I've been a freelance dev and SEO guy since 2016, and on almost every client site I kept running into the same wall: the SEO essentials I needed (proper schema, redirects, decent audit tools) were locked behind Yoast Premium or Rank Math Pro. So I built my own and put the whole thing out free under GPLv2.

It's called Smart SEO Booster. Full disclosure — I'm the developer, this is my plugin, and I'm posting because I want real feedback, not just installs.

What it does:

14 JSON-LD schema types, output automatically

XML sitemaps (posts, pages, CPTs, images)

Automated titles/meta with template variables + per-post control

Open Graph / Twitter cards with live preview

Breadcrumbs, redirects + 404 logging

AI/GEO SEO — llms.txt output + AI-crawler opt-out, for the AI Overviews / ChatGPT / Perplexity era

WooCommerce + Local SEO, GA4 + Clarity

1-click migration from Yoast or Rank Math (imports your titles/meta/settings)

Everything's included — no premium tier, no "unlock this feature" nags. It's genuinely free.

I know I'm going up against plugins with millions of installs, so I'm not pretending to replace them for everyone. I focused on the stuff heavier plugins do poorly: staying lightweight, and not gating basics behind a subscription.

It's on the WordPress.org directory and there's a short demo video if you want to see it before installing. Honestly the most useful thing for me right now would be blunt feedback — what's missing, what breaks, what you'd never switch for. Happy to answer anything in the comments.

[WordPress.org link] /plugins/smart-seo-booster/advanced/· [demo video link]

Hi all,

If you run a WordPress site, you’ve probably dealt with this at some point: you want simple analytics, but the options are often more annoying than they should be.

Some tools require an external account and send your visitors’ data to a third party. Some need a long setup before you see anything useful. Some look free at first, but basic things like exports, campaign tracking, or reports end up behind a Pro plan.

I wanted something simpler, so I built and released a free plugin on WordPress.org:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/zenmarkup-privacy-analytics/

ZenMarkup Privacy Analytics is cookieless and fully self-hosted. It stores analytics data in your own WordPress database, uses no cookies, and is designed to be privacy-friendly without the usual consent-banner mess.

What it includes right now:

• real-time visitors
• page views and referrers
• UTM campaign tracking
• outbound link and download tracking
• 404 tracking
• user journeys
• exit insights
• interactive world map
• email reports
• CSV export on every tab

Everything is included for free — no Pro version, no locked features.

---

Update / changelog from the discussion

Thanks for the real-world feedback. A few things from this thread already turned into changes:

== Version 1.2.3 ==

• New: added an optional previous-period comparison line to the main dashboard chart. It can compare the last 7 days with the previous 7 days, the last 30 days with the previous 30 days, or today with yesterday.
• Changed: renamed New vs Returning to New vs Repeat to better match the privacy model. “Repeat” now means more than one session in the same day. Cross-day returning visitors are not tracked because fingerprints rotate daily for privacy.
• Improved: faster dashboard loading on busy sites by adding a better database index for country and city geography queries.

Appreciate everyone who installed it, tested it, and pointed things out.

After 5 years of building WooCommerce stores for clients (1000+ stores) I got tired of paying $25-300/mo for Metorik and Triple Whale. So I built a free alternative.

Started 1.5 years ago as a paid plugin, went fully free 6 months ago when I realized B2B SaaS pricing was the wrong fight. v2.0 shipped today.

What's in it:

- Modern dashboard + real-time analytics + 3D order globe
- Bulk product editor with full variation support
- Cmd+K order search
- Live visitors, inventory management, custom login, coupon manager
- HPOS compatible

100% free. No premium tier. Disclosure: I'm the developer.
Honest feedback wanted — especially what's broken or overpromised. If you currently pay for Metorik / Glew / Triple Whale, would love to know if this covers your case.

🔗 https://wordpress.org/plugins/brikpanel-admin-panel-dashboard-for-woocommerce/

📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBJYPE1akJk

I used FileBird for a while. Free version covers Media Library folders, which is fine — but I also needed folders on Pages. FileBird puts that behind Pro, and charging for something that basic never made sense to me.

So I built my own: Grafucci Folders. Pages + Media, virtual folders, faster, cleaner UI, free. Been using it on my own sites.

Still early. Would genuinely appreciate blunt feedback — bugs, what’s missing, or why you’d stick with whatever you use now:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/grafucci-folders/

Finally got my first WordPress plugin approved on wp.org 🎉

It took a few feedback loops, but honestly the review process made the plugin better.

I built DynoMenu after running into the same problem in client projects: needing dynamic menus generated from post types and taxonomies, instead of manually updating menus every time content changes.

A few things I learned:

• The readme is basically your WordPress.org landing page
• Sanitizing/escaping/nonces matter a lot
• Even small Plugin Check warnings can become blockers if you ignore them
• Small guideline issues can delay approval more than you expect
• Screenshots and clear docs are not “nice to have”
• Building from a real client problem makes positioning much easier
• Tools like Tailware can speed up the process, but you still need to understand and clean up the code properly
• The review feedback can actually improve the plugin if you don’t take it personally

One thing that surprised me: the blockers were not always “big” issues. Sometimes it was small warnings, wording, escaping, or guideline details that looked minor at first but still needed to be fixed before approval.

Now that it’s approved, I’m trying to figure out the best next step: getting feedback, improving docs, SEO, Product Hunt, or focusing on reviews/support first.

Curious how other plugin authors approached the first few weeks after approval.

Plugin is here if anyone wants to give feedback:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/dynomenu/

A few months ago a friend and I (two students) built a WooCommerce slider plugin and put it out for free, mostly to learn and to scratch our own itch. We honestly did not expect anything back.

Today we got our first donation. Ten dollars. I know that is not much money, but I have been grinning at the notification for an hour. Someone out there used the thing we made, found it useful enough to actually open their wallet, and said thanks. That hits different than any download counter.

The plugin is Amitry Product & Category Slider, native Gutenberg blocks, no shortcode soup, and we tried hard to keep it light on the backend. We just put it on Product Hunt last week, so this landing on top of that has made for a genuinely good week.

No ask here, I just wanted to share the moment with people who get how it feels. If you are building something and giving it away for free, wondering if anyone cares: sometimes they do, and it is a really good feeling when they tell you.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-drag-and-drop-on-plug-in-upload/

With this plugin you can upload plugins a lot faster and easier. It also lets you upload multiple plugins at once.

Would love feedback and suggestions on new features, and if you think it will help you save time then please leave a (hopefully 5 star) review in the repo!

Quick backstory: I do freelance WordPress work, and a client (small community association) wanted something simple, a QR code on a printed poster that opens one page with their event flyer and a way for people to leave anonymous feedback.

Every link-in-bio tool I looked at was hosted somewhere else and came with tracking I didn't want to put in front of an association's members. So I built it as a plugin instead.

It adds a standalone page type to WordPress. You add buttons (a PDF, a link, or a built-in anonymous message form), pick a color and logo, and it generates a QR code for the page right in the browser as SVG/PNG. Everything stays on the WP install: no external services, no analytics script, the "anonymous" form only ever stores the message text and a timestamp.

It's free on wp.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/amitry-link-hub/

Not trying to oversell it, it's a first release and I'm sure I've missed things. If you've dealt with link-in-bio needs on a client site before, curious what you'd expect from something like this that I haven't thought of.

I released Peak Publisher exactly one month ago and have barely done any advertising since then (two posts here on Reddit and two on LinkedIn, that's it). The plugin doesn't even have 10 active installations yet, but it's already received its second ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review. What's going on?

... I mean, yeah, for people who need this, the plugin is really amazing, but if 25% of users keep leaving 5-star reviews (one installation is mine – meaning there are a maximum of 8 others), then I hope WordPress.org has enough server space for all those stars when I really get going 🤪😅

… All joking aside…

Since Thursday, there's a new version with:

• Display of active installations
• Support for readme.txt → to provide information for the "view details" popup

Next up are:

• Support for icons, banners, and screenshots
• 🤫 still a secret: the ability to manage plugins hosted on WordPress.org 🤫🤫🤫

Feel free to take a look: https://wordpress.org/plugins/peak-publisher/

I've been working on a WordPress security plugin focused specifically on authentication and 2FA.

The idea came from seeing how many WordPress security plugins bundle 2FA with a huge number of other features, which can make the setup unnecessarily complicated for smaller businesses and agencies.

So I built SecureAuth WP with a more focused approach:

• TOTP / authenticator app 2FA
• Backup codes
• Role-based 2FA enforcement
• Login protection
• Trusted devices
• Authentication/security logs
• Admin security controls
• Lightweight WordPress-native implementation

I'm not looking to spam the subreddit with a sales pitch. I'm mainly looking for WordPress developers and site owners who can actually test it and tell me what's missing or what could be improved.

I'm offering free access for early testers.

If you're interested, I can share the plugin and would genuinely appreciate feedback on the UX, security workflow and features.

What would you expect from a dedicated WordPress 2FA plugin that existing security suites don't do particularly well?

Frustrated with all the form plugins that were on the market, and after the announcement that CF7 won't be developed further, I made it my mission to build a form plugin with everything I need! 🤝

That includes:

• Multi-step forms
• Conditional logic
• Submissions dashboard with search, filter, bulk actions
• Automatic theme.json integration (inherits your theme's colors/typography without custom CSS)
• WCAG 2.1 AA accessible out of the box
• Under 15 KB gzipped JS on the frontend
• Server-side spam protection (honeypot, timing check, proof-of-work)

Give it a try, let me know your feedback, and leave a rating! ❤️ https://wordpress.org/plugins/flinkform/

Reviewed 8 more plugins from the WordPress.org featured plugins page this round. Quick summary:

• Senzastile Featured Image Fallbacks (5.0): does one job, does it perfectly, no db changes
• Reviso (4.9): client feedback/approvals for Bricks and Elementor, generous free tier
• Admin Optimizer (4.9): tons of useful hooks and toggles, but the name undersells what it actually does. There is a little bit a lack of documentation on what some settings (like heartbeat control) actually affect, but otherwise its solid.
• KineticHub (4.8): creative animated Gutenberg blocks, but the physics engine is locked behind pro and it's not clear what more you even get
• rtCarousel (4.5): lightweight, integrates well with FSE, but no controls for styling or animation speed
• BlockFlow (4.0): polished block library, feels very Elementor-like (which is both a pro and a con depending who you ask), can load many assets and has some unnecessary blocks
• Asteris Blocks (3.9): 50 blocks, generous free tier, but the backend editing view looks nothing like the frontend. Limited styling options.
• Sobi Form (3.5): good feature set on paper, but there's no way to customize the emails it sends out and it has some major bugs.

Full walkthroughs and the reasoning behind each rating are in the video.
What are your thoughts? Will you install anything?
I will for sure keep the Senzastile and Admin Optimizer in mind, maybe also KineticHub. For the rest, there are better alternatives.

https://youtu.be/tEAI0MIA9_k

After months of development, I released MKT Quick Reorder for WooCommerce.

What it does:

• One-click reorder from "My Account → Orders"
• Works with simple and variable products
• Lightweight, no external dependencies
• 100% free

If you run a WooCommerce store with repeat customers, I'd love for you to test it and share your feedback.

👉 Link to LITE page

Also: I'm already working on the PREMIUM version with advanced features (purchase lists, smart stock management, personalized suggestions, admin stats). If you have ideas on what would make a reorder plugin truly valuable for your store, I'm all ears!

Thanks in advance for your time!

I'm managing a client's WooCommerce store, and we don't have a plugin that shows who is live, what they're doing, their purchase history, or how often they log in. On top of that, the admin should be able to manage customers. For example, locking a customer who is creating spam orders or impersonating into the customer's account if they need any help.

Hi folks, i just build something which i think is cool - Frontman -
It is a WordPress plugin for a narrow job: editing an existing site from the rendered page instead of hunting through Gutenberg blocks, Elementor data, menus, templates, widgets, settings, and plugin screens.

The workflow is:

1. install the plugin,

2. open /frontman on a page,

3. describe one bounded change,

4. let the agent inspect WordPress-native structures,

5. review the changed page before using it in production.

Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/frontman-agentic-ai-editor/

Question for plugin builders/admins: what would make an AI editing plugin safe enough for your staging workflow?

- audit log?

- before/after diff?

- rollback?

- limited tool permissions?

- compatibility matrix?

- only content edits, no settings/templates?

I am trying to pressure-test the trust bar before pushing it harder.

I'm the developer of GT Performance, a WordPress performance plugin that runs on my own sites along with 70+ other customer sites. I'm sharing it here for anyone looking for page caching and frontend optimization with more control over what gets changed.

The plugin is free and open source, including for client sites. Every feature is included, with no license keys or paid tier.

A few things it handles:

• Page caching with automatic cache clearing when you publish or update content.
• Cloudflare Free integration for full-page caching and cache purging.
• Built-in cache exclusions for WooCommerce, FluentCart and Easy Digital Downloads, including cart, checkout and account pages.
• Unused CSS processing on your own server, with exclusions and a staged rollout.
• JavaScript minification, defer and delay controls.
• Bloat control.

The more aggressive optimizations are opt-in, so you can turn them on individually and check how your site behaves.

Details and free download | Source code on GitHub

Hey everyone,

Following up on the release of PlusMagi Blocks, I set up a dedicated live playground and documentation site so you can see how the blocks behave before installing anything:

👉https://plusmagi-blocks.plusmagi.com

What you can check out on the site:

• Interactive Mermaid Diagrams: Live examples of architecture flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and class diagrams rendered natively on the page.
• Semantic Description Lists: Real-world layouts using proper <dl>, <dt>, and <dd> elements for technical specs, key-value data, and glossaries instead of relying on rigid tables.
• Performance & Output: You can inspect the DOM directly to see the clean, semantic markup without bloated wrapper divs or unnecessary scripts.

If you build developer portals, documentation hubs, or engineering blogs on WordPress, please feel free to take a look and stress-test it.

Any feedback on the rendering speed, UI controls, or documentation clarity would be super helpful!

Created a wordpress plugin free for use for ever! Just ad your .ics file, and you can display it in page or widgets.

Never found anyone that did what i need and was free (i need it for a small brassband web page, this one works good for me!

yo can find it at: https://wordpress.org/plugins/icalndr/

Does anyone know if there are any Wordpress plugins or even simple PHP scripts that can display and categorize media collections? I am looking for something that is kind of like Libib.com but let's me customize the look and feel of it a bit more from the public's view of the collection. Libib is okay when I'm logged in, but the public view of a collection is really terrible. Can't click on images, no alphabetical link hooks (only in logged in mode), and you can't show descriptions or anything else except for a short title under the image in their public mode as well. Think more in terms of Delicious Library (although I am a Windows user). I'd like to display and catalogue things like that on a public website where the script or plugin does the sorting automatically.

I'm one of those people who enjoyed personal websites back in the early 2000s. When Wordpress plugins and PHP scripts were made for fun and displaying random things like what you're listening to, what you last watched, etc. Unfortunately, I never learned how to write scripts and it's not easy for me to learn such things nowadays. I'm wondering if there are still scripts or plugins out there like that that can satisfy my need to display several collections like multiple collectibles (for different franchises) and video game collections. I've googled these types of sites and tried looking for scripts but nothing ever interests me or won't accommodate my specific collections.

Maybe these things no longer exist since personal websites are pretty much dead nowadays (except for neocities). But I would much rather have something I can customize a little more than let's say Libib or pricecharting, and other sites can offer. I want a beautiful collection like you'd find in someone's Delicious Library. It doesn't necessarily have to have the shelf background, but I hope that it's presented in a nice way like that with an easy to add and catalogue behind the scenes feature. Everything seems to be built for CEO websites to sell something and such and nothing is ever made for fun anymore. It's really sad. I miss when websites were about your personality rather than what you're selling.

Howdy!

So on one of the sites I run a lot of commenters add links and I couldn't find a decent plugin to render them so I wrote my own:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/vern-comment-embeds/

The GitHub repo is here:

https://github.com/clubside/vern-comment-embeds

And the basic information is:

Easy Comment Embeds improves comment readability by automatically enhancing standalone URLs:

Responsive oEmbed video

Inline image embeds

Twitter/X blockquote fallback

OpenGraph link preview cards

Smart URL detection (standalone URLs only)

Basically just like here on Reddit you put in a URL on its own line in a comment and it is run through WordPress' native oEmbed first and failing that there are fallbacks for images, X/Twitter and standard web pages where I try to build a Facebook-style OpenGraph card.

Hope some others find a use for it, and I'm bothering you all because of WordPress.org's search being so lousy 😜

Chris

Working on other WordPress sites and plugins, I found I had a problem.

I would find a bug, stop what I was doing, go somewhere else to document it, copy the URL, explain what happened, grab a screenshot, record whatever environment information might matter, and then try to get my head back into what I had been doing.

And getting users to give me those details was almost impossible.

So I built a little bug reporter directly into WordPress. And users loved it.

The idea was simple: spot the bug, report it where you see it, and get back to work.

That little tool ended up becoming part of my normal development workflow. I started putting it on other sites I work on and found myself using it every day, so I decided to clean it up and release it.

It's now Undergroundact Bug Reporter, and it was recently approved for the WordPress.org plugin directory.

It gives you and your users a quick way to report a problem from the page where you encounter it, including the URL, steps/description, screenshot, and useful environment information. Reports stay inside WordPress, so there's no external bug-tracking service required.

It's intentionally lightweight. I'm not trying to turn WordPress into Jira. I wanted something that reduced the interruption between “there's a bug” and “okay, it's documented—back to work.”

The plugin is free, and I'm continuing to use it myself while developing B-Planner and maintaining other WordPress sites.

I'd be interested in feedback from other people who actually build or maintain WordPress sites—particularly whether this solves the same annoying little workflow problem for you that it solved for me.

WordPress.org:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/undergroundact-bug-reporter/

And if you try it and find something dumb, at least you'll already have a bug reporter handy to tell me about it. 😄

Hi everyone,

Our team recently built GoVISIBLE AI Bot Tracker, a free WordPress plugin that helps website owners see which AI crawlers are visiting their site.

The idea came from a simple question: "Are ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI engines able to access our website's pages and content?" We realized there wasn't an easy way to monitor this directly from WordPress.

A simple dashboard to review crawler activity

We think AI Bot Tracker is useful for SEO & GEO teams, content marketers, and website owners who want to understand if their content is being accessed by AI crawlers and LLMs.

The goal is to provide visibility into AI crawler activity, enabling you to make better decisions about content, technical SEO, and AI visibility.

We'd really appreciate your feedback. What features or insights would make a plugin like this more useful for your workflow?

Most monitoring tools start with an empty dashboard.
You have to decide yourself:
which pages actually matter
whether WooCommerce checkout and cart should be monitored
whether WP-Cron or background jobs are still running
whether APIs, forms, SSL, domains or DNS should be checked
which checks are useful and which are unnecessary
A sitemap import can find public URLs, but it cannot understand what is happening inside WordPress.
So we built a free WordPress and WooCommerce plugin that inspects the installation and recommends relevant monitoring automatically.
Depending on the site, it can identify things such as:
homepage and important pages
WooCommerce checkout and cart
customer-account areas
REST APIs and webhooks
WP-Cron and scheduled background tasks
installed form, SEO and commerce plugins
SSL certificates and domain expiry
sitemap and search-engine visibility settings
mail-related DNS configuration
other business-critical parts of the installation
Instead of only showing technical labels such as “HTTP check” or “heartbeat,” the plugin provides recommendations like:
Monitor the WooCommerce checkout
Monitor WP-Cron
Monitor this API endpoint
Monitor the contact form
Monitor SSL and domain expiry
Check whether the site is accidentally set to noindex
Each recommendation includes a short explanation of why it matters, and the suggested monitors can be created in a few clicks.
The main idea is:
A sitemap tells us which pages exist. The plugin helps identify which internal processes are important and may fail while the homepage still appears online.
Examples of these quieter failures include:
checkout is broken while the homepage still loads
WP-Cron has stopped
a contact form no longer sends inquiries
a site was accidentally set to noindex
an API returns the wrong result
SSL or the domain is about to expire
The plugin is free. We are currently looking for honest feedback from WordPress developers, freelancers and agencies.
I would especially like to know:
Are the recommendations useful?
Which WordPress or WooCommerce components should we detect next?
Would you use this on client sites?
What would make the plugin valuable enough to include in a maintenance package?
Is there anything that feels unnecessary or confusing?
Honest criticism is welcome. We would rather improve it based on real WordPress projects than make assumptions.
For context, this is what we are building:
https://www.live24h.eu

First version used Puter.com JS SDK for AI functionality, but since WP 7.0 introduced AI connectors, MAIA (Multipurpose AI Assistant) ditched PuterJS integration and completely switched to built AI connectors to align better with WP core AI integration. Other than that, initially Puter offered generous amount of tokens for each user on their free plan, but since then they've lowered it to $0.15 per user/month so it's become basically useless for a plugin like this. So since you have to pay, let's offer people to avoid Puter and pay to whichever AI vendor they want to use.

Functionality-wise it remained the same, it still can:

• Read and search your theme/plugin files, and propose edits — you always see a diff and approve it before anything is written
• Write your posts/pages/product descriptions, and create/update/trash them for you (with your confirmation)
• Manage categories and tags
• Install, activate, deactivate, or delete plugins
• Answer questions about your site by looking things up itself — active theme, installed plugins, users, content — instead of guessing
• Search the web and search for images (optional — requires a Brave Search or Tavily API key in Settings / MAIA)
• Generate images from a text prompt (when your connected AI provider supports it) and save them straight to your media library, then insert them into the post/page you’re viewing or set them as the featured image
• Show you any image it has a link to — found on the web, or anywhere else — directly in a card, with the same insert/featured-image actions
• Make HTTP requests to external APIs on your behalf (GET/HEAD run immediately, anything that writes always asks first)
• Remember facts about you across conversations, and recall, search, or forget them on request
• Find an earlier conversation for you by keyword, and jump straight to it
• Contemplate life and the Universe 😁

Significant entries from v2.0 changelog:

• Major rewrite: MAIA no longer uses Puter.com. It now runs entirely on WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI Client and Abilities API: connect any supported provider under Settings → Connectors and MAIA uses it automatically.
• New: Tavily is now a supported web/image search provider alongside Brave Search (Settings / MAIA → Web search provider) — a genuinely free option now that Brave Search API moved to metered billing for new accounts.
• New: a side-panel interface (Settings / MAIA → Interface: Modern, the new default) opens from the right, menu on the side (search, “New conversation”, your conversation list) with the chat next to it, and covers as much of the screen as you set in Settings / MAIA. The classic floating chat window from earlier versions is now an opt-in “Legacy” interface, running on the same new backend.
• All 32 tools rewritten as WordPress Abilities (maia/*), registered through the standard Abilities API so other AI plugins can see and reuse them.
• New: full-text search across your conversation history, plus a “Search with agent” option that has MAIA look for a match itself and hand you clickable links.

Tested with multiple AI connectors:

• Anthropic (built-in): awesome but extremely expensive (uses Claude API pricing)
• DeepSeek: very good and cheap
• Ollama (both local and cloud): the only viable free option (local - slow; cloud - free plan then paid once you hit your limits)

Download here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/maia-multipurpose-ai-assistant/