChimp for WordPress. Adds various sign-up methods to your website.
• Regenerate Thumbnails By Viper007Bond. Allows you to regenerate all thumbnails after changing the thumbnail sizes. I needed this for a WooCommerce issue where I needed to regenerate thumbnails.  Worked like a charm.  One good thing to know is that you don’t just have to do it globally if you don’t want to.  You can update thumbnails for individual images via the Media Library.
• WordPress-to-Lead for Salesforce CRM by Daddy Analytics & Thought Refinery (Nick Ciske). Easily embed a contact form into your posts, pages or your sidebar, and capture the entries straight into Salesforce CRM. Also supports Web to Case and Comments to leads.

 Bonus Plugins

• Types by OnTheGoSystems. Complete Solution for Custom Fields and Types Define custom post types, custom taxonomy and custom fields.
• WP Views by ICanLocalize. When you need to create lists of items, Views is the solution. Views will query the content from the database, iterate through it and let you display it with flair. You can also enable pagination, search, filtering and sorting by site visitors.