Top 10 Little-Known WordPress Plugins to Optimize Your Site

What makes WordPress the most popular CMS? Of course, its extensive range of themes and plugins that simplify the web development process to a large extent. There are plenty of powerful plugins that lets you embed additional functionality to the site in a matter of few minutes. But, still, we use only the most popular ones such as, Yoast SEO, BuddyPress, Contact Form7, etc.

We usually end up choosing only the most used plugins and overlook the other robust plugins that can also enhance the functionality and user experience of your WP site. In this post, I have collected the ten little-known WordPress plugins that can offer you some jaw-dropping features.

1. Contact Form DB

Compatible up to: 4.5.3

Contact Form DB is a reliable WordPress plugin that lets you save submitted contact form data to your WP database.

With the help of this plugin, you can export the saved data to a file. You can also view it using shortcodes. Plus, there are three admin pages that simplify your process and save your time.

You just need to install the plugin and it will automatically collect form submissions from:

• Contact Form 7
• Fast Secure Contact Form
• Gravity Forms
• Formidable Forms, and a lot more.

2. WP-Sweep

Compatible up to: 4.6

Remove unnecessary, unused and duplicated data from your website by using this robust plugin.

WP-Sweep is a promising WordPress plugin that optimizes your WP database by cleaning up unused and duplicated data. It also eliminates added caches, spam comments, cloned post meta, orphaned user meta and a lot more.

Instead of running direct delete MySQL queries, the plugin utilizes relevant WordPress delete functions, such as:

• WP_delete_post()
• delete_comment_meta()
• delete_user-meta() , etc.

3. Download Monitor

Compatible up to: 4.6

Download Monitor is an incredible plugin that can help you upload, manage and track downloads, and showcasing links. Even, you can also embed download links into a post.

With this plugin, you can categorize, tag, or insert other meta to your downloads in a matter of few seconds. Plus, it offers powerful shortcodes that will help you download a link in different formats. You can also use shortcodes to showcase download links to your frontend.

There is also an option to track download counts and log user download attempts.

4. WP Security Audit Log

Compatible up to: 4.6

Security is one of the key aspects of your website, so you should protect your site from hackers and spammers.

With the help of WP Security Audit Log plugin, you can keep an audit trail on all the tasks/activities and modifications implemented on your site. The plugin helps you detect and remove the suspicious element from your site.

It keeps a lot of everything happening on your WP site and lets you know about the hacks or other security threats.

5. Naked Social Share

Compatible up to: 4.6

It is least-popular yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to create simple, and unstyled social share icons for your web page or post. You also offer multiple options that can help you promote your content or products on social media websites. The options are:

• Automatic add buttons – The plugin automatically embeds social share icons below a particular blog posts or web pages.
• Social media sites – You can re-arrange your social media icons as per your requirement. It also offers a disable option.
• Twitter Handle – Embed your twitter handle to create a “via@YourHandle” message in the Tweet.
  

6. Compress JPEG & PNG Images

Compatible up to: 4.6

This plugin optimizes the speed of your site by compressing all of yours JPEG and PNG images using TinyJPG and TinyPNG, reliable image compression services. It automatically optimizes the size of your new image, which in turn improves the loading speed of your web pages.

It also offers multisite support with a single API key so you can manage the images of your multiple websites, without a hint of worry.

7. Email Address Encoder

Compatible up to: 4.6

Email Address Encoder is a less popular plugin but it can offer you an extensive range of features. With this plugin, you can protect your email addresses from spam by encoding it into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

It is a simple, intuitive yet robust plugin that restricts email-cracking robots from accessing email addresses from your web pages.

8. WordPress Ad Widget

Compatible up to: 4.5.3

WordPress Ad Widget is a pretty cool plugin that helps you upload ad images and ad codes to your site’s sidebar within a few clicks. It is an ideal plugin for those who don’t want to deal with complex ad management system.

With this plugin, you can easily place image banner ads to your WordPress site, without any difficulty. All you need to do is to drag and drop the widget to the sidebar and upload an ad image.

9. Simple WP Sitemap

Compatible up to: 4.6

Simple WP Sitemap is a user-friendly WordPress plugin that lets you generate an HTML and XML sitemap to your site that automatically updates itself. This simplifies the process of indexing your site on search engines.

There is also an option to embed pages to the sitemaps that aren’t part of your existing website. The plugin develops mobile-friendly sitemaps for your site that can run on multiple devices with ease.

10. Simplr User Registration Form Plus +

Compatible up to: 4.4.4

The Simplr User Registration Form is an incredible WP plugin that can help you add a custom user registration form on your site using the powerful shortcode. The Plus version of this plugin offers you some of the exciting features, such as:

• Facebook Connect,
• Custom Confirmation Messages
• Moderation,
• Field UI, and a lot more.

It also creates an interface for inserting or removing fields of a registration form.

Conclusion

All the plugins mentioned in this blog post are free and reliable. You can download and install any of these plugin(s) to improve the functionality, accessibility and performance of your WordPress site, without even playing with the coding.