WordPress Plugin Roundup – January

WordPress Plugin Roundup - January 2020

Each month, we recap the best WordPress plugins that were added or updated within the last 30 days on the WordPress Plugin Directory. Here’s a list of our favorite new or recently-updated plugins for January 2020.

1. BetterDocs – Best Documentation & Knowledge Base Plugin

BetterDocs – Best Documentation & Knowledge Base Plugin

BetterDocs will help you to create and organize your documentation page in a beautiful way that will make your visitors find any help article easily. It will facilitate your client to take faster decisions and get helped on the spot by self-servicing instead of avoiding the lengthy conversation.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • Sweet solution for adding a knowledge base to your website.
  • Visit /docs to view the built-in page (URL is changeable in settings)
  • Easy to create and manage with beautiful layouts and powerful search.
  • Currently an AppSumo deal for the Pro version starting at $49 lifetime for 10 sites.
  • Pro version unlocks additional layouts, instant answer and other features.

2. Pexels: Free Stock Photos

Pexels: Free Stock Photos

Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock images for personal and commercial use. This plugin helps you search, browse and download Pexels photos directly to your WordPress site, giving you the benefits of hosting them (cropping, compressing, caching, etc.)

Nathan’s Notes:

  • Add images from the free Pexels photo library to your Media Library with a click.
  • Search, click, and they’re added. That’s that.
  • No attribution is required from photos at Pexels, so it’s a safe way to add a huge library of truly free stock photos to WordPress.

3. Disable Right Click For WP

Disable Right Click For WP

This plugin is used to disable right click on website to prevent cut, copy, paste, save image, view source, inspect element, etc. But when an Administrator or Site Editor is logged in, you can still access everything without any of the above restrictions.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • A straightforward way to curb novice content thieves, but definitely not foolproof.
  • Can show a (non-editable but acceptable) message that says “Right Click Disabled.”
  • Be sure you’re in an incognito window when you test the plugin, because it does not work for Administrators and Editors.

4. Internal Link Juicer: Auto Linker Plugin for WordPress

Internal Link Juicer: SEO Auto Linker for WordPress

Internal Link Juicer is the state-of-the-art solution for building internal links within post content. It works by using an intelligent per-post configuration of your desired keywords. Overall, it improves your on-page SEO and your user experience by pointing out the right content for the given context.

Nathan’s Notes:

    • This is one of those plugins I’d usually shy away from, but there’s something pretty amazing here.
    • There are a ton of settings, but basically you add keywords on a page/post, and the plugin automatically makes links back to that page whenever it sees those keywords in other content of your site.
    • Warning #1 – Automatic link building can be dangerous. You could quickly turn your site into link city if you’re not careful (although there are settings to help avoid this).
    • Warning #2 – this plugin appears to use jQuery to adjust the output of the page as it’s rendered in the browser. This could slow down your site, so be careful.

5. Guest Author

Guest Author

Guest Author allows you to add a post author without the need to register them as users in your site.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • If you run a content site that uses guest authors, it can be a real pain to create users for each author when you post new content.
  • This plugin adds a metabox on each post where you can add author’s Name, URL, description and image.
  • If your design has an author box with description, photo, etc., the plugin will fill this info. It also makes the Byline clickable to the URL you supply.
  • Select what post types are enabled on the plugin’s settings page (and, yes, custom post types are supported!)

6. Posts Generator

Posts Generator

Save a lot of time with this plugin that generates generic, dummy or fake content to be able to have your WordPress website full of a lot of random content.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • Fantastic generator of all kinds of random posts within WordPress.
  • Works with all standardly registered custom post types, WooCommerce products, menus (yes menus are posts too), users (yes, users are posts too), etc.
  • Generates a variety of content, including images, tables, etc.

7. Redirect to Home This Month’s Simple but Useful Plugin #1

Redirect to Home

Redirect all pages (404s, search, pages, posts, attachments, archives, etc) to your homepage/frontpage. The redirection will only take place if the user is not logged in. If you’re logged in, no redirection occurs. Useful for one-page websites.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • Activate it and it works, no options page.
  • Could be a nice solution for a coming soon or maintenance page while you work on the site on the live server.
  • Uses a 301 redirect in the code to be as search engine friendly as possible.
  • A simple 1 file plugin, so you could change it to a 302 if you wanted to preserve your listings.

8. LH Inclusive Private Pages This Month’s Simple but Useful Plugin #2

LH Inclusive Private Pages

Allow draft, private (and other post types by filter) pages to be selected as parents in page dropdowns. Private posts, pages, and CPTs may also be added to menus.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • If you use private pages on your site, you may have been frustrated by the inability to add them to menus (for logged in users) or to make them parent pages. This plugin gives you that option.
  • Also prevents users who cannot see a certain page or post from adding it to a menu or as a parent.

9. Bulk View Post This Month’s Simple but Useful Plugin #3

Bulk view post

This plugin provides the view bulk action in the post, product, page or any custom post type in the admin section. The plugin will add a new bulk action menu item as “View” in your admin post view section. Using this plugin you can view or open multiple posts in one click, each open in a new tab.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • Such a clever way to pop open multiple posts when you need to edit several things at once (like WooCommerce products).
  • Make sure you have popups enabled for the site or it won’t work (you should see a browser warning).

10. Customize Comment Form Input Fields

Customize comment form input fields

Customize comment form input fields is a plugin that customizes the comment input field. You can customize from the plugin settings without adding code to function.phpategories or tags. All statuses are available for all your post types. You will find a new menu item located in the posts admin menu.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • Adds a Settings page with several handy options to help you customize your comments area.
  • All settings may not work with all themes, since some themes have custom code in their comment sections.

11. WP Site Screenshot

WP Site Screenshot

WPSite Screenshot plugin helps you to easily capture screenshot of the pages of any website. It could be used for showing a portfolio, or design collection, etc. Just provide the site URL and you are all good to go. You can categorize and manage the screenshots as you wish and can be displayed in the front end with a shortcode.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • A very easy way to create a website portfolio on your site.
  • Creates a post in a custom post type and attaches the screenshot as the featured image.
  • Add categories for client projects and organize multiple pages from the same website.
  • I’m not a fan of the built in display via the shortcode [wpsst_site_display], but since they’re posts, you can use your favorite page builder or Gutenberg to display them nicely.

12. Instant Indexing for Google

Instant Indexing for Google

When you publish new content or update old content on your WordPress website, the Instant Indexing plugin sends a crawl request to Google using the Google Indexing API.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • Takes a little setup effort, but seems to be worth it in the long run.
  • Be aware that this is part of a suite of tools from Rank Math. It works just fine independently of the others, but I’d guess you’ll hear about their other products from time to time.
  • In-depth setup notes make the process as simple as it can be. Not too bad, really.

13. Reviews and Rating – Google Business

Reviews and Rating – Google Business

This plugin will collect this data using your unique Google Place ID and display a well-formatted list or column/blocks of reviews, and some associated links to reviews and Google map listing, plus point customers to post their own review and rating on Google.

Nathan’s Notes:

  • Handy set of shortcodes for bring Google My Business reviews and other Google Place items to your website.
  • Requires Google API key to operate, and you must find your place ID. Appropriate links are on the plugin’s setup tab. Pretty straightforward.
  • Thorough shortcode documentation on the Shortcodes tab.

Watch the Webinar: Plugin Roundup – January 2020

???

This post is from the recent Plugin Roundup – January 2020 webinar hosted by Nathan Ingram. In this webinar, Nathan demonstrates how to use each of these plugins so you can get a better idea of how they work. Check out the entire series of monthly WordPress Plugin Roundup posts here & register for the next Plugin Roundup webinar here.

Download the checklist PDF: The Essential WordPress Maintenance Checklist

nttttnnttttnttttnnttt”,

“redirect_after_formfill_enabled” : 0,
“redirect_after_formfill_url” : “”,

“exit_popup_enabled”: 0
};

Keep reading the article at WordPress News and Updates from iThemes – iThemes. The article was originally written by Kristen Wright on 2020-01-20 14:49:58.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the product, We may receive an affiliate commission.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Show Your ❤️ Love! Like Us
Scroll to Top